XYZ last reported on Greens candidate for Batman Alex Bhathal, when she spoke at a Broadmeadows rally organised to stop the deportation of an admitted member of a terrorist group. The event was organised by the Freedom Socialist Party and the crowd consisted of members of Socialist Alternative, Solidarity, the Anarchist “Collective Action” group and the Marxist linked Tamil Refugee Council.
Alex has some nice friends. If by “nice” you mean violently sociopathic.
Turns out however that while she’s the flavour of the month with Marxists, Alex isn’t universally loved in her own party. On Thursday members from within her own branch leaked the details of a 101 page internal complaint against poor Alex to The Australian newspaper that called her a super-mean, stupid-faced bully who should be thrown out of the treehouse (or words to that effect).
You know it’s serious when the Greens are leaking on each other to the evilest publication in the evil-Nazi-fascist-baby-eating Murdoch press. I wonder if Fairfax and the Guardian refused to break the story?
The complaints included:
“..instances of direct intimidation and victimisation on the part of Alex, as well as the wider, more systematic operation of her political machine which has been used to undermine consensus decision making and processes, attack and harass members considered to be ‘in the way’ and we believe, to recruit members for the purposes of swaying preselection results,”
Branch stacking? Backstabbing? In a political party? My god the horror!
“Her tactics have become more aggressive and ruthless, her breaches of the code more flagrant and brazen, her behaviour many magnitudes more destructive.”
Judging on the prose alone I’m going to take a wild guess that the as yet anonymous author of this complaint is a high school English teacher.
But what were some of the examples of this destructive, intimidating and bullying behaviour?
The complaint alleges the mother-of-two ‘unfriended’ a party member on Facebook and made the Darebin branch an ‘unsafe space’.
It accuses her of ‘triggering’, projecting, and being passive aggressive, and labels her ‘aggressive’, ‘ruthless’ and ‘destructive’.
Unfriended on Facebook hey? This is hilarious.
For context, the Greens branch in the inner northern Melbourne area of Darebin is probably the largest in the country. The electorate of Batman itself is split between the traditionally working class and now heavily immigrant suburbs of Preston, Thomastown and Kingsbury on the one hand and the ultra-hipster upper middle class suburbs of Thornbury, Northcote and Clifton Hill in the south. The North traditionally votes ALP while the South is one of the most heavily Green voting areas in Australia.
At the 2016 election Alex managed to get more primary votes than the ALP’s disgusting slob of a man David Feeny (now thrown out over citizenship issues) but lost on Liberal preferences. With the Libs choosing not to run a candidate this time the race really is up for grabs.
Which is part of what makes this so funny and yet so sad.
Funny because watching a bunch of elderly hippies suddenly find out that when there is actual power on the line rather than just the chance for self-righteous virtue signalling, the members of their party are just as mercenary and cut-throat as anyone else.
But sad because the woman at the centre of these allegations was only two weeks ago making a speech to a crowd of some of the most radical violent political extremists in Australia, while calling for a self-confessed high ranking member of a terrorist group to not be deported, and it didn’t hurt her at all. Aside from here at the XYZ it wasn’t even reported.
If Alex loses the election on the 17th of March it will have nothing at all to do with her links to extremists and her willingness to spruik for dangerous foreigners (her friends in the media have completely ignored both). In fact if she loses votes at all, it will be far more likely due to the fact that she managed to upset some of her peace-and-love cat-lady comrades who haven’t sobered up since the late 70s.
Which is hilarious but still sad. As the Greens win more seats, get more and more organised and gain more power and influence, they will continue to drag the ALP away from their working class base and further to the extreme left. This might be good for the Liberals in the short term but politics in a two party system is always a pendulum; no matter how far to the left the ALP goes they will eventually get voted back in.
That has happened three times in the last half a century. We got semi-lucky once with Bob Hawke (he could have been so much worse) but both Whitlam and Rudd were disasters for our country, our nation and our society.
We should all be paying a little closer attention to the Greens, no matter how crazy they seem, and we should be doing our best to encourage the few people in the media who don’t already vote for them to do likewise.
There are a lot of crazy secrets swept under the carpet with that lot, and almost nobody is doing much looking.
