Labor’s shift to the right has opened political space on its left. If the Greens seriously want to become an alternative party of government, they must take votes from Labor, professionalise and build a much broader political movement.
The new aspiration of the Greens to be seen as an alternative party of government, rather than as a left-wing prod on the Labor Party flank, is a worthy one, capable over time of being realised. It’s not inevitable. It requires reorientation of the Greens, at both parliamentary and organisational level, and more unity of purpose and policy development. But its future cannot be defined by a sneering Labor Party. It would involve a new working relationship or set of bargains around the achievement of Labor’s agenda. And as well, a Greens agenda. Labor itself should consider an entirely different approach.
The attractive point about the Greens for potential supporters is continuing policy idealism and purity of heart, particularly on a few key issues such as the environment, human rights, immigration and open, honest government. Its adherence to such principles has seen it labelled a mere party of protest, impractical and a party prepared to make the perfect the enemy of the good.
Anthony Albanese, whose electorate is in a natural Green heartland, is particularly fond of finding points of difference with the Greens. He paints himself as the one whose fierce practicality pushes him to follow his head rather than his heart when jobs are at risk, or, as he would put it, when ideology has gone mad. All too often, however, his arguments have been mere rationalisations for often shameless retreats from principle, and from the evidence in front of his eyes.
Albanese has shifted his party sharply to the right in pursuit of his aim of making Labor “the natural party of government”. Doing so is helping to squeeze the Coalition between Labor and Pauline Hanson’s One Nation party. Not coincidentally, his policy shifts have made Labor more attractive to an array of fundamentally anti-Labor vested interests and put Labor in their thrall. Mates, cronies, party donors, lobbyists and insiders work to the disadvantage of the interests of the constituencies he has pretended to champion. Albanese knows this but thinks he can get away with it.
Those fashioning the pitch for the Greens as a party of wider influence would argue that Albanese and Labor can no longer be seen to be a progressive party, or a socially democratic one. Labor’s internal administrative structures have atrophied, to the benefit of party insiders, who have always included Albanese himself. The party conference is about as responsible to or responsive to a wider Labor membership as the Chinese Communist Party. As in China, party meetings are stage-managed to predetermined conclusions.
Is this an Albanese Liberal government, or a Labor one?
Many of Labor’s old constituents see the broad policies of the Albanese government as being in no significant way different from those of the coalition parties which preceded it. It has become at least as deceitful and dishonest about sincere action on climate change. It is now the party of big coal and big gas. Nearly always, more frequently under present environment management, the interests of the fossil fuels industry, and their subsidiary the West Australian government, will be preferred over environmental, heritage or Aboriginal interests. That the handmaiden of this surrender is the environment minister sharpens the raised digit to the Greens and Australians who care.
Greens wanting to be regarded as an alternative party of government must wrench votes from Labor, and by sharp criticism and differentiation. They must want to become the main player in a governing coalition, or to knock Labor out of the ring altogether. The latter might seem an impossible goal, but the fate of the Liberals, and probably soon too, the National Party, provides an Australian example of how quickly circumstances can change.
Elsewhere around the world, old mainstream parties of the centre-left and centre-right are collapsing. Demagogues such as Trump have captured their parties. The rise of One Nation (or, in Britain, Reform) has been caused by real public disgust at the ways of modern political parties and their remoteness from the actual experience of citizens. That disgust has also been sharpened by the way that mainstream parties have ignored the economic and social pressures caused by falling standards of living, flattening wages and rising costs.
Labor may congratulate itself that most of the ire of the One Nation phenomenon is directed towards the coalition. But it has no grounds for complacency. Nor should it fear only an attack from its front, thinking that Greens voters, and other critics of Labor, will temper their criticism if Labor survival is at stake. Greens and independents share the general disgust, if not the weakness for populist solutions, slogans and mere complaint.
Nor has Labor, on its record, any reason for seeing strident criticism from within as some sort of undeserved betrayal. The Albanese government deserves no leave pass. Nor anything like a pass mark for generally good conduct. It is not a model of good government, of effective government or efficient government. It has become the problem.
Good intentions, or the pressure of unexpected events, cannot excuse bad performance
Insiders and intimates of ministers get secretive deals and jobs, some of which involve a major corruption of principles of open, transparent and accountable government. Labor does not even have open debate within its caucuses, because the two senior faction leaders, Albanese and Richard Marles, play the politics of reward and punishment, and the allocation of jobs, not by merit but by loyalty and silence.
Labor does not consult with or listen to the wider population or to Labor constituencies in the poorer half of the community. Rather, it is a classical crony government, in many respects worse than the Morrison government, governing for its mates, its donors and itself. It treats public money and things as spoils to be distributed among its own. It listens primarily to vested interests paying for their access.
Labor has consciously nobbled many of the watchdogs and anti-corruption agencies. Indeed, Labor has attempted to completely strangle freedom of information (FOI) and might have succeeded had it not been for Green and independent outrage. It was entirely typical that the efforts to shut down open government were led by an attorney-general and her department. These were once the guardians of openness and integrity in administration.
Labor policies and practices on immigration neither follow the party’s own policies nor the nation’s broad economic interests, but are a reprehensible piece of pandering to manufactured One Nation panic. This has not been an occasion in which the party, perhaps reluctantly, switches to accommodate vagaries of public opinion. Labor’s policies damage the nation economically, morally, socially and culturally. They sabotage its capacity to achieve what it has proclaimed as a key government objective, dealing with the housing crisis. That public opinion has changed about immigration is not in doubt, as successive opinion polls show. But that has been as much a consequence of Labor’s complete failure to defend entirely defensible policies, and its unwillingness to confront the racist edge of 30 years of Pauline Hanson campaigning. Indeed, the home affairs minister, Tony Burke, who is occasionally promoted as a potential Labor leader, seems to have been the author of most of Labor’s moral panic. He was slightly held back only by a few ministers appalled at the impression his original plans would have given to traditional Labor voters, including, once, traditional Labor voters now aligned with the Greens.
Labor has lost its engine room of ideas and has become a mere ‘brand’ and plaything for ambitious agnostics
Albanese would remember well that Labor’s traditional grassroots Left abandoned Labor in disgust over Kim Beazley’s gutlessness and lack of ticker with the Tampa crisis of 2001. Repeated studies by Labor itself show that virtually none of the ALP members who left then have ever returned to party membership or even given their first preference to Labor again. The Greens were originally a party united primarily around the need for action on climate change. After Tampa, the Greens broadened their stance on issues. Their intellectual heft was greatly benefited by defections from Labor ranks. The old Labor left – the part that has gone – had always been the main engine room of Labor party ideas and policy. The loss has not been replaced, least of all by those who use phrases such as ‘left’ and ‘Hard Left’ and do the bidding of the Marles Right.
The dearth of fresh ideas has been made up from well-paid battalions of ‘suits’, pollsters, marketing folk, ministerial advisers and others thinking that the party is but a brand, and that winning elections is a matter of media tactics and slogans rather than a contract with the community. The new whizz kids have no investment in the party’s mission. Many move swiftly to representing big business, prostituting their inside knowledge, experience and access to Labor’s detriment. Checks and balances have disappeared and the vacuum is obvious, from the top down.
A party under assault from its left is, of course, rather more likely to consider the party’s defence policy, its relationship with the United States, and the subservient image Australia has in Asia, or elsewhere around the world. It is by no means certain that the Greens leader’s views on justice for Palestinians, and the need for a thorough accounting for Israel’s actions in Gaza, are out of kilter with Australian, or world, opinion. Albanese, Richard Marles and the foreign minister, Penny Wong, have had it all too easy in their failures to explain and to sell their policy of never offending the US, of appeasing Israeli leaders, and of failing to stand by friends such as Canada and Ukraine, who have fallen foul of Trump, or to aggressively defend Australia’s interests in relation to Trump’s tariff policies. One cannot see an Albanese pledging to “pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and success of liberty.”
The Greens’ task is to persuade disappointed Labor voters that a vote for the Greens is a safe alternative. And not just as a protest vote followed by a Labor preference. It must aim to force the opinions and the policies of the Greens into the councils of government. This is an entirely different ambition from aspiring to put Labor over the line into government, or, once there, to seek to extract as many concessions from a Labor government, in concert with independents, as possible. In practical terms, it would probably require the Greens to double their existing vote, bringing them to virtual parity with Labor.
The Greens must become a mass party and a more professional one. But they should not imitate any of the existing Australian mass party models
The Greens cannot progress to being a potential party of government without becoming a mass party, properly accountable to its membership, and thoroughly professionalised in its systems of policy formation, internal democracy and debate. It must take the party from being a sort of club or voluntary association around common aims, into a disciplined and united team, able to operate effectively at electorate level.
The experience of the teals in breaking into House of Representatives politics would suggest that the Greens would have to enlist hundreds of volunteers and local campaign budgets of up to $1 million in winnable seats. The Greens would have to move further afield from inner-city seats of the sort they have (sometimes) won before into wider electorates. Ones where they could make an impact such as on immigration.
It is of course true that I am advocating the Greens becoming a mass party at just a time when the idea that the major parties are democratic is becoming a farce. The power of memberships, and the number of them, have collapsed to the point that total Australian party membership is significantly less than 200,000, most members in all parties aged 60 or more. Likewise, One Nation, rather like Reform in the UK, is a commercial franchise wholly owned and operated by Pauline Hanson for her own ends, not her party’s. Why would the Greens want to imitate any of these models?
First, they should not be copying the dregs of existing systems, but creating new vehicles for public participation in the public square. The collapse of old systems is partly responsible for the loss of faith in existing parties. Perhaps formal membership itself is not as important, in an internet and communications age, as finding ways to identify and account to like-minded people, regularly consulted through accountable processes.
Nor is it necessary that the Greens copy the Labor model of binding every member by a caucus majority-rules approach. A party can be formed around common themes without having to have a position on every possible policy likely to come before the parliament. Elected members could, for example, have common views on broad economic management, on environmental and climate change matters, on defence and foreign policy, on human rights and on principles of sound, open government. But each could have their own views, and campaign for office, on their ideas about gender questions, transport policy and disability services.
An ambitious and aggressive Greens party should not be focused on motherhood issues. Each word in its platform should mean something, and each, generally, should be a spear pointed at the heart of another party, particularly Labor. Who knows? Well-directed policy may even lead Labor to reform itself, including by bringing back those it left on the wayside. That would not necessarily be a disaster for the existing Greens, or for Australia. At least, that is, if a reformed party integrated into itself the ideas, the ideals, the energy and the enthusiasm Labor and its current leadership have forfeited.
Republished from The Canberra Times
John Waterford AM, better known as Jack Waterford, is an Australian journalist and commentator.