[Marxism] Australian Greens

["Ozleft" <ozleft@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

These two articles from this morning's Murdoch-owned national daily, The
Australian, reflect mounting ruling class concern about the influence of the
Greens, and the re-emergence of an effective left in Australian
parliamentary and mass politics.

Having spend decades stamping on the Labor-trade union left, ruling class
propagandists (and The Australian is run by very conscious ruling class
propagandists) are turning their attention to the Greens. The red-baiting in
these articles is probably a taste of things to come.

There are also some (greatly overstated)  references to the SWP/DSP's early
entry into, and political impact on, the Greens, which was defeated in the
mid-1990s.

Ed Lewis


The Australian

The Greens machine

By Jamie Walker

December 27, 2003

Michael Field vividly remembers the day he was out and about, on the
hustings somewhere, when Bob Brown's election jingle crackled across the car
radio: "Go, go the Greens for government."

Eleven years on, the former Tasmanian Labor premier can still belt out his
private response. "Go to buggery," he chortles.

There's no shortage of people in Australian politics who would like to tell
Brown and his party to do precisely that. Don't hold your breath, though.
Field wouldn't - couldn't - during the three fraught years he spent
governing in accord with the Australian Greens. His counterparts today are
equally wary of their growing strength.

The Greens doubled their vote at the last federal election in 2001, albeit
off a low base. Since then, their national membership has doubled as well.
Seventeen of them have been elected to various parliaments. Federally, there
are Brown and Kerry Nettle in the Senate, and the breakthrough figure of
Michael Organ in the House of Representatives. Greens also sit in the
legislatures of Tasmania, Western Australia, NSW and the ACT; Melbourne's
Yarra City Council has a Greens mayor.

Further gains are likely in the Senate at next year's federal election,
almost certainly at the expense of the deeply troubled Australian Democrats.

But as the long, languid days of summer count down to campaign season, acute
questions will be asked of the Greens and the still unknown quantity of
their national leadership.

As The Australian revealed this week, Brown's mettle is being tested by the
internecine warfare that has broken out in Queensland, throwing the division
into chaos on the brink of a state election that will be seen as a signpost
to the Greens' federal prospects.

Whatever their veracity, the accusations of lead Senate candidate Drew
Hutton making cosy preference deals with Labor will reinforce longstanding
concerns about the Greens being a front for unacknowledged political
interests.

Much will depend on whether John Howard pulls the trigger for a
double-dissolution election, boosting the Greens' still strong chances of
lifting their numbers in the Senate to five or above. This would deliver
them the added resources of recognised party status and confirm they had
supplanted the Democrats as the third force in Australian politics.

Field can only shake his head at the prospect. His searing experience in
minority government in Tasmania from 1989 to 1992 makes him deeply
suspicious of Brown, the Greens and their collective modus operandi. The
episode is worth revisiting because it offers the only worthwhile guide as
to how the Australian Greens exercise political power.

Back then, the Liberals had 17 seats to Labor's 13 in Tasmania's 35-place
House of Assembly. The Greens, with five MPs, agreed to support Field in an
accord, giving them a say in executive decision-making but without the red
leather accoutrements of cabinet posts.

To this day, neither side can agree why it all fell apart. Brown still
trumpets the achievements of what he calls "the most brilliant period of
government since World War II". The Greens, he says, established their
economic credentials by supporting a succession of tough Labor budgets while
securing a doubling of the southwest Tasmanian World Heritage wilderness.

Freedom of information legislation was introduced and a plan to close state
schools shelved in the face of trenchant Greens-led opposition. Says Brown:
"Our process then, as it is now, was to say to both Labor and Liberal, you
bring up your programs, we'll produce ours, and then we'll negotiate."

Negotiate? With the Greens? Field says that's not how he remembers the
accord working. "It was like playing poker against somebody who would never
put his cards on the table," Field says of his dealings with Brown. The
crunch came when Labor abandoned an agreed limit to the woodchipping of
native forests and introduced resource security legislation beneficial to
leading logging companies. Field says it was a question of priorities: in
the teeth of the worst recession since the Great Depression, people and jobs
had to come first.

In the event, Labor walked away from the accord and was trounced at the 1992
election. The Greens might have talked about going for government, but they
settled for supporting the new Liberal administration, albeit without a
written accord. Field is scathing, even now, of the Greens' conduct. "We
would be left carrying the responsibility and they would just feel free to
attack us whenever they liked," he says. "You couldn't argue back, not
publicly, because that would have destablised the government. From my point
of view, it became intolerable."

Brown says he wouldn't change a thing. If anyone was at fault it was Labor;
it broke the accord and paid the price at the polls. Brown is smiling in his
thin-lipped way, just as Field does when he talks about what he wanted to
say to the Greens all those years ago. "Don't they just hate it!" Brown
exclaims, slapping a thigh for effect. "Don't they just hate having to work
with us."

Brown would hate this. Truly, deeply loathe it. But there are some in
Australian politics who equate his Greens with Pauline Hanson's One Nation,
a party they regard as their antithesis in almost every way imaginable.

Greg Barns, the former Liberal ministerial adviser who went on to head the
Australian Republican Movement and was later controversially disendorsed as
a Liberal candidate over his criticism of the Government's hardline policy
on asylum-seekers (shades of Hanson circa 1996), says the Greens and One
Nation stand for similar things, though they practise their politics very
differently.

Both, he says, are anti-globalisation and broadly anti big end of town. Each
seeks to attract the protest vote, the Greens principally from disillusioned
Labor and Democrats supporters on the Left, One Nation from disgruntled
traditionalists on the Right, among them blue-collar ALP supporters. Barns
argues that the Greens have been allowed to skate through with relatively
little scrutiny of where they've come from and where they're going.

"They are a party that has been able to get by with putting very little meat
on the bones," he says. Perhaps; compared with the blowtorch the media has
applied to One Nation at times, the Greens do appear to have had a much
easier time of it.

Brown's canny leadership has clearly been a factor in this. As Barns points
out, he is far more of a political insider than Hanson was.

Brown probably wouldn't appreciate that, either. He says the fundamental
error made by the commentariat is to measure the Greens against the
yardstick of conventional political values.

"We are a national alternative to the economic fundamentalism of the big
parties," he says. "And there is a mistake at the outset by many observers
who say, 'Well, the Greens are in some way or another there to tackle the
big parties.' We are not. We are there to replace them."

It's easy to forget when you hear Brown talking like this - and note his
emphasis on the word "economic", but more of that later - how far he and the
party have come. The Greens as a national entity came into being only in
1992, though the seed had been planted 20 years earlier in the unsuccessful
effort to halt the flooding of Tasmania's Lake Pedder. This led to the
formation of the United Tasmania Group, reputedly the world's first declared
green party. The No.2 candidate on its 1975 Senate ticket just happened to
be one R.J. Brown. He received 112 votes.

By 1983, Labor was in power in Canberra and the Greens were in business,
courtesy of the landmark campaign to save the Franklin wilderness. The
environment had become one of the hottest political issues going; after the
economy, it was among voters' principal concerns. Greens preferences were
credited with saving the Hawke Labor government in 1990.

Hutton recalls that the organisational structure at that time was an
absolute mess, which is saying something given his present travails. In the
absence of a national umbrella, 20 groups ran candidates under a Greens
banner at the 1990 general election - "a communal household here, some group
over there". They were behaving more like a herd of cats than a political
party.

Actually, the hue of green varied quite markedly across the country, with
important and lasting consequences. It went beyond the standard contrast
between light and dark green, between moderate and fundamentalist elements
in the environment movement, and still does. In NSW they were more like
class warriors, the early influence of Trotskyites and the Socialist Workers
Party so pervasive in the key inner Sydney branches that it forced rule
changes to preclude Greens from holding membership of another party.

The West Australian branch, for its part, grew directly out of the Nuclear
Disarmament Party, another halfway house for the fringe Left, and became the
most electorally successful of them all, boasting in the early 1990s two
senators in Dee Margetts and Christabel Chamarette. Brown himself didn't
enter the Senate until 1996.

Hutton and many of his contemporaries in Queensland were radicalised in the
1970s and '80s as much by the heavy hand Joh Bjelke-Petersen applied to
civil liberties as his chainsaw approach to resource development. Then, of
course, there are the Tasmanians.

The battle to save the southwestern wilderness and against the Wesley Vale
pulp wood mill forged a teak-tough leadership in Brown and figures such as
Christine Milne, who is tipped to join him in the Senate next year. "There
is a sense in which the Greens are an army, many of whose members have -
quite literally - put their bodies on the line, and it is expected that
their generals will have earned their stripes at the level of grass-roots
activism," observed novelist Amanda Lohrey, writing glowingly of the Greens
for Quarterly Essay last year. "They are only their foot soldiers writ
large."

Some would say, though, that the Greens themselves are the foot soldiers of
the Left. Earlier this year, NSW Premier Bob Carr complained many Greens
were unreconstructed Trots, closet members of the SWP. The whole Labor Party
knew this, Carr said, and voters should, too.

Discussion about the ideological orientation of the Greens tends to revolve
around the watermelon thesis that what's green on the outside is actually
red beneath. Does it matter in this day and age? Well, yes, especially if
the Greens are trying to pull the shade cloth over our eyes.

Certainly, stories abound of Greens branches being stacked with refugees
from Labor's fraying fringes and what's left of the old socialist
collective. Echoing Carr, ALP operatives will regale you with accounts of
how some former communist or ex-SWP type or former card-carrying member of
ratbags united was seen outside a polling station handing out how-to-vote
cards for the Greens.

The NSW division, far and away the Greens' biggest in terms of membership,
and still the most radical, does retain some bad old habits. Its
constitution dictates that MPs must do in parliament as the state council
dictates, eerily reminiscent of the ALP's "grey men" era. Other reminders
linger. Lee Rhiannon, the high-profile state Legislative Council member, is
a proud daughter of the Left and of Communist Party of Australia parents who
carries her arrest during an anti-apartheid demonstration as a badge of
honour. Jack Mundey, the former Builders Labourers Federation boss and
"green bans" opponent of heritage demolition, former member of the old CPA
and the former New Left party, joined the Greens last March, professing they
fit "perfectly with my philosophical beliefs".

But, really. The Greens have repeatedly displayed a bloody-minded tendency
to think for themselves. Newcomers often struggle to cope with the
free-wheeling party structure, which can be akin to wrestling with an
octopus, given that everything from national policy-making to vote
preference agreements has to be ticked off by local branches.

Witness the experience of Peter Pyke in Queensland, the former state Labor
MP who joined the party nine months ago and was fast-tracked to become
campaign director for the forthcoming state and local government
elections -- until, that is, he fell out with Hutton. Pyke says Hutton is
too close to the ALP and too anxious to realise his long-cherished ambition
to sit in parliament. Hutton, for his part, lists among other criticisms of
Pyke his alleged failing to understand the green mind-set. Greens don't like
to be organised, Hutton says.

The battle for the heart and soul of the Australian Greens is over. It was
fought and won in the early '90s at the height of the SWP's serious and
determined bid to take over the party. Having failed, the avowedly Leninist
SWP faded away and few in the Greens would lament that. The trade-off for
the rule change banning dual party membership was to allow the NSW division
its lone hand to whip MPs into line. Brown shrugs this off. If that was the
price of getting NSW on board, then so be it. In August 1992, the Australian
Greens was launched at a press conference in North Sydney. As Lohrey noted,
not one TV news crew turned up.

So here we are, sitting in Brown's gloomy office in Parliament House,
looking to what he insists is a bright future. Leaving aside events in
Queensland, the year hasn't ended as well as he would have hoped. The
Greens' vote, according to Newspoll, has slipped to 5 per cent, down three
percentage points from the October high.

Other published opinion polls show a similar dip. Brown and Nettle's
juvenile antics during the joint sitting of parliament addressed by US
President George W. Bush appear to have been coolly received by the
electorate. Senior adviser Ben Oquist insists, though, that the polls
reflect no more than the bounce Labor received from the leadership change to
Mark Latham. You'd hardly think that was a comfort.

Still, you can bet the Democrats would give just about anything for the
Greens' numbers. They're on a dismal 1 per cent in Newspoll and seem an
awful long way from climbing back under Andrew Bartlett's leadership. For
them, the election will come down to a head-to-head tussle with the Greens
for the final Senate spot in most states. The smart money is on Howard
calling a regulation half-Senate poll in the second half of next year,
partly because he doesn't want to give the minority parties - read the
Greens - the boon of a double dissolution, which halves the vote required
for a Senate quota.

Only three of the Democrats' seven serving senators would need to contest
such an election, meaning the party would survive the wipeout the polls
suggest. The one certainty is that few if any of the four Senate
independents who delivered the Government its pre-Christmas win on higher
education reform will be back. All of them, including the irascible Brian
Harradine, 69 in a fortnight, are nearing the end of their terms and must
face the voters whether it's a double-D poll or not. With the possible
exception of Harradine, who, typically, is giving nothing away about his
expected retirement, they will struggle to be re-elected.

Brown says the Greens have a realistic chance of emerging with five to seven
seats - and more if things fall their way during the campaign. Neither he
nor Nettle are out at a half-Senate election and would be near-certainties
to be returned in a double dissolution.

The Greens are highly confident of getting Milne up in Tasmania and of
unseating the Democrats' Brian Greig in Western Australia. Privately, senior
Democrats concede that Greig, the stop-gap leader between Natasha Stott
Despoja and Bartlett, is in trouble. After Tasmania and WA, the most
promising states for the Greens are NSW and Victoria. Hutton still needs his
preselection to be ratified by the State Council but, notwithstanding this
week's damaging publicity, he will confront the Democrats' John Cherry at
the election, one of their better performers.

South Australia, the Democrats' traditional heartland, remains a tall order.
But keep an eye on the ACT, despite the higher quota of votes required to
elect a senator from the commonwealth territories. Greens Legislative
Assembly member Kerrie Tucker has a strong local profile and is thought to
be a serious prospect to move up to the big house on the hill. The numbers
are already being crunched. Her election, at the expense of a Liberal
senator, would change the balance of power in the Senate. Remember, if it's
a half-Senate poll, the existing Senate stays on until 2005, except for
senators from the ACT and Northern Territory, who take their seats
immediately. Assuming the Government were returned, it would need the four
independents plus one to get key legislation such as the Medicare reform
bill past the combined opposition of Labor and the minority parties.

Acutely aware of the opportunity glimmering before him, Brown agrees the
Greens' organisation needs to become more professional, more nationally
focused. "We have to keep up with the growth and that means a greater
emphasis on national administration," he says.

Membership has blossomed since the last general election, up from about 2728
to 6366 for 2002-03, according to leaked party records published on the
website Crikey.com.au. In 2001, the Greens fielded candidates in every lower
house seat in the country and attracted more than 500,000 primary votes,
just on 5 per cent of the total cast. This was twice what was achieved at
the 1998 general election. Yet let's not get too carried away; it was still
nowhere near enough to deliver a House of Representatives seat.

The truth is the Greens will be lucky - very lucky, indeed - to hold
Wollongong-based Cunningham, let alone replicate the feat Michael Organ
achieved in snatching the seat from Labor. The gift circumstances of the
2002 by-election - the sitting ALP member taking his super and running, an
outbreak of factional brawling and the Liberals' declining to field a
candidate, just to rub it all in - are unlikely to be repeated.

Lohrey claims that Green preferences affected the outcome of no fewer than
19 federal seats in 2001, 16 of them Labor. In fact, analysis of the last
federal election vote by the Federal Parliamentary Library found that
neither Greens nor Democrats preferences changed the outcome in a single
seat in which they were formally directed. Labor got 72 per cent to 76 per
cent of Greens preferences regardless of whether the party tried to channel
them. The importance of the Greens vote is not what Brown and Co try to do
with the flow-on of the primary vote but the size of it in the first
instance.

And make no mistake, it will be crucial to Labor come polling day. The
Weekend Australian understands that both Liberal and ALP internal polling is
showing that Greens preferences could push Latham's Labor across the line.
The conservation movement is buzzing with talk of a handshake deal already
being done on preferences, with Labor getting the Greens in return for
concessions on greenhouse emissions and old growth forest protection. No
wonder Brown is smiling.

Increasingly, Green apparatchiks are talking the talk of their Labor and
Coalition counterparts. Oquist says it's high time the Greens sorted out who
they really are, and that means badging themselves as a Senate party. It
means winning seats, not congratulating themselves on running close or for
giving the other side a scare.

"You have got to close the deal ... you have got to translate the vote into
seats," says Oquist, who narrowly missed Senate preselection in NSW. His
comments underline the hard, sharp edge the Greens intend to apply to
national politics. It has always been there - it's just now we're seeing it
more nakedly, reflecting their growing confidence and ambition.

Traditionally, they have polled better in the House of Representatives than
the Senate. This time round, they aim to reverse that trend. That means a
new, more centralised form of campaigning. New methods, too.

Watch out for Brown this summer. If there's a bushfire burning, he'll be
there, according to Oquist, railing against global warming and climate
change. The Greens are cranking up the old campaign to protect old-growth
forests, an issue Labor clearly thinks has traction given Latham's decision
to accept Brown's invitation to tour Tasmania's wildnerness region in the
New Year.

An official from the NSW division has spent time with US Democratic Party
presidential hopeful Howard Dean's campaign, studying its groundbreaking use
of the internet in fundraising and direct electioneering. A national
campaign co-ordinator is to be employed and the state divisions are being
tapped to provide funds for the looming Senate campaign. Hutton says
Queensland will probably contribute about $10,000.

By next March, the Greens say they will have in place their various Senate
tickets and key policies finalised by a special national conference. They
say they're determined to avoid past mistakes. At last March's NSW election
they were considered to have a chance of breaking through in the Labor-held
seat of Port Jackson, inner Sydney, until a storm erupted over their policy
to make heroin and other illicit drugs freely available under medical
supervision. The Liberals announced their preferences would go to Labor
ahead of the Greens, while Premier Carr fanned the flames by declaring his
Government would not be party to "youngsters boiling their brains".

Peruse the Greens' 2001 election manifesto and there are other examples of
loopiness - sex-change operations at the public expense, regulating the
supply of marijuana at "appropriate venues" - though not as many as their
critics would contend. The Greens, no doubt, will strike a chord with their
youngish constituency by calling for the abolition of university HECS fees,
a policy they have costed at about $1.8 billion a year. According to
insiders, Brown will take a fully funded maternity leave plan to the next
election. But will they really stick with the idea to impose capital gains
tax on the sale of the family home? Or to slug companies "at least 49c in
the dollar" compared with the present 30c? - an impost that would inevitably
undermine "the principle of full employment" they profess to support.

Brown is careful not to pre-empt the Green's cumbersome committee-based
policy-making process, having stumbled last year in the lead-up to a
national council meeting by suggesting that he would consider a trade-off on
the full privatisation of Telstra. For the record, Brown says he is totally
opposed to any such deal with the Government. He might have supported a
debate on its merits back then, but not now.

Hutton, a co-founder of the Australian Greens and one of the most
identifiable figures in the party after Brown, believes the most important
policies are not environmental ones but economic. "What green politics are
all about is changing the nature of human relationships with the planet and
other species on the planet," he says.

But in the hothouse of federal Parliament House the view can be a little
more telescoped. People are wondering: how will the Greens operate if they
arrive in numbers after the election? Will they work for outcomes or for
scoring political points? Will the "just say no" approach adopted by Brown
and Nettle be sustainable should there be more to the Greens Senate team
than them?

Hutton says the Greens political identity is still a work in progress in
Australia. Greens themselves aren't sure about where they're heading and
that's one of the tensions at the core of green politics in this country.
Brown, though, seems to have no such qualms.

There's no need to be hypothetical when it come to the question of what they
would do with balance of power in the Senate, he says. The Greens will
behave just as they did in Tasmania when in accord with Field-led Labor in
Tasmania. Unlike the Democrats, they won't be trying to keep the other
bastards honest; they won't be for further income tax cuts, for example,
regardless of who proposes them.

Brown says he doesn't want to work the system, he wants a new order. "The
mind-set is still there that the Greens are some sort of backstop," he
explains, his eyes steely. "It is a confused mind-set, which says that
nothing can ever be changed in politics except by two parties, Labor or
Liberal. I'm here to tell you that's not the case with the Greens. We are
outside the circle."

No compromise. No prisoners. That's the Greens way forward. If 2004 is to be
their year, it will be a testing one for all concerned.

The Australian

Bartlett attack starts Dems-Greens war

By Jamie Walker

December 27, 2003

Embattled Australian Democrats leader Andrew Bartlett has fired the opening
salvo in a do-or-die election duel with the Greens, accusing Bob Brown of
leading a "Marxist-tinged" party that reserved the right to block supply in
the Senate.

Senator Bartlett also hit out at the Greens for misrepresenting Democrat
policies, and said they had relied on One Nation preferences to win a NSW
Senate seat.

The incendiary comments, made to The Australian before Senator Bartlett was
forced by his pre-Christmas indiscretions in parliament to take indefinite
leave, will deepen hostility between the minority parties as they prepare to
face off for Senate seats at next year's federal election.

Senator Bartlett said the Greens' economic policies were "hardline Left" and
basically anti-capitalist.

Their "Marxist-tinge, bring down the system" approach was reflected in
Senator Brown's insistence on retaining the right to block government money
bills -- "about the only thing you get the Coalition and the Greens agreeing
on", he said.

"It will certainly suit their way of doing things to take that particular
approach with supply," he said. "I'm all for standing up for Senate powers
... but I don't think that's one we need to retain."

Senator Bartlett said Greens campaign literature distributed on behalf of
Kerry Nettle, who narrowly won her NSW Senate seat at the expense of the
Democrats in 2001, had blatantly misrepresented the Democrats' record by
claiming they supported mandatory detention of asylum-seekers.

He said the Greens were "very, very quiet about the fact" Senator Nettle had
won her seat with One Nation preferences.

But a spokesman for Senator Brown said Senator Bartlett was wrong to imply
there had been any deal with One Nation. Senator Nettle had been elected on
preferences from a range of groups including One Nation -- "that's how the
preferential voting system works".

"It benefited (Democrats senator) Lyn Allison in the same way in Victoria,"
the spokesman said.

On the question of Senator Brown reserving the right to block supply in the
Senate, this was only in the event of gross maladministration or corruption
by a government.

Senator Bartlett's attack under lines the pressure on the Democrats as the
party flounders in the polls.

The last Newspoll put the Democrats' vote at a dismal 1per cent, compared
with 5per cent for the Greens. On that basis the Democrats would lose three
senators at a half-Senate election, and most, if not all, of their existing
line-up of seven in a double dissolution poll.






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