Richard Di Natale was on a flight to England this week when some of Australia’s most powerful business leaders held a press conference in Canberra.
The heads of the Commonwealth Bank, Qantas and Wesfarmers, as well as executives from BHP Billiton, Rio Tinto, Energy Australia and JBS, had gathered in the Senate courtyard of Parliament House on Wednesday afternoon to make a pitch on national television.
They wanted everyone to remember that the Turnbull government had been elected promising $48bn worth of tax cuts, and they said senators must support the entire package. The country needed it.
Di Natale laughed when he heard about it the next day.
“That represents everything that’s wrong with the system doesn’t it?” he said on the phone from Liverpool, England.
“One of the things that people are rejecting right now is this huge and growing divide between the privileged few and everybody else.
“For a big bank to stand up there and argue for a cut to the company tax rate when it’s been responsible for some of the most appalling and systemic abuses of average people, it just shows you how completely out of touch they are.
“How about actually getting your own institutions in order before coming with your hand out for more government support?”
In the end, the big banks missed out and the Senate voted for tax cuts only for businesses up to $50m turnover.
Di Natale was in England for the fourth Global Greens Congress, a four-day gathering of the world’s Green parties.
He was there to tell the other participants how Green politics was faring in Australia in the era of Donald Trump and the recrudescence of far-right populism.
He’d been paired in the Senate so his vote wouldn’t be missed while he was attending the meeting.
“Given the commitment of both Bob [Brown] and Christine [Milne] to the Global Greens, for me personally it’s something I really want to commit to, and to continue to build,” he said.
“Look what’s going on around the world. The election of Trump, the rise of economic nationalism ... We need to articulate what a progressive international political movement looks like.”
The day after the group of high-powered execs tried to pressure parliament to cut corporate taxes, the former prime minister Paul Keating admitted the liberal economic philosophy he had once championed had “run into a dead end”.
Keating was responding to a speech by new ACTU national secretary, Sally McManus, who declared on Wednesday that “neoliberalism” had run its course.
“The Keating years created vast wealth for Australia, but that has not been shared, and too much has ended up in offshore bank accounts or in CEO’s back pockets,” McManus had said.
“Working people are now missing out and this is making them angry.”
Keating told Fairfax Media the next day: “Liberal economics had [in the past] dramatically increased wealth around the world, as it had in Australia – for instance a 50% increase in real wages and a huge lift in personal wealth.
“But since 2008, liberal economics has gone nowhere and to the extent that Sally McManus is saying this, she is right,” he said.
Di Natale said Keating’s comments were “very interesting”.
“As somebody who had – and I’m talking about the early 90s before the Greens were really a presence – that economic transformation I saw was something I experienced with very mixed feelings,” he said.
“It was something that was never talked about. It was talked about as universally good, and yet there was a cost to it and we’re experiencing that cost now.
“I came from a working-class background where I had family members who were in the textile industry, were machinists and so on, who saw their jobs disappear with some of those economic reforms.
“What we saw were a set of reforms that produced some dividends, but for many decades we’ve celebrated the transformation in the Australian economy without recognising that it came at a cost.”
He said he wasn’t sure who those family members who lost their jobs had gone on to vote for.
“I would suggest that it’s likely they would have continued to vote Labor, I mean my family was a working-class migrant Italian family and their identity was much more aligned with the Labor side of politics than the Liberals,” he said.
Di Natale said Australians were crying out for stronger leaders, and Bill Shorten should have backed Sally McManus when she defended the right of workers to break laws they thought unjust recently.
“It was a statement of the bleeding obvious,” he said.
“I’m here because I saw my uncle, as a 12-year old kid, go over to Tassie and get locked up campaigning for the Franklin River, to me he was like a hero,” he said.
“That’s something I think we should celebrate ... and it was disappointing that [Shorten] couldn’t lend his support to comments that I think are representative of what progressive politics should look like.”
As he prepared to speak at the Global Green Congress on Friday, Di Natale said despite the political turmoil globally, the mood in Green politics was optimistic.
He said most people at the conference understood that Green parties had an opportunity.
“People globally are rejecting a system that has produced a huge gap between rich and poor, that’s been totally incapable of responding to climate change,” he said.
“We’re seeing a fundamental rejection of politics as usual around the world, and the question for us is: how do we get people to understand that we’re with them?”
