While the finance minister, Mathias Cormann, has worked frantically this week to stitch together an against-the-odds deal to deliver Australia’s biggest businesses a tax cut, backed by a trailing chorus of corporate captains on a charm offensive (hi Pauline) – the Greens have been coming to terms with their loss in Melbourne last weekend.
The first resort from the Greens leadership, in public at least, has been to blame the party’s internal divisions for the Batman byelection defeat.
Richard Di Natale opened the batting on Monday by calling for the expulsion of members responsible for leaks against the candidate, Alex Bhathal.
The Victorian Greens co-convenors, Rose Read and Colin Jacobs, issued a statement noting the campaign had been “marred by the actions of a person or persons who … [leaked] confidential information regarding an internal dispute in order to damage the campaign. It is an attack on the very mission of the Greens. It can have no place in our party.”
The Batman campaign was certainly marred by leaks, and by personality conflicts, which hampered the party’s ground operations.
But if you are inhabitant of the real world, not a stressed-out occupant of the political hothouse, Di Natale’s swingeing public response to the skulduggery looked brittle and over the top.
If you take a moment to stand in his shoes, the reaction becomes more comprehensible. Obviously there will be a lot of angry true believers to console, party activists and volunteers who spent their weekends door knocking and phone canvassing for a lost cause.
There’s another point that may not be obvious if you’ve had no exposure to the Greens internal culture. From the vantage point of Di Natale, the culture of the Victorian Greens has been largely collaborative, unlike the riven and punishing party culture that exists north of the border in New South Wales.
In the mind of the leader, sending a strong public message that Victoria needed to avoid succumbing to the NSW disease was an important and necessary component of the Batman wash-up.
Wanting Victoria to avoid the roiling mess of NSW is doubtless a worthy objective. The problem with it, though, is the dissent has already begun, and if you want to chase down the thought criminals, that is a course of action that carries its own consequences.
You can identify the leakers, perhaps, if they’ve been naive enough not to cover their tracks, but even if you find people to purge – if your crack investigative team unearths the People’s Front of Judea – that process will inevitably open questions, such as how did the internal disaffection get so bad in the country’s largest Greens branch that activists were motivated to sabotage their own campaign?
There’s also the problem that your leakers have already made it abundantly clear that going to the media is an accepted part of the toolkit. Hmm. Let’s think about this. What could possibly go wrong?
The other problem with fixating on the leakers is the risk of missing the real lesson.
Let’s be blunt. The Greens didn’t lose in Batman because colleagues were nasty to Bhathal, although obviously that didn’t help.
Anyone watching the Greens at the moment can see a party that doesn’t really know where to position itself. It’s hard for people to buy what you are selling if you don’t quite know what that is.
Let’s consider the challenges, one by one. First problem. Labor in the current period of opposition federally has tilted left. That shift has a crowding-out effect.
Second problem. Di Natale’s early disposition as party leader – which was about growing his political movement by positioning the Greens as a serious player capable of doing legislative deals on their merits – wasn’t universally loved. Unfortunately for the leader, there is still a strong faction within the Greens that believes politics is about protest and pragmatism is to be avoided at all costs.
Third problem. The decline in the major party vote is generating fragmentation across the spectrum. There are “anyone but the major parties” popup political insurgencies proliferating across the country. Even if the party was 100% clear about its mission, the crowded political market place makes it harder for the Greens to be heard. Their collective response to date from the Canberra crew has been to shout louder, and pick fights in the parliamentary chambers with all the subtlety of a bunch of internet trolls. Not that encouraging, frankly.
Problem three leads us to problem four. What are the Greens about nationally in 2018? That’s something for the party to determine, self-evidently, but the NSW Greens MP David Shoebridge expressed some views immediately after Batman. “In recent years we’ve seen how campaigns without an effective social justice agenda have failed to excite the public. In Tasmania, for example, Greens support at a state level has halved from 21.6% in 2010 to 10.3% in 2018.
“In comparison the Queensland Greens in the recent state election made a deliberate shift to campaign on economic issues and the environment, and they scored the highest Green state election vote that Queensland has ever seen plus their first MP. We can hold true to our environmental record and principles and also prioritise fixing a system that is causing dangerous social and economic inequality and fuelling climate change and environmental devastation.”
While it would be deeply silly to conclude that Labor has cracked the code of how to hold out Greens insurgencies in the inner-city, ipso facto, the Greens have hit a representative ceiling in the lower house – Batman demonstrates that the ALP is watching, learning and adapting.
Labor cleared a significant barrier for soft-left swinging voters in Batman by choosing Ged Kearney, a candidate they could actually vote for – someone who wasn’t Martin Ferguson, a leftwinger who did deals with the right, or the right’s defence-obsessed David Feeney.
Labor picked up many of the local issues Bhathal had campaigned on in the 2016 federal election, when she almost grabbed the seat, and Kearney launched an empathy offensive on the ground, sending a clear message the ALP was listening.
If you want to listen in retrospectively on just one focus group – a lively conversation between a group of progressive voters in Melbourne trying to make up their minds about who to back – have a look at the Facebook page of the Melbourne writer Tony Wilson.
The thread that follows contains interesting exchanges as locals debate whether the best means of advancing progressive causes would be another Green in the House of Representatives, or a motivated representative in the Labor caucus – if only on a trial basis.
One participant in the thread says: “Never been so conflicted in my life as I have at the last two by-elections! I can’t believe I’m also leaning towards Ged after 20 years of green voting ... same reasons as you Tony.
“How can Labor ever change their appalling stand on refugees and the environmental issues if the same old dicks keep getting voted in. Ged is an excellent candidate and would fight hard from within. But the greens have the policies I support. What a dilemma!!! To send a message or to try and actually change the party? I think I have to go red. Particularly since it’s only for a year or so ... test drive red?”
So while the Greens have a significant task ahead to reposition in light of changing circumstances and to develop some genuine cut-through, the conversation in Wilson’s Facebook thread also underscores the fact that the new Labor member for Batman is absolutely on notice from the swinging voters in the south of her constituency.
After all, it’s one thing to win a campaign. It’s another thing entirely to deliver on the expectations you have raised.
