The former leader of the Greens, Christine Milne, has defended the process the party followed to elect her replacement, citing the problems the Australian Democrats had with direct ballots of the membership.
In a speech to the National Press Club on Thursday, Milne expressed confidence in the Greens’ future prospects and argued the world was “witnessing the death throes of neoliberal economics”.
But she also faced questions about the rapid leadership handover to Richard Di Natale. Milne announced her resignation from the top job on Wednesday morning and an hour later a ballot of the 11 Greens parliamentarians in Canberra elected Di Natale as leader unopposed.
NSW Greens senator, Lee Rhiannon, has questioned the speed of the process and renewed her calls for grassroots members to be involved in leadership ballots.
Milne said the Greens had previously considered and rejected changes to the leadership election process.
“The NSW Greens have a different view, but it was a view that was not accepted by the Australian Greens and at our national conference it was determined that the process that we have be the process into the future,” she told the National Press Club.
Milne pointed to the experience of the Australian Democrats, which once held an influential role in the Senate and reached a deal to pass the Howard government’s goods and services tax, but was beset by infighting and was deregistered as a party by the Australian Electoral Commission last month.
“You only have to look back at the history of the Democrats to see how the direct election of leaders can go awry,” she said.
“The Democrats collapsed because of internal fighting and in part their direct election system was a contributor to that. We have a very strong commitment to consensus and collaboration.”
Milne said she was “never afraid” that the Greens might go the way of the Democrats “because the Greens have a very substantial structure around the country, a growing membership, an engaged membership so we were always building from a strong base that was talking to one another, that was well organised.
“Our aim was always to enable people to develop more representation, not less, and I would argue we’ve probably got a bit smarter at putting our resources where we think we can win seats rather than distributing our resources too thinly and ending up just missing out in a few cases,” she said.
“So the Greens are very, very well positioned now to continue to grow. They will grow because the biggest issues of this century are environment and social justice … I have every confidence that this is not only the century of the environment and social justice; it is the century of the Greens.”
At the 2013 election, the Greens attracted 8.65% of the primary vote in the lower house, which was a swing away from the party of more than three points since the previous election. But the Greens also increased its representation in the Senate by one.
Milne, who took over as leader from Bob Brown in 2012, said the “tide was coming in for the conservatives” in 2013, but the Greens had since rebuilt its primary vote by standing with the community against the Abbott government’s neoliberal economic policies.
She reflected on the Greens’ role in supporting Julia Gillard’s minority Labor government between 2010 and 2013, which led to the introduction of a clean energy package that included the now-abolished carbon pricing scheme.
“The problem for the Greens in balance-of-power scenarios is frequently the government of the day, the minority government is a minority because they’ve gone from majority to minority because the community actually voted to get rid of them,” Milne said.
“The Greens go into a balance-of-power situation, keeping in power a government that the people determined they actually wanted to get rid of. That is a problem for the Greens because you are dealing with a very weakened government which may or may not recover. Some do, some don’t. In the case of the Gillard government, it couldn’t because of its own internal wranglings.”
Milne said she planned to attend the UN climate conference in Paris in December, but had not yet made a decision about whether she would still be a member of the Senate at that time.
While Milne’s resignation as leader was immediate, the timing of her exit from parliament remains unclear. Milne, a Tasmanian senator, said she would not stand for another six-year Senate term at the election due in 2016. Her 25 years in politics included stints in the Tasmanian and federal parliaments.
