Former PM and guy-who-is-defs-not-undermining-anyone Tony Abbott couldn’t wait a fucking day before hitting out against the suggestion his beloved Green Army conservation program might be axed, taking aim at the Coalition government’s new deal with the Greens.
After learning the campaign – which has been criticised as socially exploitative – may be radically overhauled or nixed completely in the next budget update, the former PM voiced his dismay on Facebook:
“Not only has [the Green Army] been good for grass roots conservation but it got unemployed people working too.”
“It’s a bad principle to axe your own policy for the Greens policy because it means that their priorities are more important than ours.”“That would hardly be a smart move for a centre-right government.”
As part of their backpacker tax deal with the Greens, the government will restore $100 million in funding to the farming and environmental management group Landcare.
And while Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull declined to confirm one way or the other, it looks like the investment will come at the expense of the Green Army, which was previously set to get by on some funds cut from Landcare.
While the Green Army has reportedly been responsible for planting roughly 2 million trees, ridding 90,000 hectares of weeds and, according to Landcare, replacing an ageing volunteer base with younger people, it has been criticised for exploiting poor people and for paying only half the minimum wage.
With Turnbull kind of screwed either way, and after the death of yet another one of Tone’s policies, the only person getting exactly what they want looks to be Green’s leader Richard Di Natale.
He’s obviously all about Landcare funding, and he hates the Green Army’s “punitive program for people down on their luck” with a bloody passion:
“We always opposed the green army.”“It was not an environmental program, it was an employment program and a bad one at that.”
Shit could get seriously wild soon. Check out Old Mate Tone’s full response below:
Source: The Guardian.
Photo: Carl Court / Getty.
