Allan Patience, you are a knowledgeable and thoughtful political commentator. But on the Greens you have an absolute blind spot. You rightly excoriate the politicians of the “timorous” Labor party and the now remnant Liberal and National parties, whose four decades of “neoliberal evangelism” have brought us to levels of societal inequality and poverty not seen since the 1930’s.
Yet you turn to the independents to provide the “intelligent policy options” we so desperately need, while entirely ignoring the policy offerings of The Greens. Two of the independents you laud have actually pushed back against the government’s limited proposals to redress some of the worst tax inequities we face.
Have you actually looked at The Greens’ economic policy? It isn’t sexy stuff, but it is the sort of coherent policy which a party without vested interests and lobbyists to appease has the ability and the resources to create:
You will find within it principles such as
“Responding to the scale of our inequality and climate crises requires a transformation of our economic institutions and measures of economic value.”
“Wealth inequality is fundamentally unjust and requires structural economic change and wealth redistribution.”
What more do you want?