Website | Instagram | TikTok

This week, I spent a couple of days up in Parliament. You’d be forgiven for not knowing Parliament was even sitting, because the truth is not a whole lot happened!

Sometimes that’s the way it goes in Parliament – there’s always a lot of noise, but not always a lot of news. Still, I think there are interesting shifts playing out in Parliament and politics which have slipped under the radar. One is the changing relationship between Labor and the Greens, which is my focus this week.

It has become a common refrain in Parliament House that the Greens are ‘the new Opposition’.

This is said in a variety of tones: from the Greens it’s a boast, from Labor an accusation, from the Coalition a joke.

For young people, it’s statistically accurate. Among Generation Z voters (those born since 1995), Labor received 40% of the vote at the last election, the Greens 35% and the Coalition 20%.

In that context, it may not be surprising that the Greens have been the main ‘opponent’ of the Government on two key issues for young voters: climate and housing.

Partly, this is because of the balance of numbers in Parliament – if the Coalition opposes Government legislation, it cannot get through the Senate without the support of Greens’ Senators.

However, it’s not just about numbers – the tension between Labor and the Greens is personal, and disagreements are fierce. Greens leader Adam Bandt calls Labor “the coal and gas lobby” and “the party of property moguls”. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese calls the Greens “a party of protest”, accusing them of caring “all about the game, not about the substance.”

This political name-calling can be off-putting, but there is more nuance to the Labor-Greens relationship than the insults suggest.

The clearest example is on climate change.

This is a longstanding area of tension between Labor and the Greens. In 2009, the Greens and the Coalition voted to block the Rudd Labor Government’s emissions reduction policy, the Greens arguing it didn’t go far enough. Australia did not successfully legislate any limit on emissions for the next 13 years, and the 2009 failure has remained a sore spot for both parties.

Last year, history looked like it might repeat itself when the Greens resisted supporting Labor’s major emissions reduction policy because they believed it didn’t go far enough.

The policy was to reduce the emissions of major polluters by setting annual limits, which get stricter each year. In Labor’s own words, the policy was a “compromise”. It was an adaptation of an existing Coalition policy and had been designed to avoid the ‘climate wars’ by winning the support of business groups.

The Greens’ main demand was that Labor commit to banning all new coal and gas projects – a line the Government was unwilling to cross.

However, after months of back and forth, an agreement was reached. The safeguard mechanism was tweaked to effectively prevent any new coal or gas project from going ahead if that project would breach the Government’s emissions reduction target.

As Independent MP Allegra Spender said at the time, neither party was happy, but both had reached a level of unhappiness they could live with. The political insults on climate change have continued to be exchanged, but Labor and the Greens were this time able to achieve what they had failed to achieve in 2009.

It is less clear whether a similar disagreement on housing policy will be resolved.

Once again, the Greens oppose a key Labor policy which they argue doesn’t go far enough. In this instance, it’s a $10 billion investment into a fund, where the returns would pay for the construction of social and low-rent housing over time.

The Greens’ main demand is that the Government work with states and territories to limit rent increases.

In June, the Greens voted with the Coalition to block the Government’s housing bill in the Senate. There have been some small concessions on each side since then. Labor recently announced extra short-term housing, and the Greens have shifted from talking about a ‘rent freeze’ to a ‘rent cap’.

Despite this, there is no immediate sign of resolution, and the trading of insults continues. Still, even if there is no resolution, the Greens can reasonably argue they are playing the role of the ‘opposition’ – the housing debate is unfolding between the Government and them, not between the Government and the Coalition.

This is a significant shift in the political landscape. Even if Labor and the Greens can’t agree on housing policy or climate policy, their prolonged arguments show the concerns of young voters are beginning to take centre stage.