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The rise of the Greens

By Michael Pearce - posted Thursday, 21 July 2011


The rise of the Greens in contemporary Australian politics should not surprise anyone. It is the only major party, which in recent times has consistently articulated a coherent ideological position.

The major parties of the left and right have largely abandoned their ideological bearings. Labor has given itself over to focus group driven policies and is paying the political price for that. While the Liberal and National parties are enjoying some short-term political gains from merely opposing everything the Government proposes. However, signs are already emerging that this will not alone win them government.

The Greens have eschewed this politics of expediency and have prospered. There is an important lesson in this for the major parties, but they seem oblivious to it.

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Now the Greens hold the balance of power in the Senate and the support of the one Greens member in the House is vital to the minority Labor Government. The success or otherwise of this Labor-Greens cooperation will be very significant for the course of left-of-centre politics in Australia in coming years.

Cooperation between Labor and the Greens offers a corrective to the loss of electoral support for the Labor Party. This will only happen if the two parties can establish effective means of cooperation within the context of competing for the left-of-centre vote. Some early signs are promising but the real question is whether Labor can make the adjustments needed for such cooperation.

The Greens have already been largely instrumental in the formulation first of the broad policy and then of the detail of the carbon tax. Julia Gillard, having scuttled Kevin Rudd's ETS and then promised there would be no carbon tax, has been forced to adopt it as the price of Greens support.

This is precisely the sort of bold policy initiative that modern Labor appeared incapable of delivering. Left to its own devices it is almost certain Labor would not have introduced a carbon tax or any effective policy on climate change.

Gillard's prescription of waiting for bipartisan support on climate change was bound to continue the political deadlock and betrayed a telling lack of conviction. Thus, the Greens have injected some much needed policy resolve into the Government from which it stands to benefit politically if it has the nous.

The political heat the Government has taken over the carbon tax is entirely of its own making. The Rudd Government had widespread political support for action on climate change but squandered that support by failing to push through with the ETS via a double dissolution in early 2009.

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At the start of 2009 the Liberals were split down the middle over the ETS and had just elected a new leader by a one-vote majority who was widely regarded as unelectable. Rudd's position appeared impregnable. But instead of acting he hesitated. This created the space for Tony Abbot to capture the political initiative with his warnings about a great big new tax on everything. This in turn led to a fall in popular support for the ETS, which caused Rudd to abandon it in April 2009.

Rudd's failure to follow through on climate change when he had a clear mandate to do so produced within Labor the political calculation that such action was unpopular and would cost the Government electorally. Labor has thus come via its own political failings to equate effective action on climate change with political unpopularity.

Such unpopularity is not necessarily terminal. As Hawke showed with the capital gains tax and Howard with the GST, a Government can introduce an unpopular tax and survive.

Indeed, once the tax is bedded down, and people realise that its disadvantages have been overstated, the voters tend to reward a Government that has the courage of its convictions to introduce an unpopular tax.

If the Gillard Government can hold its nerve and see through the introduction of the carbon tax, this may be the making of it. If it then turns into a long term Government, it will owe that longevity to the Greens for requiring it to adopt a carbon tax as the price of support for a minority Government. Even if it does not last but it still manages to introduce the carbon tax it will at least have left a worthwhile legacy and will likewise owe that to the Greens.

Labor's debt to the Greens – whether or not it forms a long-term government - highlights its uncomfortable and unresolved relationship with the Greens. It feels under siege from the Greens in the inner cities of Sydney of Melbourne, and its natural instinct is to fight.

But, it must now rely on Greens support at the national level and the prospect of Labor-Greens coalitions is real at both the federal level and in some States, especially in Victoria and New South Wales. Tasmania is already governed by a Labor-Greens coalition and this could prove to be a significant laboratory for cooperation between the two parties.

Labor is still searching for a workable strategy to deal with the threat from the Greens. In Victoria many Labor traditionalists say the gloves should come off and the Greens should be resisted by all means possible.

This approach proved disastrous in the 2010 State election, which Labor lost by one seat. Labor devoted considerable resources to defending four inner city seats from challenges by the Greens, only to learn that this was unnecessary because the Liberals decided to preference Labor ahead the Greens in those seats, making them safe from the Greens challenge.

Had the resources devoted to the inner city seats been diverted to a couple of key marginal seats, like Bentleigh and Carrum, Labor probably would have held Government.

This is not being wise after the event. Had the Liberals preferenced the Greens ahead of Labor in the inner city, no doubt a couple of those seats would have gone to the Greens. But if Labor had held Bentleigh or Carrum it could, and almost certainly would, have formed a minority or coalition Government with Greens support.

Federal Labor made no such mistake: It abandoned Melbourne to defend the outer suburban seats, which it held and so held Government.

The contrasting strategies and results of the 2010 federal and Victorian elections hold an important lesson for Labor. It has more to gain by abandoning the inner city to the Greens than by fighting them there.

Labor strategists have been unable to find a pitch for the inner city electorates to dissuade significant numbers from defecting to the Greens. Strident Labor attacks on the Greens have only been counterproductive in the inner city. That sort of politics turns off the educated electorates there, and many traditional Labor supporters have gone over to the Greens because of such attacks.

The success in holding off the Greens challenges in Victoria in 2010 did not vindicate that strategy. That success was owed to the Liberal Party's decision to preference Labor ahead of the Greens and came at the cost of Government.

Many Greens members and supporters are former Labor people, overwhelmingly from the party's left and from its branches, rather than the trade unions. The broad church that is the Labor party embraces a large diversity of opinion, especially on social issues, with deep divisions on issues like abortion and gay marriage and on human rights issues like the treatment of asylum seekers.

The tensions created by these divisions are never very far from the surface. They destabilise the party and narrow its appeal. This is starkly evident on policy towards asylum seekers. Many on the left have abandoned Labor because they regard its policy as inhumane. But in the wider electorate the same policy is seen as soft and costs Labor votes.

If Labor were to abandon the inner city to the Greens and its left leaning supporters increasingly go over Greens, this could over the long term maximise the overall left-of-centre vote.

Labor would be free to adopt policies more in line with the social conservatism of the wider electorate and thus reduce internal party tensions and hold more mainstream votes. The Greens would be free to garner those votes unburdened by a right wing of social conservatism.

Internal Labor Party tensions would be replaced by tensions between the Greens and the Labor Party, which would emerge in coalition negotiations. The give and take of such negotiations ought to produce a better way of resolving the current policy issues that divide Labor internally and reduce its electoral appeal.

The prediction of long-term Labor-Green cooperation and coalition governments is based to a large extent on the recent history of Germany. There the Greens have largely replaced the Social Democrats as the party of the progressive left and the two parties have formed coalition governments at State and federal levels on many occasions.

Indeed, in the recent State election in Baden-Württemberg, the conservative Christian Democrats lost Government for the first time to be replaced by a Green-Social Democrat coalition in which the Greens are the senior partner and the Premier is from the Greens.

The German experience is not directly translatable to Australia. Public awareness of environmental issues is much greater there. The voting system, with proportional representation in the lower house, gives smaller parties more power.

Most importantly, the Greens as a political movement are far more advanced than their Australian counterparts. The German Greens have behind them a protracted period of internal division between the "Realos" (realistics) and the "Fundis" (fundamentalists). This internal debate was won by the Realos and freed the Greens to participate in the pragmatic business of forming coalition governments.

The Australian Greens may not need to undergo such an upheaval but there are bound to be internal tensions caused by the necessary compromises of power. The refusal by the Greens to engage in negotiation over Rudd's ETS, though it would not have guaranteed its implementation, nevertheless betrayed a lack of pragmatism.

Many Greens members and supporters fall more within the German "Fundi" camp and the compromises of power would inevitably create a lot of internal tensions. This is why the experience is Tasmania will be so important. The willingness of the Greens to make real compromises over the carbon tax, on such key matters such as the rate and compensation, does however bode well.

Labor too will be challenged by a future in which it depends on Greens support to form Government. If it cedes socially progressive policy to the Greens, it will find it even harder to distinguish itself from the Liberal Party.

Since the Hawke and Keating Governments abandoned traditional Labor policy of wealth redistribution and direct Government intervention in the economy, Labor has struggled to articulate a social democratic ideology for the 21st century.

The broad convergence of mainstream left and right on both economic and social policy has left both major parties struggling to define and distinguish themselves.

Being the more ideological of the major parties, Labor has suffered more from this convergence than the Liberals. If the business of Government is seen as largely managerial, Labor will struggle to compete.

The Greens are not challenged ideologically in this way. They know what they are on about. Perhaps surprisingly, the prospect of future Labor-Greens cooperation might therefore depend more on adjustments within the Labor Party than the Greens.

Labor must first sort itself out ideologically and articulate a social democratic view for the 21st century. Then it must accommodate itself to the reality that the Greens will outperform it in the inner cities and likely win seats from it there. It must learn to cooperate with the Greens, though still competing with them to some extent in the wider electorate.

If Labor can make these adjustments, then there will be a real prospect that left-of-centre politics can still compete with the right in Australia. But if it cannot, the outlook for the left is not rosy. The big imponderable is whether Labor has the political smarts to do this. Its recent performance in Government is not encouraging.

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About the Author

Michael Pearce, SC, is the immediate past President of Liberty Victoria. He practises in most areas of commercial law especially trade practices, contract , company and property law, as well as equity and constitutional law.

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