I think you’ve got a mistaken memory here.

The Greens blocked passage of Kevin Rudd’s CPRS in 2009. This is before the minority Gillard Government. And the reason they did it is because Rudd’s policy wasn’t “good even if it’s not perfect”. It was terrible. Independent Treasury modelling said it would have no beneficial effect for 25 years. Even now, so far on, we’d have more than a decade left before it even began to improve anything. Rudd, it is quite well known, was an incredibly egotistical man, and this policy shows it perfectly. He would rather risk throwing out his entire Government than be seen to negotiate with the Senate in a democratic manner.

Then Gillard came along and we got the minority Government aided by the Greens and independents. Gillard was an impeccable politician. Very well-liked among her colleagues, something Rudd could not claim. And very willing to work with others in order to arrive at a better end result. She negotiated with the Greens and the cross-bench to pass the Clean Energy Act, among other policies. The CEA was an incredible, world-leading effective climate policy. We actually saw pollution go down while it was in effect. It worked using what economists recommended as best practice climate policy: a short fixed-price period leading in to an emissions trading scheme. This was falsely characterised by the right-wing media and the LNP as a “carbon tax”, and Labor did a very poor job of even attempting to correct the lies.

And so Abbott got in and undid all that excellent work. But that was Abbott. Abbott, the right-wing media who supported him, and the voters who fell for those lies are the ones to blame for our infection on climate. The Greens were a big part of the reason we even had good policy in the first place, they are not at fault for its removal.

Additionally, outside of climate policy, the Gillard Government was far from disastrous in a very real sense. They demonstrably did not hold up Labor’s legislative agenda. Because that was a time period where we saw enormous amounts of bills get passed. More than any Prime Minister before her, on a per-day basis. That’s just a simple objective fact.

Subjectively, it was also very good on the quality of legislation passed. The environment policy above has already been covered, but that time period is also when we introduced the NDIS. It’s when the actual Bill to legislate for the NBN got passed. It brought in changes to Howard’s school chaplaincy to require the chaplains have specific relevant qualifications and allow the hiring of secular roles in this function. Plain cigarette packaging. And more.

Be careful not to blindly repeat the misinformation that serves the LNP’s best interests. It simply does not hold up to scrutiny.