28.03.2025

On the march: ‘former Marxist’ Adam Bandt (right)

Arms and the Greens

Seeking ‘electoral credibility’, Australia’s Green Party has adopted nationalist militarism, writes Marcus Strom. Meanwhile what passes for the left peddles a combination of economism, pacifism and liberalism

In a pre-election lurch to the right, the Australian Green Party has announced a $4 billion policy to invest in domestically produced missile and drone systems. It is being promoted as the only “credible” way that Australia can drop the $368 billion Aukus pact for nuclear submarines and militarily ‘decouple’ from a Trumpite United States.

In announcing the policy, the Greens said the investment will be “strictly for defensive purposes to ensure the defence of Australia without relying on the US and foreign arms companies”. Defence against whom or what they do not say, but everyone knows in the current geopolitical climate, this means China.¹ Naive, stupid or both? Either way, the Australian Greens are clearly going down the same road taken by the German Greens. They want to be seen both as a ‘respectable party’ and the bringers of a ‘liberal eco-capitalism’.

Of course, this armament policy was decided behind closed doors. No debate with party members, no conference vote. This echoes how the Australian Labor Party was dragooned into adopting Aukus before the 2022 election. That policy too was adopted by the parliamentary leadership on the eve of an election and then presented to the party as a fait accompli.

This is as a point worth making. Green Party members regularly claim its internal political life is far more democratic than that of the ALP, for which the Green Party acts as a reformist left in exile.

Defensive weapons

How this all fits with the Greens’ global ‘four pillars’² is not explained. Those pillars are ‘ecological sustainability’, ‘grassroots participatory democracy’, ‘social justice’ and ‘peace and non-violence’.

After all, its fourth pillar says: “Australia’s foreign policy should be based on dialogue, diplomacy and cooperation, not aggression. Trying to prevent or counter violence with violence itself will not work. The Greens are committed to peaceful and non-violent solutions locally, nationally and internationally.” Good to know the $4 billion will go to non-violent drones and missiles, then.

While the Greens do call for an end to Aukus, the closure of US spy and military bases and the removal of US troops from Australia, their approach to the ‘Anzus treaty’ is not for withdrawal, but for its “renegotiation”. Anzus - the formal treaty aligning Australia with the United States - has been the cornerstone of Australian foreign policy since 1951.

This commitment to investing in drones seems to contradict elements of official Green Party policy - namely this clause in the ‘Peace, conflict response and veterans’ document: “Lethal autonomous weapons are a serious threat to global peace”. That is followed by a demand for an “international ban on the development of lethal autonomous weapons systems”.³

While drone systems are often manually operated, we have seen in Gaza and Ukraine that the switch from manual to autonomous is simple and frequent. The use of AI for target selection has become commonplace.⁴ And the idea that military capacity can be maintained as ‘strictly defensive’ and that a military offensive could never be a defensive move exposes a lack of any serious understanding of such matters.

Further, to believe that modern drone and missile technology can be autarkically built using only “genuinely sovereign” manufacturing capabilities would make Kim Jong Un blush. Even the North Koreans know they need to get their military technology from the best available sources. Any ‘national only’ military industry would quickly be eclipsed and become redundant. The arms industry is truly global.

This shift to the right is nothing less than a desperate move to achieve bourgeois respectability on the eve of an election, which will take place in early May.

Recent election fortunes of the Greens have been mixed, but they have been stuck at around 10% of the vote for about two decades now, with no clear pathway to growth. In the 2022 federal election, they went from one seat in the House of Representatives to four, adding three in Queensland to the seat in Melbourne, held by their leader and former Marxist Adam Bandt. The party received 12.2% of first-preference votes - up by 1.8 percentage points. In addition, the party has 11 senators in the upper house out of 76.

In recent Western Australian state elections, the Greens picked up 4.1 percentage points - up to 11.1% - but failed to pick up any lower-house seats. In the New South Wales local elections last year, they won votes in some outer-Sydney council areas. However, in the party’s middle class inner-city base areas, they failed to make headway. In Victoria’s local elections, they did less well, dropping from 36 to 28 councillors - in part due to changes in the voting system.

To their credit, the Greens have campaigned against the Israeli genocide in Gaza, but this has come at some cost amid the furious confected anti-Semitism campaign being waged by Zionists. There are concerns among the Greens themselves, added to projections by psephologists, that the party could lose three of its four-seat beachhead in the lower house, in part because they have been painted as ‘extreme’ on the Israel-Palestine question and ‘unrealistic’ on defence questions over Aukus.

In the Queensland state elections last year, which saw Labor lose office, the Greens failed to build on their gains in the 2022 federal election, winning just one seat with 9.9% of the vote - similar to its 9.5% in 2020. According to the Australian Financial Review, “Prime minister Anthony Albanese said the state Greens MPs had paid the price for the increasingly militant and opportunistic behaviour of their federal counterparts”.⁵ So there is pressure from the right on the Greens - and this adoption of a multibillion missile and drone policy needs to be seen in that context. Pointing to the militarist Green parties in Europe, Euan Graham from the hawkish anti-China think tank, the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, told Sky News Australia that the Greens were “behind the curve” of their counterparts in Europe, who had realised the need for a “viable defence policy”.

Anti-China

Unsaid by the Greens is the fact that this policy shift comes amid an ongoing anti-China scare campaign (not least with Aukus) to drum up militarism in the region. Of course, China has a strategic interest in expanding its influence in Asia-Pacific, but only the most febrile think that this would include a military attack on Australia. The Chinese navy recently sent a three-ship taskforce to circumnavigate Australia in international waters and conducted live-fire exercises to show that Beijing is not intimidated by US posturing in the region.

The Greens themselves have a staunch anti-China faction not least around Clive Hamilton, who in 2018 published Silent invasion: China’s influence in Australia. Two years later he came out with a follow-up: Hidden hand: exposing how the Chinese Communist Party is reshaping the world. Hamilton was a Green Party candidate in 2009.

Of course, the Green Party is right on one thing. In order to present yourself as a party seriously worth supporting for political office, you need a credible policy on the military and defence. Naturally, for a petty bourgeois outfit like the Greens, credibility means echoing establishment opinion and proposing a few policy tweaks.

Left deficit

But this shift to the right by the Greens has exposed a real deficit among left groups like Socialist Alternative and its electoral front, the Victorian Socialists. The same goes for the Socialist Alliance and the rump ‘official’ Communist Party of Australia. These groups share various pacifist and liberal nostrums, however, naturally, they take for granted the standing army, and make no call for it to be disbanded and replaced.

Socialist Alliance election material contains calls to “cut military spending by at least 50%”.⁶ The CPA less ambitiously says Australia should “immediately cut military spending by at least 10%”,⁷ while the Victorian Socialists, dominated by the post-Cliffite Socialist Alternative, make the call to “cut military funding - no to a new armaments programme. Redirect military funding to healthcare, housing and education.” Of note, the Victorian Socialists do call for the disbanding of the SAS special forces, due to their “repeated involvement in war crimes”. But this makes it clear that they do not want to disband the rest of the Australian standing army.

Naturally, we want resources shifted from warfare to supporting useful human activity. But, on their own, these policies are mere pacifism - turning swords into ploughshares. Privately, perhaps these comrades think that the standing army should go. But they dare not say so, because ‘ordinary people’ are not calling for it. This, apparently, is the magic of the ‘transitional method’.

For these comrades, the ‘transitional method’ has become an opportunists’ charter, whereby you hide the principled politics of Marxism that you think lack immediate traction. Instead promote mainly economic and social demands that are already popular. Vital constitutional demands thereby go downplayed or totally ignored: open borders, a popular militia, the election of judges, republicanism. Marxism, it seems, is to be hidden until ‘the revolution’, when the masses will spontaneously arrive at such politics. It is only then that we should reveal our true programme.

This shows a complete misunderstanding of the ‘revolutionary’ programme (for such groups useful only for speechifying at Sunday school sermons). There is no joined-up thinking: the Marxist programme is not, it seems, a roadmap to political power, but something shared only among consenting Marxists. Meanwhile, there is the wages, conditions and benefits gruel for the benighted masses.

A consistently democratic and republican defence policy is to disband the standing army and initiate a popular militia. This is not even a specifically Marxist demand, but was the common sense of democrats and republicans throughout the 19th and into the 20th century. It was even in the first election manifesto of the British Labour Party, which called for “abolition of the standing army, and the establishment of a citizen force”. Quite right.

A model for a democratic and popular militia in Australia could be the State Emergency Service, a largely volunteer force that exists in just about every community. The origins of the SES lies with the air-raid wardens of World War II and a little later the Civil Defence Service, started in 1955. The SES has a small number of full-time staff to organise logistics, training and organisation, but the overwhelming majority are volunteers that assist with disaster relief and emergency services. The Swiss organise their militia along similar lines.

Meanwhile, the Victorian Socialists lead senate candidate, Jordan van den Lamb, has posted a decent takedown of the Greens’ lurch to the right, slamming its crass electoralism. But it seems that he does not see the beam in his own eye. The Greens, after all, have a point - if you want to contend for power, you need a defence policy.

So who should have the arms in society? If the Victorian Socialists secretly believe the population should be armed, but will not say so, they too are guilty of electoralism to be ‘respectable’ and are peddling pacifist ‘swords into ploughshares’ nostrums. If they do not support this, and want to maintain a standing army, then how are they socialists or even democrats?

Our minimum programme should be for a republican and democratic constitution that ensures the disbandment of the standing army and a democratically organised popular militia.