Barbara Pocock on the Greens’ policy priorities

The Greens have heaped a lot of pressure on the government during this term, from issues of the environment, housing, and Medicare, to the war in the Middle East.

With the polls close to a dead heat and minority government appearing a real possibility, would the Greens push a minority Labor government even harder in pursuit of their agenda?

To talk about the Greens’ policies and prospects, we’re joined by South Australian Greens senator Barbara Pocock, who is the party’s spokeswoman on employment, the public sector and finance.

After their efforts in this term, Pocock says the Greens would be just as tough in pushing a possible Labor minority government next term:

People can judge us on our record in the last few years. People saw us really fight hard on housing – we wanted to see something meaningful. It is the most significant post-war crisis in housing that is affecting millions of Australians’ lives and certainly an intergenerational crisis.

So we held out for a long time to try and push Labor to improve its offering on public housing [and] on housing spending and we achieved some real wins there. We will fight hard for the things that matter.

We will push very hard on those core issues of a better health system, putting dental into Medicare. We pushed very hard on that in the last time there was a minority government and won it for kids. We want to see everyone be able to get to the dentist, and we really want to see reductions in student debt.

However, Pocock stresses that keeping Peter Dutton out of government remains a key focus:

We are very focused on preventing a Dutton Coalition government, because everything we hear from that stable sends a shiver down my spine.

Pocock did a lot of work during the Senate inquiry investigating consulting services and she warns Dutton’s policy to cut 36,000 public servants would lead to a return to consultants:

In that last year of the Morrison government, we saw a spend of $20 billion on consulting and labour hire and a hollowing out in the public sector. We are still seeing a slow regrowth of the capability of the federal public sector following the scandals relating to the consulting industry and the way it worked with government.

I am very worried about the Coalition’s proposals for a 36,000 cut in the public sector. That’s one in five public sector workers gone and that means services like Centrelink, Veterans Affairs, services that Australians depend on cannot deliver on what they suggest. And we also need to remember that a very significant number – something like two-thirds of our public service, federal public service – actually live outside Canberra.

All they would be doing is taking that money, which pays for public servants, doing a whole range of many different things and taking it across to, in many cases, their supporters and buddies and donors in the consulting and labour hire industry and it’s a very bad value-for-money proposition for the Australian voter.

As spokeswoman on employment, Pocock is a strong advocate for the Greens policies on a four-day work week:

If we go right back to 1856 when Australia led the world on reducing working hours, and the eight-hour day, now we were the first to adopt that internationally for stonemasons in Melbourne. And in the last 40 years, [we] have not seen any reduction in average working time. It’s been 38 hours now since 1983. In that 40 years, we’ve seen massive changes in technology. We have seen increases in productivity. And in the last 10 years, we’ve seen private profit increase by 97% while wages have gone up by 50%. And what we’re saying is, let’s look at the length of the average full-time working week and let’s see how we can move the dial on that.

We’d certainly like to see a wide range of pilots, diverse experimentation, real change, working with those who are ready for it, who are up for it, but making sure we collect the evidence and then move over time towards a national test case, which is the way in which over decades we have slowly ratcheted back the length of the working week.

On the attack from the opposition and others that the Greens are anti-Semitic, Pocock defends the Greens as an anti-racist party.

I think there are diverse views out there in the community and certainly, and we can see it every day, but I think that there are also many people, including many Jewish people, who understand that you can have a critique of a war that’s had such a terrible consequence for civilian women and children in Gaza, and you can still take a very strong position in relation to the kinds of attacks we’ve seen on the Jewish community, for example.

We are an anti-racist party. We want to call out behaviour which is wrong wherever it happens and we have certainly been critical of the behaviour of the Israeli state, their military, and the way they continue to conduct a war against the civilians in Gaza.