The nightmare begins…

With Andrew Wilkie backing Labor [who didn’t see that coming? He’s a former Green himself, which we all know is hard Left in drag] it looks like Julia will cling on to the power she so desperately craves, but at a potentially huge price. Paul Kelly correctly argues that a deal with the anti-business, anti-mining, anti-capitalist, anti-everything-that-isn’t-the-environment Greens will alienate the cautious electorate of middle Australia:

How will people, notably voters in NSW, Queensland and Western Australia, react at hearing that Gillard’s response to losing her governing majority at the election is to strike an alliance with the Greens and move even further to the Left?

This is strategic folly. At the tactical level it remains unclear whether this move is a masterstroke or omen of doom. Its aim is to prove Gillard’s commitment to the new politics of the hung parliament. Without doubt, this re-stamps the Labor brand. It is an alliance, not a coalition, as Tony Abbott claimed.

But for the first time, Labor and the Greens are governing partners. Their tentative embrace has an enduring justification – to defeat the Coalition. As Abbott said yesterday, the Greens had not been serious about negotiations with the Coalition.

The entire world knows this deal has only one objective: to build momentum to sway the independents into duplicating such an agreement and vote Labor into office. (source)

With the Greens pulling the levers of power, as we know they will, we will inevitably have an ETS or a carbon tax within the next parliament. We can only hope that the Labor brand is so damaged by their grubby deal with the Greens and the resulting lurch to the Left, that middle Australia will desert Labor in droves in 2013.

Here begins the Green nightmare for Australia.