Michael Danby (Melbourne Ports, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary to the Leader of the Opposition) Share this | Hansard source

I have never been asked to grace the pages of GQ or to be a Playboy centrefold, as the current Greens party leader, Richard Di Natale, has. If they were unlikely enough to ask me, I would be guided by the cautionary tale of the doctor. A black turtleneck might go down a treat with Dr Di Natale's urbane new Liberal Party friends, but the Greens party represents all that working people have ever needed to know about the fraud that the Greens political party is when they claim to be a friend of the workers. They are a friend of the Machiavellian Michael Kroger from Melbourne, the master Liberal manipulator, who is enacting what I would call a decapitation strategy on the Labor Party by trying to remove two of our most talented inner-city MPs, potentially Peter Khalil from Wills, and David Feeney, the member for Batman, as well as authentic Labor stalwarts like Anthony Albanese.

In the Senate, we have gone from the influence of the preference whisperer, to now the influence of the preference doctor, and his close collaborator, Michael Kroger from Melbourne. Dr Di Natale is advising people now that the Greens political party would never give preferences to the Liberal Party. He must think that the Australian public, the media and people in this parliament are stupid, because the Greens are not going to give their preferences to the Labor Party, which is what most of their alienated Labor Party voters would want them to do; they are going to issue split tickets. That will reduce the preferences going to people like Mr Feeney, Mr Khalil, Mr Albanese and Ms Plibersek, and the Greens political party will therefore hope to have those people defeated.

I was one of the first people in the opposition to warn about Michael Kroger's role in all of this. I think a lot of people in the government and in the Liberal Party have severe doubts about giving support to a political party with extreme policies, like the Greens, and extreme activists, like Senator Rhiannon. I have been challenged by Michael Kroger to say where my preferences will be going. I said as a matter of principle at the last election that when you have a person like Senator Rhiannon among the Greens you cannot in all conscience get voters to give preferences to the Greens political party, and I will probably say the same again. I call on the Liberal Party and the government to adopt a principled attitude to politics in Australia and not support the Greens political party as they are planning to do.

See this speech in context