Fake Greens convinced they’re on a good thing

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Via Guy Rundle whose grasp of political realities is slipping away:

The simple version is that the Greens had a good election in the Senate and a disappointing one in the House. Before the elections there were dire predictions of a Senate disaster, with the possibility that they would suffer both a solidarity-drift back to Labor and fall down the preference tumble at the hands of hard-right and “anti-system” parties. There was talk of losing three Senate seats, sending them back to six and thus fulfilling centrist media’s greatest dream: that the Greens will be just like the Australian Democrats.

That didn’t happen. Across the country, the Greens had an aggregate swing to them of a round 2%. That was made up of around 1.3% swings in NSW, WA and Tasmania; a small 0.3% swing against in Victoria; a 2.5% swing in Qld; and a 5% swing in SA. The SA swing is presumably their share of Nick Xenophon’s old vote, and the Queensland heft from anti-Adani Labor voters.

Overall, the oomph allowed them to hold all their nine Senate seats, though they didn’t gain any. When they suffer 2% swings against, the mainstream media construct this as a disaster. When it swings towards them, it goes largely unremarked upon.

…the results show that the Greens are still in the hunt for their switched strategy of running after liberal middle-class seats across the country — something Scott Ludlam had been arguing as a strategy for years before the switch. They need a very achievable 5-7% gain, minimum, to be in the hunt. And 10-15% to be on the safe side. With cultural and demographic shift, and a bit of a party sort-out, there are about six to eight seats in the immediate (i.e. next 12 years) sights.

These possibilities are emerging as the Greens are having a new surge in Europe. The movement appears to be renewing, not failing.

In other words, the Fake Greens recaptured some lost vote as other parties disintegrated. They did almost no damage in the bourgeois seats they targeted and the gains achieved were very obviously temporary based upon Malcolm Turnbull’s execution.

The party is also the epitome of what cost Labor government via Quexit in north and west of Sydney and Melbourne” arrogant, progressive, open borders nut jobs unable to grasp that the deplorables want their country back.

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There is no doubt that the context is spectacular for a green revolution. Major parties have failed. The environment is dying. Civilisation is quite literally doomed without it. The Fake Greesn should already be a major third party.

I am a natural Greens voter for all of these reasons, and I share their progressive views. Yet they repulse me physically.

Why? Because their open borders, global government obsession is horribly hypocritical as an environmental destroyer and rabid class war. And it has about as much chance of coming to fruition as Guy Rundle has of being invited to be guest of honour at Davos.

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About the author
David Llewellyn-Smith is Chief Strategist at the MB Fund and MB Super. David is the founding publisher and editor of MacroBusiness and was the founding publisher and global economy editor of The Diplomat, the Asia Pacific’s leading geo-politics and economics portal. He is also a former gold trader and economic commentator at The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, the ABC and Business Spectator. He is the co-author of The Great Crash of 2008 with Ross Garnaut and was the editor of the second Garnaut Climate Change Review.