Bandt’s Greens continue to sell out the climate movement

The Federal Greens party room has once again backed down on real climate action and have provided greenwashing cover to Albanese’s Safeguard Mechanism.

The Safeguard Mechanism is a Liberal-era policy that placed emissions caps far higher than polluters could ever achieve. What the safeguard mechanism is, although it is appearing as another name, is a cap-and-trade scheme. Such schemes are even less ambitious than the Gillard-era carbon tax – a ‘market-oriented solution’. The carbon credit aspect of the scheme, as has been proven time and time again, is a complete scam. Credits are given out to companies by the Australian government simply for promising not to commit future deforestation. These do not represent any offset or reduction of CO2. They are a payout to private business and a licence for fossil fuel companies to continue to pollute. The Australia Institute, an progressive think tank, has still described the safeguard mechanism as ‘not nearly good enough’ despite the Greens’ amendments. 

The Federal Greens’ support for Labor’s changes to the mechanism are based on a slate of amendments that have been agreed to after months-long negotiations. These amendments would make Labor’s proposed update of the safeguard mechanism an actual policy with enforceable targets, rather than a symbolic gesture. The ‘hard cap’ on emissions creates an upper limit on total emissions from projects covered by the scheme which can be legally mandated, while the ‘climate trigger’ supposedly makes new projects that exceed the cap unviable. The use of carbon offsets would be more limited and transparent, but still possible, and only around 30% of our total national emissions are even covered by the scheme. 

The shift from Bandt and the Federal Greens has come after weeks of rhetorical opposition to the safeguard mechanism. At a recent forum at the University of Sydney, Bandt declared that the policy was not only weak but actively “making things worse”, and that the Greens were committed to opposing the policy unless Labor agreed to block all 116 of the proposed new coal and gas projects that are currently awaiting federal approval. Bandt noted that “just one of the new projects would wipe out the gains of the safeguard mechanism.” Yet, they have now agreed to pass the legislation on the assumption that around half of the proposed projects would be stopped by the new safeguard mechanism. 

This assumption relies on making new, highly polluting projects financially unviable. Allegedly, the business case would be so severely damaged by the necessity to buy carbon credits that projects could not go ahead. Not only has Adam Bandt misjudged the profit margins of fossil fuel companies like Santos, which tripled its baseline profits in the last year, he has sold out the grassroots, worker-led climate movement in return for a flimsy promise from the ALP. 

This decision shows the Federal Greens party room’s fundamental failure – the decision to favour bureaucratic negotiations over mass movements and direct action. This strategy can only ever plug holes in a sinking ship. It cannot win true climate justice, as it leaves behind the many thousands of Greens party members, progressive supporters, and the climate movement more broadly, who are calling on the Greens to apply serious parliamentary pressure to the Labor government. Instead of even beginning to tackle the superprofits of private fossil fuel companies, or leading the debate around public renewables, the Greens have opted to negotiate around the edges of a meagre cap-and-trade scheme. The superprofits of energy corporations are the reason why inflation is squeezing working-class communities to the brink, and the safeguard mechanism only serves to protect these profits – not the planet. 

For all of Bandt’s hard talk about fighting Labor’s capitulation to the fossil fuel companies, Albanese’s legislative agenda remains untouched. The Greens have stunted their political imagination while in Parliament, not pursuing their own agenda but pretending as if they’ve won concessions out of a Labor party which has not had to fundamentally change a single proposed policy during its first year in government. Like the previous 43% target and Labor’s industrial relations reforms from late last year, or the proposed referendum for a Voice to Parliament, the Greens have continued to wave through ALP policy with only superficial opposition, despite serious concerns from their members, left-wing activists, and even think-tanks like the Australia Institute. This strategy is a cloying attempt to appease the Labor hacks who cry that Greens MPs cannot act constructively in Parliament – to forget the trauma of their previous term in the ‘balance of power’. This new-found ‘constructivism’ is, in practice, killing off the reality of Net Zero by 2030. By locking-in harmful policy and undermining the voice of their own membership, Bandt and the Federal Greens have set back the movement which placed them in their current position of influence.  

This decision is yet another capitulation to the pressure of the polls. Instead of promoting the fight for Aboriginal self-determination and land rights, or for industrial reforms that benefit workers not bosses, the Greens chose to bury themselves in bureaucracy. Now, instead of supporting the union fight for public renewables and a just transition, Greens leaders have chosen to safeguard the superprofits of fossil fuel companies. This is an abandonment of their commitment to securing ‘no new coal and gas’ and Net Zero by 2030, in an effort to market themselves as a ‘constructive’ party of government. While climate protesters are being hounded with the full force of the law around the country, Bandt alongside Albanese has chosen to leave the mass movement behind to get in on Labor’s  first term in government.