Podcast #144: Will the Greens hold their own?

Interesting and it will be an interesting election for all parties. Will we see the continual decline of the major parties, or will the Greens just fade away.

For me, who generally vote Greens for tactical purposes, I would like to see a greater maturity of the Greens evolve. While there are some green shoots in this area, I still can’t see enough of this to for my desired growth from adolescence to adulthood.

My personal preference in political terms is for politicians to take a problem solving approach to issues – identify the core issue and then work to identify options that are within their jurisdiction and control to address. Unfortunately all parties don’t take this approach and tend to take an ideological / vested interest approach and then play around the margins, with the end result being you never really get to solve the real root cause of the problem (e.g housing affordability). While I can’t see them doing it, maybe this is something that the Greens can focus on the future to help broader their appeal. But that will mean ditching some of their existing core base, but possibly pick up a greater number of centralist voters.

At present the Greens remind me of the fatal flaw that the Democrats fell into at the last US Election – they focus too much on niche issues, but ignore the central issues that are of concern to the greater majority. I think their strategy on focusing on renters was smart, tactically, but possibly not the winner they think it will be.

Personally I would vote for a Teal like candidate in a heartbeat, as I see them generally having the level of maturity that I desire. Unfortunately I am not in an electorate that has that option.

I love elections because for me they give me a sense of the heartbeat of the nation at that point in time. As I said in a previous post, I don’t like any of the major party options, but whether this is just me or a wider opinion, I would be interested to see. My gut feeling is that the Greens will go backwards this election and there may be an up-tick in independents votes (but possibly not seats) in the lower house and who knows what in the upper house.

Sorry but the commentary above on Greens seems like so much divorced from reality and just repeating various tropes without any evidence
Greens main policy platforms relate directly to major and significant issues on many people’s minds and concerns. Housing, accessing healthcare including costs and availability of services. General cost of living, climate and environmental concerns.
It seems just incredibly shallow often evidence free views that dominate Aust political discourse
Labor are Lib/Nats run tedious negative ads and carry on like children demanding it’s their way or the highway, even if more than a third of voters vote for neither of them and neither of the duopoly will muster a majority of primary votes again.
Greens are putting out detailed policy positions and clearly stating working for better outcomes is the point. Usually ignored or attacked through total BS stories.
The duopoly parties are captured by vested interests and continually fail to do anything but tinker and pander to those donors and interests.
If polling is correct more Australians will vote for Greens in the coming election than have ever done so before. Despite millions of dollars and BS thrown around by those vested interests to attack Greens and the major political party tropes which so many just mindlessly repeat, ad nauseum.
All the tropes seem like a poor effort to justify keeping the mediocrity of Australian politics rolling along and doing nothing actually useful. Just accept the same crap for ever.
As for independents, no social change or movement was ever a product of a bunch of egos or individuals. Only a social or political movement, electoral or otherwise, that can act together and promote a cohesive platform or intention has ever really changed anything. I actually find it remarkable how naive some seem to have become about how basic social and political power operates. A bunch of disparate individuals cannot produce any cohesive social or political change. If they are not a bunch of disparate individuals are they really independents?

I 100% agree Quoll.

Living in Macnamara myself, I constantly read about how the Greens being “solely focused” on Palestine will hurt them, I receive attack flyers from the Libs and Advance calling them extremists, and even in the Jewish community debate the other night – which the Greens candidate wasn’t invited to – the ALP incumbent, LIB candidate and all the moderators and people asking questions just spoke about the Greens being anti-Semitic and focused on extremist issues as if it were fact.

The actual reality I see out there in a seat the Greens are extremely visible in, are the Greens focusing almost exclusively on cost of living, the rental crisis, housing affordability, childcare access, Medicare and environment. Not just on posters, leaflets and the policies they are promoting on social media, but they actually host renters’ rights workshops, baby clothes swap meets, beach cleanups, have been lobbying to save a childcare centre and build a primary school hall…

It’s a case where if certain opponents backed by the media just say something (“The Greens are extremists”) enough times, it becomes a reality for people which isn’t based in fact.

Agree Trent and Quoll, living in a Greens seat myself (Brisbane) I have noticed that Steven Bates doesn’t seem to be the extremist type compared to Adam Bandt, Max Chandler Mather or even Jono Sririnigathan. He focuses on the core issues (such as rental affordability) and also hosts frequent community BBQ’s.

Well Quoll, Trent and Yoh An, we will all just have to wait until the election results roll in, because they are the only real hard core evidence we can all definitely rely on. The rest is just reading the tea leafs and offering opinions, such as what I was doing from my perspective.

You might have missed the part where I vote 1 Greens, but I still have some concerns with their policies. When you look at them, most of their big spending initiatives come down to “taxing multi-national corporations more”. While I agree with the sentiment, it does appear to this little black duck to be quite simplistic and verging on populism in terms of actually funding these spending initiatives. If taxing multi-national corporations more was so easy and popular, surely it would have been done before now, given all parties and governments around the world are facing a revenue problem in this day and age.

I worked as a town planner and while the Greens Housing Policy is better that the two majors, it still falls well short of addressing the core issues associated with this wicked problem, which was what I was trying to highlight in my original comment. If the Greens actually tried to address these core issues in a substantive way, then maybe, just maybe they will gain more credibility and votes, much like they have done in Germany.

Too be perfectly honest Neil, I would say that the German Greens are the last party that the Australian Greens should be seeking to emulate. Their recent result was a 6% loss of primary and a loss of over 30 seats in the Bundestag.

I think the “Major Minor Progressive parties” in the world are in a really interesting position these days, and I’m watching the Canadian Election with a lot of interest, where it seems that the NDP is about to cop a flogging as well. It’s also worth pointing out that although UK Labour have been increasingly unpopular, that hasn’t really translated into support for the UK Greens it seems. An outlier here is probably the French New Popular Front, but I’m not going to pretend to have much of an understanding of that grouping.

I don’t see these sorts of things translating to the Australian Landscape yet, but it’s something that the Australian Greens should be mindful of.

My feeling is that the Greens will probably hold their ground this election, but probably will not have enough gains to significantly change their current number of seats (they may loose a couple and/or gain a couple but I’d guess they will end up in net the same position). I’m not super convinced its much to do with the Greens themselves necessarily, but the realpolitik that a lot of swing progressive voters may vote teal/Labor for strategic purposes to avoid Dutton, rather than taking issue with the Greens. I don’t think the Advance Australia stuff is landing with anyone other than people who already hated the Greens.

I think the Greens lost a year of momentum over the Palestine issue. They were keeping up their work in parliaments and councils but nearly all of their political capital from October 2023 to a bit before the Qld election was being spent on Palestine. It is detached from the kitchen table issues focus the Greens had successfully pivoted to. I do think it turned off some by openly picking one side of a very messy and violent conflict shaped by an attack on civilians by a terrorist organisation, and usually comes with campus socialist vibes. For example Huong Truong is a very strong candidate in Fraser but her recent speech to the Palestine rally sounded like something you tune out walking between lectures.

The Greens have, as predicted, got their focus back closer to the federal election, and anyone following the Israel/Palestine issue would see Israel flouting the ceasefire deal and entertaining Trump’s visions for Gaza. So their focus looks somewhat prescient and their activities in 2024 likely won them volunteers going door to door talking about renters rights and dental in Medicare.

Moving ahead the Greens will need to make the case that being an organised political party is a good thing. They may have accepted losing the small l seats to teals, but left wing Fremantle is a seat where Greens should not have expected to be outdone by an independent. In the ACT I’m getting the sense the winnable voters genuinely prefer the Pocock/Emerson style of politics to the Greens and it’s an existential threat.

There were a couple of issues where the teals got pittances while the Greens extracted strong reforms in the last parliament, but that didn’t seem to cut through as much as the narrative the Greens were obstinate blockers. I think the key to success is that the Greens function across all 3 tiers of government. Their activity on council gets mostly overlooked outside BCC and there hasn’t been good evidence of coordinated interstate policy. With the breakthrough in the NT, they now have the capability to push state level initiatives nationwide – they should use it

@Westside Finch, thanks for your comment.

I really don’t follow Green politics overseas, but I just recall a throw away comment recently made by Hammish McDonald on his podcast Global Roaming about the German Greens joining in a minority government and they did a complete backflip on their previous policy position. All this goes to reinforce my view that governing is never easy and once you are sitting at the big table you have to make real life decisions that have consequences. This backflip probably goes to your point about them losing votes next time around – the true believers were not happy!

This was partly my point about developing a more mature policy / problem solving approach. Populism only gets you so far, but if you get elected, then you have to face these choices / consequences (i.e. Trump).

In my job it was ALWAYS a case of making choices between different outcomes and ultimately you have to jump one way or the other. We were always creating winners and losers and I often used to say that if governing choices were so easy – then no sensible government would have ignore them beforehand. The truth is there is rarely easy choices when governing, but many people think it is so easy and black or white.

We lack a political class across the board that can articulate the problem and state the reasons why they took the decision they did. We might not like that decision, but if we can see beyond our own blind spots then we might just appreciate the magnitude of the problem and devilish choices and consequences that need to be made.

The Greens definitely face the problems of being an established political party with an activist base. This has only been growing because as they remain an embedded feature of the political landscape over the years, they’ve been seen more and more as part of the mainstream rather than outsiders. The leadership seem to be induced to respond to this activist base to maintain the donations/volunteers, particularly when an election isn’t imminent, but that puts them offside to the broader electorate by appearing offside. I’m thinking in particular of Palestine and fights over “transphobia” in the VIC Greens as moments when they are unable to maintain a focus on bread and butter issues because of being driven by an activist base.

Muslim Votes Matter are actively campaigning for the Greens in Wills. Socialist Alliance are preferring the Greens over the ALP in Wills.

Austria doesn’t have a Christian Democrat Party. It is not a Protestant country.

I just saw an ad from an Organisation i have never heard off attacking the Greens accusing the Greens of not being focused on the environment and focusing on Palestine and not showing outrage over North Korea etc

https://www.betteraustralia.org/?gad_source=1&gclid=CjwKCAjw5PK_BhBBEiwAL7GTPW00kxsEz0At0djno4PJR7wxKG1UoBxbqp3wBejUGc0K1tG2ZZ-Q5xoCNYwQAvD_BwE

@Nimalan this seems to be a new organisation given the website is quite basic, but it seems to have a good cause.

The teals have voted with Labor and the Greens more than they have with the Coalition, even though moderate centrist voters were a key part of their actual base other than the tactical voters.

The Greens were once an environmental party but I think since about June 2024 people have started to realise that they aren’t the same Greens as they were 10 or 20 years ago.

This is why all three of the Greens seats in Brisbane (Brisbane, Griffith and Ryan) are at risk of falling, but the problem for the Liberals is they’re falling to Labor, not the Liberals. On the local government level all of them are Liberal seats, on the state level all of them are Labor seats except maybe Ryan (when I did my calculations I didn’t add postals so maybe it woulda been enough to overturn Labor’s small margin in Ryan), and federally they’re all Greens seats.

“The Greens were once an environmental party but I think since about June 2024 people have started to realise that they aren’t the same Greens as they were 10 or 20 years ago.”

This is utter nonsense that suggests you either don’t remember what the party was like when Bob Brown led the party or deliberately suggest it was something that it was not. It is over 20 years since Bob Brown and Kerry Nettle got up in the Senate to heckle George W Bush. The party has always had social justice and radical positions in addition to its environmental stances.

Better Australia is not a new organization. They had a test run at NSW council elections where they distributed a lot of smear leaflets. The two organizers are hardline Zionists, which is why they’re attacking the Greens. Until recently it was hard to find any information about them but there’s a piece by Wendy Bacon with all the details.

Personally, I was very frustrated that it was so hard to find information about the group when they first started advertising – you can’t claim to be a grassroots group when there’s nothing to join and no easy way to contact anyone from the organization. I guess they’re building up their operation now, and that its the moment for them and Advance to test new methods of shit slinging on a budget.

As for the Greens, they’ve never been a solely environmental party. A breakthrough moment in their support was the Tampa incident, and in the past decade they’ve grown as a renters party. I think their opponents think its a gotcha but its obviously been a left of Labor grouping for some time now.

@Ben Raue yes but my point is they were less extreme back then.

Take China for example. 15 years ago they spoke of human rights abuses in China, now they claim the Coalition’s pro-Taiwan stances are somehow “racist”. Criticising George W. Bush for the Iraq War also wasn’t a radical stance either, even back then as lots of people opposed the war.

Keep in mind too that what was considered quite progressive then isn’t now. Back then only factions of the major parties (e.g Warren Entsch in the Coalition) supported same-sex marriage, even though in Europe it started becoming a more mainstream position. Nowadays even socially conservative rural people support it, and rightfully so. I’m sure net zero was considered quite progressive back then but it isn’t now.

Things change over time, and so does the electorate as a whole.

@ Nether Portal
You raise an interesting point. The Better Australia ad points out that the Greens never spoke about the War in Sudan and the massacres that has been happening on ethnic grounds. Some have pointed out why there has been no protests against the massacre of Alawites in Syria recently. Erin Molan asked why there has been no protests against the attacks on Hindus in Bangladesh.

@NP, I have been involved in politics since then and I really don’t think they’re more radical now than they were then. Yes opposing the Iraq war was a reasonably common political position but I’m talking about standing up and disrupting the President’s speech, far from mainstream.

The Greens were also very prominent in radical pro-refugee campaigning in the early 2000s.

There is no way in which it is true, it’s bordering on moronic to sincerely try and argue this point.

I also think the “what about” argument when criticising those protesting about human rights abuses rarely has any basis. Firstly, the people that are making those arguments aren’t out there protesting those abuses either. They’re really just arguing that we should be consistent by not protesting against any of them. Secondly, often there are activists campaigning against other bad things in the world, they just don’t get a lot of media attention. Thirdly, Israel is a rich western country with a lot of support from Australia’s allies. Drawing a comparison with North Korea is silly. I don’t think Israel wants to be treated the same as North Korea.

It is true that the Greens have always had a radical activist base, but I think it is fair to say that from its beginnings of a radical environmentalist base it gradually shifted to more of a focus on radical social justice/student left. A lot of that has to do with the centre of the Greens’ power shifting away from Tasmania and into young activists in Melbourne, Sydney and other capital cities which naturally emphasise different issues.

Kind of weird to have a NSW people commenting on Victoria. Sorry you need to get local campaigners on the ground to comment rather that people who rarely visit let alone campaign.

One of the two guests is from Melbourne, Damian.

@Adda, those radical groups have been part of the Greens since the very beginning. And one of the defining moments when the party’s membership expanded was the Tampa crisis in 2001.