Forwarded from Ben Reid

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

The growth in the Green vote in Australia does pose important questions 
for the left. Arguably organisations like the DSP and Socialist Alliance 
may need to increase some forms of collaboration with potentials lefts 
within the greens.

However, a starting point surely is an honest appreciation why the DSP 
has had to organise separately outside of the Greens. The fact is the 
DSP was effectively excluded with the formation of national Green party 
in Australia. It was an act of political cynicism by the eladers of the 
Australian Greens out of fear that the presence of an organised left 
would alienate middle-class voters. That’ the bottom line.

I’ve seen some interesting attempts to apologise for and exonerate the 
Greens’ exclusion of the DSP from the national green party in 1991, but 
Painter and McCann’s posting of an appalling anonymous paper from their 
strange little secret seminar on the DSP takes the cake. The key 
paragraph is the following:

"With pressure to exclude the DSP coming from some key figures, mostly 
from other states, a delegated national meeting was held at the Sydney 
Earth Exchange in mid-1991 to discuss a possible national organisation. 
Agreement with proscription of other political parties was a 
prerequisite for attendance, although some DSP turned up anyway. Whilst 
being an excruciating meeting, held in a hot, noisy room, the main 
outcome was that further national meetings would require participating 
organisations to implement proscription.”

This national conference was organised in a top down way by a small and 
shadowy circle of Greens leaders such as Bob Brown and Drew Hutton to 
initaiate the process of forming a national Greens Party. It was the 
exclusion of DSP members from this initial meeting that made it 
inevitable to me at the time a primarily electoral Greens party would be 
established that would exclude any organised left currents.

At the time I was active in the DSP in Queensland and the Green Network. 
In the early part of 1991 the Network established a highly successful 
Green Alliance campaign in the Brisbane City Council elections. It was a 
model campaign of how a non-exclusionary alliance could function. It 
grouped the DSP, Drew Hutton (mayoral candidate), some Democrats, 
community activists and even the SPA!

It was a model campaign with a DSP member holding it all together as 
campaign director.

Then, less than a month later the usual delegation of DSP shows up to a 
Green Network meeting. It was stacked by over thirty of Hutton’s 
followers who voted to establish an Australian Greens working group. 
This was the prelude to the Queensland Greens and shut down the Greens.

I can still remember a comment from an exasperated secretary of the 
local Wilderness Society branch (an organisation that has often been 
quite hostile to the DSP) asked, “what has changed over the last month?” 
Hutton’s followers literally sneered in response.

The same story was repeated around the country in the lead-up to the 
national conference mentioned above. Attempts by the DSP to argue for a 
national-level version of the Brisbane experience were ignored by the 
main Greens leaders. The proscription was motivated by a desire to limit 
the influence of the left in a new and purely electoralist green party.

It was this experience that generated the deep-felt cynicism amongst DSP 
members about the Greens. It’s this cynicism that perhaps leads comrades 
to be a little wary of people like NSW Senator Kerry Nettle, despite her 
record as a campaigner.

So don’t you fucking tell me the DSP caused its own proscription from 
the Greens: I still feel the knives my back. Three years later the same 
incompentents helped elect a National party government in Queensland, so 
perhaps they did the DSP a favour!


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