“Joined forces” is a dodgy way for them to frame that. Libs and Greens both wanted different outcomes. The Greens weren’t being unreasonable and showed themselves to be open to compromise, during a housing crisis.
Fwiw, I wish the two parties were more cooperative, but it takes two to tango. Greens aren’t obliged to blindly pass every bill that Labor proposes, the burden is also on Labor to negotiate their proposals to gain majority support.
they aren’t obligated to block critical funding for housing either, they made their decision and ive made mine
the real pain for me is that when i went to vote there was like 5 nutter parties all of them right wing, the libs and then just labor and the greens on the left, limited choices for anyone left wing :(
They didn’t block critical funding. They stalled a long-term project by a few weeks, and in the process improved that project both in the long term and forced it to include some benefit in the shorter term, before passing the improved policy.
The Greens MPs and their staffers had concluded that a growing proportion of their own support base wanted them to stop blocking.
No shit but he doesn’t comprehend why:
If the Greens don’t block Labor, nothing will change
You can block labor, on things that need to be blocked on, if labor wants to build a coal power plant, go for your life, block the shit out of it
If labor is trying to build some renewables in a very heated/debated area and you demand they build even more, stop it, you’re making it worse
The Coalition has promised to repeal the fund if elected.
No mention of the Greens blocking it for some reason, just straight up, if we get in its gone.
So its more like:
If the Greens block Labor, nothing will change, people will get unhappy, and the libs will get in and then we’ll be stuck yelling from the sidelines like we did for the 10 years prior to labor getting in again
It’s interesting he mentions that as well:
Australia’s fossil fuel emissions … are still rising.
but wouldn’t it have been nice if labor had been in power building out renewables for 10 years instead of Morrison bringing a lump of coal into parliament talking about how great it is?
We are a conservative country, the Greens are currently polling within 3% of One Fucking Nation, they have to work better on things that they can really hammer home to people, not in fighting over policies that are aligned with what greens voters actually want
Sort of. If you look at the timing of its actual passage you can see that even though it was first introduced to the Senate in March, Labor didn’t actually even schedule it to be debated until May. So That 6 months is down to 4 right off the bat.
After that, things get more complicated. Without a doubt, some of the delay was indeed caused by the Greens. But some was still caused by Labor, too. I forget the precise timeline, but circa June or July, Labor agreed to some compromises with the Greens. The Greens continued blocking the bill and arguing for more compromise out of Labor.
At the time, I was actually upset with the Greens and thought they should have accepted the initial compromise. But after talking with someone from my local Greens MP’s office, I found the trick…despite agreeing on a compromise with the Greens, what Labor actually presented was the original, un-amended plan. It took weeks more before Labor finally actually presented in Parliament a Bill that they had negotiated to get Greens support on.
We are a conservative country, the Greens are currently polling within 3% of One Fucking Nation
Just looking at the latest polling, Labor + Greens poll at 47.5%, while LNP + One Nation + Trumpet of Patriots at just 43.5%. Labor are ahead of the LNP. Greens are ahead of One Nation + Trump. And if you look at the last actual election results, the Greens outperformed One Nation by more than a factor of 2.
So yeah, we’re a country with a lot of conservatives. But we have a lot of progressives too. And the Greens’ job is to represent the views of the people who voted for them in Parliament. That means pushing, hard, to get Labor to do more than just fiddle around the edges, as they are so often wont to do. In the case of the HAFF, it meant pushing Labor to increase the amount invested in total, and also to make sure it wasn’t only a long-term project that might eventually pay off…if the LNP doesn’t dismantle it first, but that it is also able to start doing good work immediately, by requiring a minimum spend instead of Labor’s planned maximum spend.
Thanks for linking that article from Sriranganathan. I hadn’t read it before. I found that interview he showed a video clip of particularly galling. That is precisely why I support the Greens and I have become more and more upset at Labor over the last 3 years.
So they did what minority parties are supposed to do, and told labor “we will not pass your plan unless you double the social housing fund and number of houses”, and labor simply ignored it, letting the bill die?
That’s a labor problem. Not a greens problem. It shows Labor did not actually care to fight for one of their core election promises. The Labor of today is captured and exists to prevent real meaningful change, and low knowledge voters like you blame “the left”.
There’s this weird belief that minority parties are supposed to ignore their own policies and just support whatever the closest major party wants. And not supporting the major party means they’re failing in this duty.
So Labor could drop the plan and blame the Greens for it, instead of actually pushing for their own policy. And the media frames this as a failure by the Greens.
The same media that almost unanimously supports Australia’s right wing conservatives, but I’m sure their opinion on this particular point is completely unbiased.
There’s often this revisionist history about things as well. Labor wouldn’t negotiate with the Greens over the original ETS, and the Greens get blamed for it not passing. Only a few years later they work together and make a better policy (the carbon price). Abbott comes in and tears it up. Current Labor supporters either conveniently forget this ever happened, or they somehow argue that Abbott would have teared up the carbon price but not the ETS.
Meaningful change or nothing? Blame labor all you want, the greens voted against an improvement.
Fuck ideals, I want progress.
Even if you disagree with me (which is fair) check your local candidates in theyvoteforyou.org.au - especially independents who vary enormously between rhetoric, voting and even attendance.
Meaningful change or nothing? Blame labor all you want, the greens voted against an improvement.
Fuck ideals, I want progress.
But these aren’t ideals. Those are necessary material requirements for resolving the housing crisis. Shelter, one of the most basic requirements for people to be productive in a modern society. Idealism would be dropping the $56+ billion defense fund to zero and putting it all into housing until we can secure our own population.
Fuck the bare minimum, I want this problem solved before I die. History has shown that without real pressure from unions and “radicals”, Labor might not have even solved segregation (but they’d be making progress).
If the end result is no legislation being passed then surely you agree that its not a win.
We can argue about whose fault it is & realistically that will be different for each bill. For the housing one I would have liked to have seen the greens get it in - it was a measurable improvement. The greens are right to complain about labor bullying but saying no every time gets us nowhere.
If the end result is no legislation being passed then surely you agree that its not a win.
Yes, and if we’re looking at the here-and-now then objectively less housing was built and people suffered. You’re absolutely right about that.
However, my experience and perspective is that Labor are the problem in that situation, and that’s not just some blame game or complaint, it’s part of a bigger picture that Labor are a conservative force who will never do enough by choice. They’ve long abandoned their labour roots and having talked with many current and former Labor rank-and-file, there’s pretty strong signs of corruption and elitism dominating the party. So unless there is material pressure on them, enough to dominate their own interests and those of their backers, they will simply just sit comfortably as “better than the Coalition”, similarly to the US Democratic Party in their two-party system - they ended up being the moderate billionaires’ party, hijacking progressive symbolism to cover for their selling-out. And we saw the inevitable result: a steady ratcheting shift towards oligarchy.
The point of that quick rant is that, the solution - not just small wins but the solution - can’t be to just work with Labor. They will appease people with little short term gains, but rarely-if-ever enough to solve these problems. They’re just not positioned to, even if most of their members want them to, because they’re beholden to their bigger backers. If we want to actually solve these problems, the worker class needs to build collective political power and force the government’s hand away from the business-owning class and towards us. The union movement is being repressed harder and harder even under Labor, so in lieu of reliable union power, the next best option is to replace Labor with the Greens, who have at least shown some level of integrity and independence from the ruling class and have shown backbone in demanding the necessary dedication towards solving the housing crisis. Yes, their resistance resulted in a real loss, but if enough people see that Labor refuses to do enough and saw what Greens were struggling for, and that ends up giving the Greens more support and more power, perhaps enough to force through legislation in a few years, then that will be a profound long-term win. I know that may sound like a gamble, but the growth of the smaller parties is consistent and given the track record of Labor over the last century, getting rid of them will be worth the unfortunate and real losses that come from when when Labor stubbornly refuse to help this country.
Disclaimer: I’m here from /all and not Australian, so there’s a nonzero chance I’m talking out of my ass.
Meaningful change or nothing? Blame labor all you want, the greens voted against an improvement.
It’s not pretty, but from my limited knowledge it seems that voting down the bill was the best course of action. A small party’s goal in a two-party system is to twist the major parties’ arms and force them to effect meaningful change, however the party’s constituents define meaningful change to be. Jumping at the first sign of progress and allowing Labor to claim they’ve solved the housing crisis would defeat any chance of a real solution, establish precedent that Greens will back off from their demands for breadcrumbs and throw the ball in the Liberals’ court after Labor’s bandaid bill predictably fails to accomplish anything. If the Greens wanted to provide something better than a Labor majority both for housing and in general, it seems to me that rejecting the bill was the optimal course of action.
It’s not pretty, but from my limited knowledge it seems that voting down the bill was the best course of action
The thing is, they didn’t vote down the bill. They stalled it by a few weeks while they extracted concessions out of Labor, then Labor secretly dropped the concessions and tried to pass the original bill, then the Greens forced them back into presenting the improved version with yet more improvements. Then they passed it.
It was a long term investment fund anyway, so not a short-term fix, so delaying it by a few weeks isn’t a big deal, especially if the end result is better. Plus, the version that got passed actually changed from having a maximum spend per year to a minimum. So its short term benefit was actually improved by the Greens delaying it.
Like ziltoid101 said (I think) there is a balance. If the greens vote inline with labor every time then they are too weak - why vote for them. But if they block everything then they are preventing progress.
I feel like they have been too far in the second part but thats just, like my opinion man.
Can we please just agree that Dutton is batshit crazy.
to me $10 billion for social housing is a massive win and huge progress over previous governments, the greens demanding cherries on top by blocking it right up until the last minute in the middle of a housing crisis is a joke, they took credit for forcing labor to go around them and give money directly to the states as well
the greens are free to pick their battles, in my opinion they picked the wrong one, for that after 15 years of preferencing the greens above labor they are now behind it
So… (spoiler alert for everyone who is only up to the June 2023 episode of APH in the Vice article):
In September 2023 the $10B housing bill was passed by Labor and the Greens.
Bit of a shame Labor held back for so long on the Greens amendments, but Labor did show here they can work around the inevitable delays of robust parliamentary discourse by approving interim funding for housing in June to get things started while the details of long term funding were nutted out the crossbench.
So OP’s claims that this vote by the Greens is “unforgivable” is basically propagandist bullshit, because the Greens passed a solution only months later…
No thanks
https://www.vice.com/en/article/the-greens-and-liberals-joined-forces-to-block-labors-housing-bill-what-now/
Unforgivable
Despite volunteering for them for decades I have stepped away a little. I didn’t like Greens’
But they will probably get my #1 in the lower house and may get my preference flows in the upper (certainly ahead of the majors).
I won’t let perfect be the enemy of good.
“Joined forces” is a dodgy way for them to frame that. Libs and Greens both wanted different outcomes. The Greens weren’t being unreasonable and showed themselves to be open to compromise, during a housing crisis.
Fwiw, I wish the two parties were more cooperative, but it takes two to tango. Greens aren’t obliged to blindly pass every bill that Labor proposes, the burden is also on Labor to negotiate their proposals to gain majority support.
they aren’t obligated to block critical funding for housing either, they made their decision and ive made mine
the real pain for me is that when i went to vote there was like 5 nutter parties all of them right wing, the libs and then just labor and the greens on the left, limited choices for anyone left wing :(
They didn’t block critical funding. They stalled a long-term project by a few weeks, and in the process improved that project both in the long term and forced it to include some benefit in the shorter term, before passing the improved policy.
It was stuck in the Senate for half a year?? Labor nearly called a double dissolution over it? We’re trying to build houses in a housing crisis
Even Jonny Sri admitted:
https://www.jonathansri.com/greensmustblock/
No shit but he doesn’t comprehend why:
You can block labor, on things that need to be blocked on, if labor wants to build a coal power plant, go for your life, block the shit out of it
If labor is trying to build some renewables in a very heated/debated area and you demand they build even more, stop it, you’re making it worse
No mention of the Greens blocking it for some reason, just straight up, if we get in its gone.
So its more like:
If the Greens block Labor, nothing will change, people will get unhappy, and the libs will get in and then we’ll be stuck yelling from the sidelines like we did for the 10 years prior to labor getting in again
It’s interesting he mentions that as well:
No they’re not, our emissions peaked in 2019
but wouldn’t it have been nice if labor had been in power building out renewables for 10 years instead of Morrison bringing a lump of coal into parliament talking about how great it is?
We are a conservative country, the Greens are currently polling within 3% of One Fucking Nation, they have to work better on things that they can really hammer home to people, not in fighting over policies that are aligned with what greens voters actually want
last reply on this one :P
Sort of. If you look at the timing of its actual passage you can see that even though it was first introduced to the Senate in March, Labor didn’t actually even schedule it to be debated until May. So That 6 months is down to 4 right off the bat.
After that, things get more complicated. Without a doubt, some of the delay was indeed caused by the Greens. But some was still caused by Labor, too. I forget the precise timeline, but circa June or July, Labor agreed to some compromises with the Greens. The Greens continued blocking the bill and arguing for more compromise out of Labor.
At the time, I was actually upset with the Greens and thought they should have accepted the initial compromise. But after talking with someone from my local Greens MP’s office, I found the trick…despite agreeing on a compromise with the Greens, what Labor actually presented was the original, un-amended plan. It took weeks more before Labor finally actually presented in Parliament a Bill that they had negotiated to get Greens support on.
Just looking at the latest polling, Labor + Greens poll at 47.5%, while LNP + One Nation + Trumpet of Patriots at just 43.5%. Labor are ahead of the LNP. Greens are ahead of One Nation + Trump. And if you look at the last actual election results, the Greens outperformed One Nation by more than a factor of 2.
So yeah, we’re a country with a lot of conservatives. But we have a lot of progressives too. And the Greens’ job is to represent the views of the people who voted for them in Parliament. That means pushing, hard, to get Labor to do more than just fiddle around the edges, as they are so often wont to do. In the case of the HAFF, it meant pushing Labor to increase the amount invested in total, and also to make sure it wasn’t only a long-term project that might eventually pay off…if the LNP doesn’t dismantle it first, but that it is also able to start doing good work immediately, by requiring a minimum spend instead of Labor’s planned maximum spend.
Thanks for linking that article from Sriranganathan. I hadn’t read it before. I found that interview he showed a video clip of particularly galling. That is precisely why I support the Greens and I have become more and more upset at Labor over the last 3 years.
Yeah I thought that was the whole point of a parliamentary system.
So they did what minority parties are supposed to do, and told labor “we will not pass your plan unless you double the social housing fund and number of houses”, and labor simply ignored it, letting the bill die?
That’s a labor problem. Not a greens problem. It shows Labor did not actually care to fight for one of their core election promises. The Labor of today is captured and exists to prevent real meaningful change, and low knowledge voters like you blame “the left”.
There’s this weird belief that minority parties are supposed to ignore their own policies and just support whatever the closest major party wants. And not supporting the major party means they’re failing in this duty.
So Labor could drop the plan and blame the Greens for it, instead of actually pushing for their own policy. And the media frames this as a failure by the Greens.
The same media that almost unanimously supports Australia’s right wing conservatives, but I’m sure their opinion on this particular point is completely unbiased.
There’s often this revisionist history about things as well. Labor wouldn’t negotiate with the Greens over the original ETS, and the Greens get blamed for it not passing. Only a few years later they work together and make a better policy (the carbon price). Abbott comes in and tears it up. Current Labor supporters either conveniently forget this ever happened, or they somehow argue that Abbott would have teared up the carbon price but not the ETS.
Meaningful change or nothing? Blame labor all you want, the greens voted against an improvement.
Fuck ideals, I want progress.
Even if you disagree with me (which is fair) check your local candidates in theyvoteforyou.org.au - especially independents who vary enormously between rhetoric, voting and even attendance.
edit: .org.au
But these aren’t ideals. Those are necessary material requirements for resolving the housing crisis. Shelter, one of the most basic requirements for people to be productive in a modern society. Idealism would be dropping the $56+ billion defense fund to zero and putting it all into housing until we can secure our own population.
Fuck the bare minimum, I want this problem solved before I die. History has shown that without real pressure from unions and “radicals”, Labor might not have even solved segregation (but they’d be making progress).
If the end result is no legislation being passed then surely you agree that its not a win. We can argue about whose fault it is & realistically that will be different for each bill. For the housing one I would have liked to have seen the greens get it in - it was a measurable improvement. The greens are right to complain about labor bullying but saying no every time gets us nowhere.
Yes, and if we’re looking at the here-and-now then objectively less housing was built and people suffered. You’re absolutely right about that.
However, my experience and perspective is that Labor are the problem in that situation, and that’s not just some blame game or complaint, it’s part of a bigger picture that Labor are a conservative force who will never do enough by choice. They’ve long abandoned their labour roots and having talked with many current and former Labor rank-and-file, there’s pretty strong signs of corruption and elitism dominating the party. So unless there is material pressure on them, enough to dominate their own interests and those of their backers, they will simply just sit comfortably as “better than the Coalition”, similarly to the US Democratic Party in their two-party system - they ended up being the moderate billionaires’ party, hijacking progressive symbolism to cover for their selling-out. And we saw the inevitable result: a steady ratcheting shift towards oligarchy.
The point of that quick rant is that, the solution - not just small wins but the solution - can’t be to just work with Labor. They will appease people with little short term gains, but rarely-if-ever enough to solve these problems. They’re just not positioned to, even if most of their members want them to, because they’re beholden to their bigger backers. If we want to actually solve these problems, the worker class needs to build collective political power and force the government’s hand away from the business-owning class and towards us. The union movement is being repressed harder and harder even under Labor, so in lieu of reliable union power, the next best option is to replace Labor with the Greens, who have at least shown some level of integrity and independence from the ruling class and have shown backbone in demanding the necessary dedication towards solving the housing crisis. Yes, their resistance resulted in a real loss, but if enough people see that Labor refuses to do enough and saw what Greens were struggling for, and that ends up giving the Greens more support and more power, perhaps enough to force through legislation in a few years, then that will be a profound long-term win. I know that may sound like a gamble, but the growth of the smaller parties is consistent and given the track record of Labor over the last century, getting rid of them will be worth the unfortunate and real losses that come from when when Labor stubbornly refuse to help this country.
Disclaimer: I’m here from /all and not Australian, so there’s a nonzero chance I’m talking out of my ass.
It’s not pretty, but from my limited knowledge it seems that voting down the bill was the best course of action. A small party’s goal in a two-party system is to twist the major parties’ arms and force them to effect meaningful change, however the party’s constituents define meaningful change to be. Jumping at the first sign of progress and allowing Labor to claim they’ve solved the housing crisis would defeat any chance of a real solution, establish precedent that Greens will back off from their demands for breadcrumbs and throw the ball in the Liberals’ court after Labor’s bandaid bill predictably fails to accomplish anything. If the Greens wanted to provide something better than a Labor majority both for housing and in general, it seems to me that rejecting the bill was the optimal course of action.
The thing is, they didn’t vote down the bill. They stalled it by a few weeks while they extracted concessions out of Labor, then Labor secretly dropped the concessions and tried to pass the original bill, then the Greens forced them back into presenting the improved version with yet more improvements. Then they passed it.
It was a long term investment fund anyway, so not a short-term fix, so delaying it by a few weeks isn’t a big deal, especially if the end result is better. Plus, the version that got passed actually changed from having a maximum spend per year to a minimum. So its short term benefit was actually improved by the Greens delaying it.
Like ziltoid101 said (I think) there is a balance. If the greens vote inline with labor every time then they are too weak - why vote for them. But if they block everything then they are preventing progress.
I feel like they have been too far in the second part but thats just, like my opinion man.
Can we please just agree that Dutton is batshit crazy.
to me $10 billion for social housing is a massive win and huge progress over previous governments, the greens demanding cherries on top by blocking it right up until the last minute in the middle of a housing crisis is a joke, they took credit for forcing labor to go around them and give money directly to the states as well
the greens are free to pick their battles, in my opinion they picked the wrong one, for that after 15 years of preferencing the greens above labor they are now behind it
So… (spoiler alert for everyone who is only up to the June 2023 episode of APH in the Vice article):
In September 2023 the $10B housing bill was passed by Labor and the Greens.
Bit of a shame Labor held back for so long on the Greens amendments, but Labor did show here they can work around the inevitable delays of robust parliamentary discourse by approving interim funding for housing in June to get things started while the details of long term funding were nutted out the crossbench.
So OP’s claims that this vote by the Greens is “unforgivable” is basically propagandist bullshit, because the Greens passed a solution only months later…
Speaking of unforgiveable, do you know why Labor didn’t stand in Prahran earlier this year?
No idea I’m in Brisbane but are you talking about federal labor or victorian state labor?