Category: Christine Milne

23 Feb

6 Comments

After the divorce: Contradictions of Greens strategy

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With a sense of crisis swirling around the government, last Friday’s post on how the ALP’s problems run much deeper than a faulty “narrative” was republished at ABC’s The Drum. Then Christine Milne announced the end of the Greens-ALP agreement, and The Drum commissioned the piece below on the Greens. Now that comments are closed at the ABC website, we’re reposting it here.


Greens in 2013: Between a rock & a hard place

By Tad Tietze

Karl Marx once wrote, “The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.” In the case of the Australian Greens one might say that the party’s now-dead alliance with the Gillard Government weighs like a nightmare on their current political options. Continue Reading

Filed Under: ALP, Christine Milne, Featured, Greens, Julia Gillard, Left strategy, Liberal Party, Tony Abbott

30 Dec

1 Comment

2012 in review: The year that politics disoriented the Left

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Immigrants protest against Greece’s neo-Nazi Golden Dawn

Just before 2012 closes out, I’m reposting my last Overland blog of the year, which originally appeared here. In some ways it is a summing up of themes we have developed at Left Flank since we started in mid-2010; chiefly in our attempts to present not just a general ideological or theoretical approach to the topics we covered, but to concretely analyse actually existing politics — something that we thought had not been focused on enough by the Australian Marxist Left in recent years. We hope readers have found the blog and our writings elsewhere stimulating because of that focus, and we look forward to developing these ideas more next year. Thanks to all of you for your readership, comments, criticisms and support.

The political prediction business is not one you should engage in unless you’re either willing to repeatedly admit erroneous forecasts (one of Ben Eltham’s most endearing qualities) or to march on obliviously ignoring them (most of the rest of the commentariat). It’s even worse for us Marxists, as we’re notorious for having accurately foretold five out of the last two recessions. The problem is that history unfolds dialectically in the real world, and not simply through a logical derivation from some initial starting point.

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Filed Under: age of austerity, ALP, Anti-capitalism, Christine Milne, Egypt, Europe, Featured, Greece, Greens, imperialism, Islamism, Julia Gillard, Left strategy, revolution, social democracy, social movements, Spain, trade unions

17 Apr

2 Comments

The Greens after Bob Brown: ‘Replacing the bastards’ or just joining them?

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Bob Brown at the s11 anti-corporate globalisation protest in Melbourne, 2000

Bloody Bob Brown. I have a relatively quiet weekend planned and he goes and retires. Here’s the other article I was asked to write on the subject, for yesterday’s The Drum Opinion, looking at things in terms of the prospects for the party itself. I reproduce it below for your commenting pleasure away from the, er, conservative tenor of the ABC threads.

What is the future for the Australian Greens in the wake of Bob Brown’s retirement? Can Christine Milne and Adam Bandt take the party forward after the loss of such an iconic leader? Will the party be “torn apart” by factional tensions? Will it veer Left or Right? What of the party’s alliance with a Labor government facing a historic landslide defeat? These are some of the questions emerging in mainstream commentary after the Greens’ surprise leadership change last Friday.

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Filed Under: Adam Bandt, Bob Brown, Christine Milne, Featured, Greens