I think I might have been the only person in Italy following the Tasmanian state election. That’s certainly nothing to brag about; it was very missable.

Another hung parliament and another power scramble – much to the glee of the Greens.

Especially gleeful at the prospect of a Labor/Green alliance was the leader of the Tasmanian Greens, Rosalie Woodruff, who has been re-elected in her Franklin seat.

In her election night speech, she delivered an enthusiastic ‘Welcome to Country’ including condemnation of colonial Australia, its government, and its occupation of stolen lands. Then she moved on to the most pressing topic on the little island state: Gaza.

Woodruff immediately used the podium to call the conflict a ‘genocide’ and emphasise the Greens’ unwavering support for Palestine.

As I sipped espresso on my couch in Verona, I found myself checking the chyron to see whether I was still watching the Tasmanian state election or if I had inadvertently switched over to Al Jazeera.

Then I started to ponder, ‘What did Hamas leader, Ismail Haniyeh have to say about Tasmania after he was elected?’

During the opening of Parliament, Senator Mehreen Faruqi continued The Greens’ agenda with a bizarre, attention-grabbing protest, calling for sanctions against Israel. While she herself risked sanctions in the senate, undoubtedly, she will be celebrated by her green comrades.

Here in Italy, I have questioned why bars fly their football teams’ flag, sure you’ll get a few like-minded customers in the door; but what about supporters of the other 19 teams? Sometimes, a little diplomatic abstention can be useful.

But this is the sort of social signalling that the extreme-Left has come to require, the kind that Greens co-founder Drew Hutton didn’t manage to keep up with before getting the boot.

Expelled, not for something he said, but for refusing to remove alleged ‘transphobic comments’ made by others on his Facebook page. Hutton was a martyr for freedom of speech.

He could no longer recognise the environmental party that he founded with Bob Brown, describing it as ‘aggressive and authoritarian’.

Nonetheless, Hutton is out. And the Greens have chosen the hill they want to die on – a Gazan-transgender hill. It’s an unusual political alignment and again, I find myself pondering. What is the official Hamas position on trans rights? Or the position of their benefactor, Iran? Do the Iranian Morality Police refer to them as ‘pregnant women’ or ‘pregnant persons’?

Back in Italy, The Federazioni dei Verdi (Greens alliance) experienced a similar internal kerfuffle.

They tore themselves apart a few years ago, as their environmental agenda was completely overshadowed by authoritarian moralism and anti-capitalism.

They championed meat-bans in schools, or banning people from driving their older diesel cars, people who obviously can’t afford a 30-thousand-euro electric Fiat.

The party completely alienated themselves amongst voters, before biodegrading entirely, and receiving less than one per cent of the vote.

In rural Italy, much like rural Australia, the Green-vote is almost absent. Rural Italians call them ‘communisti’ and add a few other adjectives that don’t need to be repeated here.

The same is the case in Germany, where the greens do well with the bourgeois in Berlin cafes, but saw their vote collapse from over 20 per cent to just 12 per cent in the last European elections. Disillusioned voters cast them out because of their obsession with gender ideology in schools, moral policing of language, and an unsustainable, open-door immigration policy.

So, greens everywhere have fallen off the cliff on the far left. But why does conservation have to be completely absent on the conservative side of politics? Can we not protect our life-giving rivers and forests, without being Marxist hippies?

One of the greatest conservationists of all time was a Republican – Teddy Roosevelt. He built the US National Park System, which a century later finds itself on the DOGE chopping block.

The absence of level-headed, centre-left, conservationists like Drew Hutton or Bob Brown in the greens, leaves them on a slippery, algal green slope to the extreme, fascist left. An ideological echo chamber where freedom of speech and the party’s core issue have been forgotten.

Tasmania is the perfect place, with vast and incredible wilderness, to demonstrate that there is fantastic fiscal value in the preservation and promotion of Tasmania’s incredible natural assets.

The Franklin River that Bob Brown saved from damming is still a pristine tourist destination 40 years later.

But today The Greens are dying on a hill of identity politics and performative virtue while the right hill is burning ferociously behind them.

Europe just experienced its hottest June ever and August is set to be hotter.

Deforestation isn’t slowing down and climate change is set to be the biggest expense in capitalist history – bankrupting nations.

It might be too late to save the Greens; they seem poised to go the way of their European counterparts. But they will leave a hole on the Australian political spectrum. Who can we vote for if we love green spaces but don’t have green hair?