Seeing red over Green

POLITICS ... with Mungo MacCallum

Tony Abbott has a new mantra: Labor is in government, but the Greens are in power! Well, actually they’re not, and the fact that they have rather more influence than they are used to is entirely the Liberals’ fault; it was, after all, Liberal preferences that put the Green Adam Bandt and the ex-Green Andrew Wilkie into Parliament.

nd it is true that this sudden elevation has given the Greens delusions of grandeur; endorsed by none other than Mark Latham, they are all but serenading us with the Horst Wessel song, The Future Belongs to Me. Even some relatively sober commentators have suggested that Labor may never again by able to govern in its own right; the Greens will eat into the ALP vote to such an extent that they will inevitably end up as a permanent coalition partner. But hang on a minute; is the rise of the Greens either as spectacular or as irresistible as it currently appears? There are good reasons to doubt it.
The first question is whether the upsurge is based on a positive and lasting attraction to the party, or is simply a desperate, and possibly temporary, rejection of Labor.
There is no doubt that Labor is going through one of its most disillusioning periods at present, beset by factional apparatchiks and bereft of inspirational leadership. It is still (just) in government almost everywhere, but there is general agreement that this is due entirely to the awfulness of the alternatives, and the time is nigh when the voters will make the switch anyway.
In this political wilderness even the beige Bob Brown looks charismatic, a messiah leading a band of untainted idealists towards some largely undefined promised land.
As the federal election showed, few Labor supporters are prepared to desert the left entirely; the swing to the coalition was just 1.5 per cent, while the Greens gained 4.0 per cent. Importantly, Green preferences overwhelmingly favoured Labor, implying that most of the lost votes were simply borrowed. It is reasonable to suppose that many of them will be returned if and when Labor can get its act together, and a new and more appealing leader – a Whitlam, a Hawke, a Keating or even a pre-2010 Rudd – appears on the scene. And of course the deserting Labor voters may end up feeling very frustrated by their new minority status.
They are used to voting for a party which can provide the Prime Minister; the best the Greens can hope for in the foreseeable future is to become some kind of junior partner, in the same subservient role as the National Party is to the Liberals.
And even to achieve that dubious status they would need to accept a great many compromises to their platform and policies. The principal attraction of the Greens is their ideological purity.
But as Gough Whitlam memorably pointed out, the impotent are always pure. Is this a choice many Labor voters will really want to make? The history of third parties in Australia is not a happy one.
In the long term, Australians seem generally happy with the simple dichotomy: Labor or conservative. Splinter parties like the DLP and the Democrats seem to have a very limited shelf life, due largely to the fact that they lack a genuine mass following. I recall once suggesting to Gordon Barton, the millionaire founder of the Australia Part (the progenitor of the Democrats) that his child could not survive because it lacked a socio-economic base. Barton glared at me and replied: “I am its socio-economic base.” And for a while he was, and the truly charismatic Don Chipp left the Liberals to take over the political leadership and the Democrats seemed destined for bigger things.
Then the Greens effectively pushed them aside. The Greens come from a more secure base: the environment movement is a serious player. But it has never been very good at politics, and because it tends to attract zealots it always runs the risk of splitting into factions. Brown can’t last forever and the election of the hardliner Lee Rhiannon could signal trouble ahead.
Factionalism was the beginning of the end for the Democrats – the disagreement between Meg Lees and Natasha Stott-Despoya over whether to support the GST led to irrevocable breakdown, and the Democrats were, by and large, a less passionate bunch than the Greens. Only a party as large and well-established as the ALP can hope to survive serious splits and the Greens have a long way to go before reaching that kind of security.
The Greens are certainly on a roll and deserve congratulations for their performance last August. But this is not, as Winston Churchill might have put it, the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it just might be the end of the beginning. The Greens are definitely on the stage. Now we'll see if they can perform.

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Last week’s OECD report brought great comfort to the government – well, it would, wouldn’t it? It was largely the result of material provided by the Australian Treasury, whose advice the government has generally followed.
And the report endorsed the concept of the National Broadband Network, while suggesting there could be some problems with its implementation. The Australian’s hit squad predictably fell on this section like a pack of piranhas and berated the government for trying to have it both ways, for gleefully accepting the good bits of the report and rejecting the criticism.
Of course the correct thing to do is to ignore everything except the bits you agree with: oddly enough The Australian failed to notice the OECD’s recommendations to raise the mining tax, raise the dole to the unemployed, and get on with putting a price on carbon and an ETS.
And our national daily also rather overlooked the OECD’s unstinting praise of the government’s stimulus policy – including the Building Education Revolution.
Funny, that. Or tragic, depending on how you view consistency and ethics in journalism.