Can the enemy of your enemy in politics really be your friend?
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The Greens and the Liberals have done their best to work this out, engaging in detailed, lengthy discussions over how they could form a government together in the ACT and do away with Labor.
Both the Liberal leader, Mark Parton, and the Greens leader, Shane Rattenbury, have said publicly it would be right for the two parties to be talking in a parliament where no party commands a majority. Indeed, but the public ought to know what was, and is, intended.
There has only been one majority government in the history of the Assembly. It was led by Labor’s Jon Stanhope from 2004 to 2008, when Labor’s primary vote was close to 47 per cent. Last year, with a slipping primary vote, Labor polled about 34 per cent; the Liberals were just below 33.5 per cent. Look at those two numbers and it is impossible to dismiss the Liberals as a lost political cause.
The ACT political environment expects power-sharing arrangements. It’s a positive feature championed by the biggest supporters of the territory’s Hare-Clarke electoral system.
Shane Rattenbury, who has been exploring the possibility of forming a government with the Canberra Liberals. Picture by Karleen Minney
The Liberals go to elections declaring they are working to win a parliamentary majority. It’s a noble aim but the chances of it are vanishingly thin.
Labor publicly and privately is more comfortable with the need to strike a deal to stay in government. Their natural allies in the broader progressive firmament are the ACT Greens, who held four seats after the 2024 poll.
But the relationship between the two parties has become more strained in recent years. Labor finds the Greens’ consensus decision making processes and policy idealism to be frustrating and divorced from harsher political and economic realities. Chief Minister Andrew Barr last year said the Greens leaving executive government allowed Labor to be more genuinely centre left.
The Greens finds Labor to be too centrist, too concerned with process, captured by the public service, unimaginative and unwilling to pull the biggest levers available to government to deliver big changes in people’s lives. Mr Rattenbury last year said his party’s focus was “on making sure that we are not just standing in the dead centre of politics, but actually tackling the real issues that are out there”.
So the natural question follows: can the Greens stomach working with the Liberals?
Mr Rattenbury certainly seems to think they could, and, according to multiple sources familiar with the conversations, stood to benefit to the tune of becoming the ACT’s eighth chief minister. It was not a shared view across the party, which is supported by plenty of members who see the Tories as public enemy No.1. The extent of the damage from the fallout of the talks being revealed is yet to be felt.
Meanwhile, if you’re the Liberals, it comes to a point of asking why the hell not? Surely making a go of it with the Greens is better than fussing about in opposition until the end of days? At least that’s how some in the party saw it. Misery, as Shakespeare wrote, acquaints a man with strange bed-fellows.
Others thought Liberal MLAs would be better off working as hard on winning in their own right, or with like-minded independents, than putting so much effort into a power-sharing fantasy with the Greens.
If it comes off, the problems would be enormous. The longer you think about the deal, the more issues you can imagine. The list of philosophical differences between the Greens and Liberals is long.
The claimed fiscal emergency, said to be a trigger for the hostile government takeover, would need to be addressed somehow by two parties that have very different views on the role of government spending. If the ideas put forward by the Greens and the Liberals were so good, why didn’t they win more votes at the election less than a year and a half ago?
Mr Parton, while popular in his own electorate, has never faced an election as leader. And the Greens’ 12.18 per cent of the primary vote across the ACT cannot be read as a mandate for the party’s leader becoming chief minister.
Canberrans could have to wait until 2028 to cast judgement on this new grouping, which risked suffering policy paralysis in an ideologically splintered cabinet. A government has not fallen in the Assembly outside of an election since 1991.
When the rumours of these talks began to spread the week before last, they were dismissed by many as coming from a fever dream. In the political desert, still caught far from the Treasury benches, had the Liberals been taken in by a glimmering mirage of power?
It was more than a mirage. The ground has shifted in the Legislative Assembly and the old expectations between Labor and the Greens are probably now dead. Talks between the Liberals and Greens might yet have a dim pulse but the rank-and-file on both sides have taken issue with the plot.
But if nothing else, this episode has started a real – and necessary – conversation about alternatives to the ACT’s Labor hegemony. The plan being hatched had elements of crazy, but its plotters might still hope the heresy of today can become part of tomorrow’s orthodoxy.
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