Labor elder Kim Carr warns party against deals with the Greens

Minority government may be beckoning but one Labor elder has warned his party must not do deals with the Greens, which only wants to force it into positions that will damage its traditional base.

Labor stalwart Kim Carr said if his party wanted to avoid a minority parliament, it needed to be bolder and better communicators.

The former minister says Labor must never forget the Greens’ ultimate aim is to replace Labor, not work with it.

“Minority government beckons. It’s not inevitable, but you’d have to say the risk was, at the moment, very high,” Mr Carr warned in an exclusive interview marking the release of his memoir, A Long March, with Monash University Publishing.

He said the Queensland election result underscored his point about Labor having lost the trust of its traditional constituency in outer suburban and blue-collar areas.

Voters swung harder towards the Liberal National Party in the State election the further out from inner-city Brisbane they lived.

“The boldness of policy pronouncements towards the end clearly resonated but, ironically, they resonated in the inner cities, reinforcing the view that the Labor Party has become identified with the inner cities,” Mr Carr said.

But in appealing to inner city voters and alienating those in outer suburban areas, Labor had also found itself under attack from the Greens on the left as well as its traditional conservative foes.

There was a “love-hate relationship” with the minority party but Labor should always be wary.

“It’s got to be understood that the Greens are not there as allies of Labor, they’re there to replace Labor,” Mr Carr said.

“If the circumstance arises that we don’t sustain majority government, we have to find some mechanism to deal with a potential Green (agenda).

“The Greens will be asking Labor to do things they don’t want to do and the historic pattern has been that that has led, led to quite negative outcomes ... That’s why I’m saying we’ve got to do everything we can to avoid minority government.”

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has repeatedly ruled out making any formal coalition agreement with the Greens and insisted his eyes on continuing a majority government.

But the polls have been sliding downwards for months, pointing to a minority outcome.

Labor’s primary vote is sitting below the historical low of the 2022 election, according to Newspoll, Resolve and Freshwater polling.

Mr Carr — who has been an ALP member for nearly 50 years and retired from the Senate in 2022 — said the party had to wear its portion of the blame for the broader collapse of trust in the political system that had sent people looking outside the major parties.

His book extensively covers the leadership ructions of the Rudd-Gillard era and Mr Albanese’s efforts to take on the mantle of opposition leader and ultimately prime minister.

The party has allowed “personal ambition to override our commitments to the public and to the movement”, he writes, lamenting that too much politics is transactional in the modern era.

The federal government should relish a battle over industrial relations at the coming election, due to be held by May, as a way to show it had not forgotten traditional labour concerns.

“We need to be more conscious of our capacity to represent the outer suburbs and rural cities,” he told The West.

“And if they think they’re taken for granted, then you can’t assume they won’t vote conservative.”