PUT THEM LAST: Liberal patriot MP Bernie Finn stands up for principle on the rising tide of Greens menace

True Blue Liberal patriot Victorian MP Bernie Finn has publicly called on the major political parties to stop conspiring to elect members from the ultra-left Greens political party to our Parliaments.

Finn told ABC Radio that the Greens are a threat to Australian freedom and prosperity, reflecting concerns over their ill-considered, usually extreme-left wing policies.

Liberal thinking – and past Labor practice as well – has been that it was best to put the radical left-wing party ahead of their principal political opponents so that it would cause as much tactical disruption as possible.

However, as the Greens party vote as surged in concentrated parts of Melbourne’s inner-city, it is possible the extremist environmentally-cloaked party could win as many as eight or nine seats in the Victorian Legislative Assembly. A tactical stunt prompts a strategic disaster.

If momentum continues going their way and neither Liberal or Labor call out the Greens on their jobs-destroying policies, their surge will continue in Victoria where they stand to win the following state seats:

â–  Melbourne
â–  Richmond
â–  Brunswick
â–  Footscray
â–  Northcote
â–  Kew
â–  Hawthorn
â–  Prahran

It is worth noting that these seats contain significant figures from each side of politics, two Ministers, a Cabinet Secretary, two Parliamentary Secretaries, the Liberal leader himself and the Shadow Minister for Police.

The major parties could give themselves tactical advantage by occupying these senior figures in the business of defending their marginal seats throughout the next state election. But for the Liberals in particular, for this dubious benefit, they will get a block of ultimately very ideologically hostile inner-city Greens MPs who regard traditional Liberal areas like Hawthorn, Kew, Brighton and Toorak as potentially very fertile ground and will make their move real soon.

Any Liberal seat where the Greens can run ahead of Labor could fall.

De facto Greens party leader, stock market speculator and party numbers-man Greg Barber has already publicly identified these targets. We laughed at him at the time. He was right though, he does want to takeover the world and for now the trend is his friend. Indeed even his enemies in Labor and Liberals are his friend too, handing over preferences in return for nothing but self-destruction.

Labor could never win these traditional Liberal seats but the Greens party, supported by freshly propagandised graduates, socially aware trust account heirs, doctors’ wives and guilt-tripping high income-earners from ad agencies, the professions and the public service, could win, with Labor preferences.

The federal figures show that in Ted Baillieu’s heartland Hawthorn seat, the Liberals achieved less than 50% of the primary vote in the relevant Kooyong booths (around 48%), putting the Greens within striking distance of beating him. If their vote continues to surge, he’s gone, leaving the state in the strange position of potentially electing Ted Baillieu Premier but getting someone else, perhaps his little known Deputy Louise Asher, who would be presumably only be slighly less surprised than the rest of us.

It’s in this context that many on both sides of politics think this joke has gone on for too long.

For Labor, they’ll think they will miss out on crucial Greens preferences in marginal seats in the burbs where the Greens don’t have a chance if they didn’t do a deal with them. Maybe. But most Greens voters want to and do preference Labor and even in the seat of Blair where the Greens candidate (an extremely eccentric sex instructor and accused kleptomaniac) was preferencing to the Liberals it didn’t shift the preference flow from Labor too much. As for unseating Baillieu and McIntosh, while it be amusing for some Labor comrades it would clearly be seen as massively destabilising and vindictive as well.

It’s the same too-clever-by-half politics that gets politicians into trouble.

The Liberals have not much to lose either by shafting the Greens. By preferencing to the Greens in the inner-city, they cause great angst not only for principle-driven Liberals like Bernie Finn but real trouble in regional Victoria where the Greens party is widely acknowledged as their natural enemy. The Liberals have just elected a member of the House of Representatives from the extreme-left party. It doesn’t take Nostradamus to know they’ll get called on it at the state poll. All they get out of giving the Greens party a preference hand-out is a little distraction for Labor in four or five seats, potentially electing Greens MPs who will almost inevitably side with Labor anyway and drag any government it forms further to the Left of anything Bracks or Brumby has delivered in the past ten years.

We have seen from the private email correspondence from Bob Brown’s own staff that their own market research (remember they profess to oppose poll-driven politics and reject the concept of political ‘brands’) reveals that their supporters violently oppose them playing games with preferences. They pretend to be a party of protest against politics but – as the many shocking stories based on recent leaks have demonstrated – they are indeed the same cynical, nihilist, ruthlessly pragmatic types that we once saw populate the Communist party and other far-left groups. Their underbelly has been quite the sight.

Finn is totally right. It’s time the major parties put their Greens party in their rightful place. Last or near enough to last. It’s time for party members – Liberal and Labor – to make themselves heard on this before it’s too late.

How many seats does these extreme-left militant party need to win before we wake up to them?

Click here to hear Bernie Finn on the Greens party menace.