I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry when I read the following words from Victorian Greens leader Samantha Ratnam, quoted in the Australian Financial Review:

‘We’re really worried about a lurch to the far-right in the Upper House. We’re seeing the rise of the far right and far-right extremism in Victoria.’ 

What planet is Ratnam living on? It must be one with lots of large rocks to hide under. Unfortunately, I suspect many inner-city Melbournians will take her words at face value. Is this naivety or manipulative rhetoric?

When you have a far-left policy platform, it’s likely you’ve lost all perspective and relativity.

Anything not on the agenda must invariably be ‘extreme right’. Just as anyone who does not agree with you must be a ‘Nazi’.

I have previously alluded to this cunning strategy employed by the progressive Left, in which they resort to lazy-name calling in order to misrepresent their opposition. A mere evasion of the debate at hand, it is utilised as a tool to both silence, as well as to discount a person’s perspective.

A great example of how shallow these claims can often be was exemplified by Leigh Sales, the former host of the ABC’s 7:30 Report.

In an article written by Sales on the personal attacks she, and other colleagues, had received – ‘overwhelmingly [from] left-leaning Twitter users’ – she noted the irony of Fran Kelly being attacked as a ‘mouthpiece for the Liberal Party’. As Sales pointed out, this was, ‘Laughable for anybody old enough to recall that Kelly was public enemy number one for the Howard government and its media barrackers.’

I’ll add, for anyone to accuse any ABC journalist of being a mouthpiece for the Liberal Party is really quite comical.

Returning to Ratnam, I will grant that it is likely that the Victorian Upper House will be more diverse than the current government, and in many respects, this is a good and healthy outcome for democracy.

‘Only through diversity of opinion is there, in the existing state of human intellect, a chance of fair play to all sides of the truth.’

Further, if it means that the Greens and the Teals will not hold the balance of power in the Upper House, then it’s a great outcome. Victorians who suffered through our state’s draconian lockdowns will recall that Daniel Andrews ‘consistently relied on support from the Animal Justice Party MP Andy Meddick, Greens’ Ms Ratnam, and the Reason Party’s Ms Patten, including for the controversial pandemic powers’.

Ratnam alleged that this apparent ‘lurch to the right, will really impact the health of Victoria’s democracy’.

When it comes to democracy, Ratnam does not have a foot to stand on. Aside from being on the authoritarian progressive-Left, obsessed with identity politics and the Woke agenda, Ratnam was a persistent supporter of disproportionate pandemic powers which saw Victoria endure the longest lockdown in the Western world. This included the shutting down of Victoria’s Parliament. That was a genuine threat to the health of Victoria’s democracy, as the opposition did not have the opportunity to hold Andrews’ government to account in Parliament.

If the Senate is more diverse and therefore more representative of the different views in public opinion, then democracy is in fact functioning well. Unfortunately, the likes of Ratnam only seem to care for democracy when it works in their favour.

But who are these right-wingers Ratnam is referring to?

• Clive Palmer’s UAP is putting up several candidates, but the support they will have is questionable, especially if the Federal election results are any indicator.
• There is the Liberal Democrat (LDP) MP David Limbrick, ‘who defied the state’s vaccine mandate’. Presumably Ratnam would label Limbrick ‘far-right’. Though the LDP has some outstanding libertarian policies (which by the way, are not far-right), they ‘support the immediate legalisation of any drug shown to be less harmful than alcohol or tobacco, and the decriminalisation of all other drugs’. This is not a right-wing policy.
• The United Firefighters Union chief Peter Marshall is ‘going to war with the Premier’. The unions are certainly not right-wing!
• Lastly, the Liberal Party has also been accused of ‘running a team of conservatives, including Evan Mulholland.’ I was fortunate enough to work as an intern at the same company as Evan and I can vouch for the fact he is not a ‘far-right extremist’. Evan is a great bloke and I wish him well for the election, he is a breath of fresh air for the Victorian Liberal Party. My personal bias aside, I am not convinced that campaigning for policies that ‘ease the cost of doing business, boost economic growth, apply rigorous scrutiny to the decisions made by government’ and providing certainty ‘for individuals, families and their livelihoods’, within the Northern Metropolitan Region, is a threat to democracy. Anyone with even the vaguest understanding of Victorian politics will appreciate that the Victorian LP has in fact drifted further to the left in recent years.

Ultimately in Victoria, the far-left is far more of a threat to a robust democracy than the (non-existent) far-right. Our Premier is from the socialist-left faction of the Labor Party.

Whether this is a case of intentional deceit or a flimsy analysis – or both – let’s not be gaslit by these misleading comments.

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