Greens desperately look for their Zohran Mamdani. They have Mehreen Faruqi instead
The Australian Greens are desperately looking for their Zohran Mamdani. They have Mehreen Faruqi instead, and that is bad news for Australia.
The numbers say it all for the Australian Greens: two leaders gone in a year, three House of Representatives MPs lost at the last election, and a primary vote forever stuck between 10 and 12 per cent.
Between that stark picture and a health battle with kidney disease, one cannot blame Larissa Waters for calling time on a leadership that wasn’t really going anywhere anyway.
The leadership contest, if it’s anything like past Greens spills, will be closed door on Wednesday or Thursday at a partyroom “retreat” in Sydney. There is no transparency over votes, no consultation with members, no idea what the candidates’ platforms are.
What we do know is that the most visible Greens senator, Sarah Hanson-Young, could struggle yet again to win the leadership because she is seen to be a moderate (well, their version of a moderate) and a deal maker.
After a year of an emboldened Anthony Albanese using his post-election authority to torment the Greens and force them into passing bills where they win next to nothing, the hard left is not very interested in deal-making.
Hanson-Young or hard-left NSW senator David Shoebridge would hardly atone for the party’s role in the antisemitism crisis, and neither could be expected to all of a sudden come up with a sensible foreign policy.
But while they may dance on the line of acceptable politics, neither option would cross it quite in the way that Faruqi repeatedly has.
Faruqi is the hard-left’s torch bearer, a beloved figure in the anti-Israel protest movement. And the worst candidate possible for Australia’s social cohesion.
After the nation’s worst terror attack in history, it was Faruqi who declared that “dark forces” like Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu were behind the demands for a royal commission into the two years of antisemitic hate that led to the alleged murders of 15 Australians.
This is the same Faruqi who called the decision to light up the Australian Parliament in the colours of the Israeli flag days after the October 7 massacre – the worst single mass slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust – “one colonial government supporting another.”
And it was Faruqi who had to delete a Instagram photo of her standing in front of a placard saying “keep the world clean” with a picture of the Israeli flag in a rubbish bin.
Is this who the Greens are turning to?
Faruqi also had to sack a staffer who suggested the firebombing of the Israel Adass Synagogue was a “Zionist false flag attack.”
The NSW Greens senator did counsel and condemn her staffer. But like Jeremy Corbyn before her, she seems to be surrounded by people who don’t seem to live her repeated mantra that anti-Zionism doesn’t equal antisemitism.
A Faruqi leadership will be more radical and more divisive than any of her Greens predecessors.
Faruqi reportedly has been frustrated that Waters – who developed a reputation in the hard left as a bit of a patsy for Albanese’s Labor – was not tapping into the populist success of Mamdani or British Greens leader Zach Polanski.
Never mind that nobody in the Australian Greens could come close to the socialist New York mayor’s charisma.
Not that the New York Mayor is an answer for Australia’s policy problems. Government-owned supermarkets, rent freezes, and massive increases in taxes are frankly disastrous ideas.
And he has spent most of his career attacking Israel at every opportunity he can get.
But Mamdani does at least understand that his mad foreign policy views are not what his voters care about: his messaging is totally focused on the cost of living and city priorities like potholes and kindergartens.
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