Lee Rhiannon

I think s- the, the new leader Shoebridge is pretty extreme.

He says that his mentor was the, uh, pro-Russian, um, Lee Rhiannon.

Um, Faruqi, well, and she's proof of the, the fact, uh, of, of what I'm talking about.

And, uh, they're, they're just a bunch of rat bags, but they still get more than 12% of the vote, so we've got a lot of explaining to young people why, uh, they're not in the Australian national interest, Bronwyn.

But the problem with the Greens, Jack, as we know, is that the New South Wales branch and their state branches of the party that come together nationally, there's no real national body, administrative body, but the new south wales party uh version of the grains tends to be more extreme uh it tends to move away from environmental issues and into political ones shoebridge is constantly obsessed about foreign policy which he will make a zero contribution whether he's green's leader or not um as opposed to, let's say, more sensible environmental-based greens like the Tasmanians, West Australians and Sarah Hansen-Young in South Australia.

Well, Lee Rhiannon was a kind of a Muscovite even amongst the hard left in Australia.

Yeah, she's a Stalinist.

Yeah, she's a Stalinist.

I think it's important to know that David Shoebridge and Mehreen Faruqi have a bit of bad blood, and that goes all the way back to when Mehreen Faruqi was coming into Parliament.

So when she, um, ran for the ticket, she beat out Lee Rhiannon, and she was, I guess, a ally or a supporter of David Shoebridge.

They were quite aligned.

So there's always been a bit of a tension between those two.

Because I, I feel like this-

I feel like since the Lee Rhiannon, like, ousting-

I was gonna say, like, yeah, this-

... there's not that much

... that's gone on

... like, the...

I was, I was gonna bring up the Lee Rhiannon thing.

Like, that-

So I think in terms of the politics of that party room that you need to understand, you've got to understand the history of the people inside it.

Senator Faruqi came into Parliament by tearing down Lee Rhiannon, the decapitation strategy in terms of a pre-selection.

And Lee Rhiannon, for people who remember, was very hard left, very much associated with David Shoebridge.

So there's this sort of relationship there.

So Senator Faruqi and Senator Shoebridge have never really gotten on.

But post this decision to install him over her, it's not clear to me that they've spoken and it's fascinating to me...

They haven't spoken.

..that she seems as isolated now as Lee Rhiannon was a decade ago when she tore her down.

I mean, this guy, this guy's in the angry extreme left.

He was part of the Lee Rhiannon faction in the New South Wales Greens.

That's right.

So he's hard left.