With the Coalition in decline, Labor cautious and One Nation on the rise, the Greens need to move beyond issue-based advocacy and present a comprehensive alternative capable of winning government.
Recently economist Steven Hail commented on why Modern Money Theory (MMT) is influencing the Greens in Britain, whose political fortunes are rising, but the Greens in Australia have shown little interest, despite many attempts to explain MMT.
Hail suggested that the Australian Greens do not want to have to contend with the hostile attacks they would cop from the the political mainstream and the media, particularly the Murdoch media. This would imply that the Greens think their energy and political capital are better spent on the environmental and social causes they do champion.
This tactic, or whatever tactic the Greens are actually pursuing, sees them perceived or portrayed as a fringe party. They are not widely perceived as a potential party of government, and their share of first-preference votes, nationally, never seems to rise past 10-12 per cent. They give some signs of wishing to gain more traction, but have not seemed willing to step whole-heartedly into the main game.
This raises the question: if not now, when? When might the Greens step up to the main game in Australian politics?
English Green Party leader Zack Polanski has told the Australian Greens they need to connect with and acknowledge the anger of battlers who feel ignored by the old politics. If they feel heard, many resentful voters might then be more open to the Greens agenda.
This call echoes the approach of Bernie Sanders in the United States, who appealed directly to resentful battlers and offered them real solutions. If the old guard of the US Democrats had not undermined Sanders, he might well have beaten Trump the first time around, and the world would be a different place.
So here we are: the Liberal Party has collapsed dramatically, perhaps terminally. The National Party is threatened by its own ambiguity: is it a farmers’ party or a miners’ party? Both are threatened by the dramatic, if fragile, rise of Pauline Hanson’s One Nation party. The Australian Labor Party has a large number of seats but a low primary vote that leaves it vulnerable, and now One Nation has surpassed Labor in polls.
In any case Labor resolutely avoids acting on most of the urgent issues confronting us in a rapidly changing world. It is far from clear that it has the wit and will to resist the surge to One Nation.
Globally, so-called populist right-wing parties have seized power or are threatening to seize power in many countries. They not only pursue regressive policies, they threaten democratic systems, most obviously in the United States of America.
Their promise is of repression and exploitation that will accelerate the global collapse wrought by multiple global crises such as inequality, global warming, chemical and plastic pollution, shortage of fresh water and so on. These crises are not distant, they are imminent or already happening.
So how bad do things have to get before the Australian Greens decide that the risks of their present course of limited action, which is unlikely to deflect us from catastrophe, outweigh the risks of stepping up and mounting a full-spectrum campaign for the votes of all Australians?
Already the prospect is for a substantially diminished world for our grandchildren. Even if, by some miracle, the human world decides to slow and reverse its assault on the climate system, and if the climate system does not tip into runaway warming, a great deal of damage will be done before the planet’s prolonged recovery is complete. Long-lived pollution, the blind rush into developing AI, the threat of nuclear war, and other crises all diminish humanity’s prospects.
The community independents have already shown they can step out of the old politics-as-usual. The Greens, to give credit where it is due, pursue some of the same community-based campaigning, though they are less bottom-up than the community independents. Independent Senator David Pocock seems to be the most willing to stick his head up on important issues, but he can’t fight these battles on his own.
What comprises the main game, and how would progressives play it? Both the economy and our international relations need thorough revamping, and the values guiding policy need to prominently include compassion.
Pauline Hanson prospers on resentment, and the biggest resentment is inequality. Battling punters can see the rich creaming off more than their share. An early remedy would be to increase the minimum wage dramatically, say by fifty percent. This would actually stimulate the economy because battlers spend their money on what they need now, whereas the rich just bid up asset prices. The 2021 nobel prize was awarded for demonstrating this in the real world. The government could return to directly providing services as it used to, because privatisation has generally failed – financial incentives for private companies are commonly not well aligned with what we need, as the aged care debacle has demonstrated. Both moves would greatly benefit battlers.
The housing price bubble is a major social crisis. The government is at last acting to remove tax incentives to treat housing as an investment instead of a home, but another change is also required. The ability of private banks to issue loans needs to be regulated, again, so that the price spiral does not simply continue, fed by ever-larger loans. Bank lending used to be regulated in Menzies’ day, it was called a credit squeeze.
We need to properly tax gas and other natural resources. We need to extract ourselves from the US entanglement: end AUKUS, stop following the US into disastrously counter-productive wars, and pursue Sam Roggeveen’s echidna strategy of making us unthreatening at a distance but very prickly up close. Immigration could be brought back to the 70,000 per year it used to be, or less: Jane O’Sullivan calculated a decade ago that each new person costs our society around half a million dollars. Immigrants should be welcomed, but we can’t handle too many at once.
These changes would be just a beginning. The transition to clean energy needs to be dramatically sped up, many climate adaptation changes are already needed, and so on.
The Greens were founded to defend the health of the non-human environment. They expanded their scope to include the health of our society. The great crises confronting us threaten both society and the planetary environment. If they want to remain relevant to those causes they need to lift their sights and lift their game.
Dr. Geoff Davies is an author, commentator and scientist. He is the author of A New Australia: Discarding Delusions and Organising for the Wellbeing of All (2023, https://betternaturebooks.net/my-books/regenoz/). He blogs at Thrival Economics https://thrivaleconomics.blog/.