WHO PAYS FOR GREEN UTOPIA?

LAST week in the gardens of Parliament House, Greens leader Adam Bandt made a cocky video welcoming a Labor government “where the Greens hold the balance of power”. For once, he’s not wrong.

As Labor gets suddenly coy about what it stands for while barrelling into an election, the voting public is being sold romanticised Greens’ mission statements that would leave Australia incapable of defending itself and economically anaemic.

The Greens stand to gain a host of new colleagues from the socalled independent Voices Of candidates, who, if their votes match their rhetoric, will back netzero Green utopia.

Where Mr Bandt is wrong is that it is not a billionaires’ tax that will fund the Greens’ welfare spree, but the slashing of defence spending by $191.7bn to 2032 and creating a “Global Centre for Peace and Conflict Resolution”, which promises “peace and conflict resolution around the world” but would be more at home on a vegan commune.

Tellingly, the pointy end of their defence policy, called a “peace, disarmament and demilitarisation” strategy, is not about defending our sovereignty at all but calls for urgent decarbonisation of defence activities, which it says are “the biggest sources of carbon emissions in the public service” and could “help mitigate … climate change”.

The No. 1 concern about the Greens holding the balance of power should be their world peace strategy, which ends the US alliance, slashes military spending from 2.2 to 1.5 per cent of GDP, and takes money out of defence to develop a “climate security paper” while spending $10m “to promote peace and nonviolent conflict resolution”.

You cannot slash defence spending and abandon the US alliance while China is setting up military bases within spitting distance. They will wipe billions from our bottom line by crushing our defence exports and restricting what we sell, including through legislation prohibiting us from exporting weapons or fossil fuels.

Our defence exports are not all pointy stuff that goes bang – it’s radars, decoy missiles, bulletproof jackets, laser equipment, and other technology smarts that bring billions into the economy.

If the Greens wipe nearly $350bn in resources and energy exports, how will they pay for their free university, TAFE, childcare, parental leave, coal miner retirements and welfare utopia?

Labor may be indulging in mission statements rather than detailed policy but its potential coalition partner is bolder, sending policies to the Parliamentary Budget Office to be costed.

According to the PBO, the Greens’ plan to tax corporations adds only half a billion dollars to the budget in 2023-24 while a mining super profits tax would have a net revenue of $26.9bn and the billionaires tax would increase the fiscal balance by $11.26bn.

This is assuming that billionaires and their accountants won’t exploit valuation challenges in complex structures such as trusts and partnerships, hide assets in offshore accounts, gift assets to non-immediate family members, or simply move overseas.

The PBO determined “a very high degree of uncertainty” in the billionaires tax because of the obvious oversight that people would leave Australia.

Even if the super wealthy remained here and committed to enormous taxes, the Greens’ balance sheet cannot pay for the promises it has already made, including $19bn to pay 50 per cent of coal workers’ wages for a decade, wiping about $58bn that students owe in unpaid loans, $19bn in free childcare, $24.5bn for a 26-week paid parental leave package and the $40bn to convert the Snowy Hydro scheme to renewables.

Tellingly, remaining uncosted is the welfare plan to subsidise “all young people 18 and over $1300 per fortnight whether they are studying or looking for work”, along with the plan for free education, which for just 465,000 TAFE spots and 20,000 university spots Labor costs at $1.1bn.

Then there is $1bn to tell Australian stories, $6.06bn for a First Nations elders gold card and Indigenous “healing spaces”, $12bn to “end violence” against women and children, $5bn for “green” school halls, $7bn for “green” public housing, and $1bn for a nationwide “compostable processing” scheme.

These alone sit at $268bn. Idealistic plans of love and peace are a stark contrast to the reality of global tensions, with military superpowers in conflict and preparing for more.

This policy through rosecoloured glasses leaves the nation poorer, exposed by an army of idealists and climate zealots marching Australia to its knees.

Unfortunately for Australians, the Labor small-target election strategy means this is the only platform in the Labor-green alliance we have to view.