The resignation of Christine Milne as leader of the federal Greens on Wednesday was met with mixed emotions among New South Wales Greens party members. Although nobody had called for her to go, there were rumblings about the federal leadership– which were intensified by the NSW election – and many agreed the time was fast approaching for her to stand down.
It has been almost six weeks since the Greens won three lower house seats in the NSW parliament, its biggest haul: two inner-city Sydney seats, Newtown and Balmain, and Ballina, on the north coast.
The party is turning its eyes to the federal election and although no one wanted to “push” Milne the party was unsure about what to do. One NSW politician was considering calling for Milne to resign in the next month.
The state election had been a thrilling win but with the federal election looming, was it more important for the party to focus meagre resources on retaining Senate seats in every state? Or should it continue on the warpath to get lower house seats in state parliaments, which are beginning to fall but can be difficult to parlay into tangible legislative results?
The party is walking on cloud nine in NSW, but it is also facing the natural companion to growth – divisions – although they are nowhere near terminal.
Country members have their biggest representation in the NSW parliament, and their priorities tend to diverge from the inner-city folk at times.
While the inner-city rages against public funding for independent or private schools, the country Greens see value in government funding in some cases, particularly for country Catholic schools. Public transport is important for both but roads and bridges in the country are essential, something the inner-city Greens are not keen to campaign too much on.
There is also the generational shift, as the activist generation who chained themselves to trees – such as Christine Milne, Bob Brown and Lee Rhiannon – makes way for the hyper-educated young professionals of the next generation. In the middle are those who see themselves as pragmatists stuck between the idealists of the outgoing and incoming generations.
Jenny Leong, the new Greens MP for Newtown, says it is not so much a divide as a shift, as the next generation builds on the work of the previous generation. As for where the resources should go for next year’s federal election, Leong says it should not be up to any party executive.
“The way the Greens should continue to decide is through consultation and involvement with our members in those discussions,” she says. “The more we can involve the broader membership in conversations about how we set campaign priorities, electoral priorities, achievement priorities, the more secure and strong the party will be.
“The moment you start isolating those decisions in one area of the party the more damaging that is, or the more risky that is that you’re not going to be reflecting where your supporter base and where your membership base is at, and that’s a key principle of grassroots democracy.”
However, Leong does believe it is not an either/or proposition and although she agrees there is pressure on the Greens to maintain their federal Senate spots, especially since they have a sitting senator in every state, it is the usual pressure on any party not to lose seats.
“I think the idea is a commitment and a resolve to make sure we can have a Greens representative and maintain a Greens representative in each state, to be able to represent the progressive views of that state, and I think that’s probably not a surprising thing,” she said.
“After every election you get the narrative where someone writes a story ‘This is the peak of the Greens’, ‘This is the best result ever’, ‘This is the worst result ever’, and you can often have those written after the same election campaign.”
Leong will not comment on internal polling before the election but consensus in the party is that it is becoming less and less reliable. Internal polling had a possible loss in Balmain – where the only sitting Greens MP, Jamie Parker, increased his margin by 4.4% on a two-party-preferred basis – and the Greens losing Ballina and Lismore. Ballina was won by Tamara Smith with a swing of 27.8% to the Greens. In Lismore the Greens candidate, Adam Guise, had a swing of 21.5% but narrowly missed out.
Even Newtown, an emphatic win, was looking dodgy at one point, according to the internal polls.
Work done by the Greens on the basis of how people voted in booths in the NSW election shows Anthony Albanese’s seat of Grayndler could have a swing of 17% from Labor to the Greens, and the seat of Sydney could be on a 52-48 Labor to Greens. Greens are sceptical they could win because of the personality power of the sitting MPs but are buoyed by the possibilities over the next decade.
The election of Richard Di Natale as leader of the federal parliamentary party could also mean a discussion around reforming how the leader is elected, another point of contention. Since Labor was forced into giving members a say in the election of the leader it has been an issue on Greens members’ minds.
“How can we let Labor be more progressive on us on this? Membership involvement is meant to be the basis of our party,” one Greens member said.
There has been no movement though in case it was interpreted by Milne as a move against her.
The NSW Greens are caught up in their own leadership conundrum: specifically, when are they going to get one? Technically leaderless the party operates with individuals taking on specific areas of interest. Now with eight members in parliament, including five in the upper house, chatter is turning to the pros and cons of having a designated leader.
Greens say there are many models of leadership and that is likely to be the focus long before a leader is chosen. Alternative models include having co-leaders or direct election by members.
“I think what we need and what we’ve always had is the idea of strong leadership in the party, and the idea of just calling someone a leader and putting that power on to one person really doesn’t reflect the way we do politics,” Leong says.
“That said, I think we should feel very much in a position to talk about how we are setting priorities and how we’re providing more leadership – in that I mean in the broad sense of leadership, rather than in a leader, in terms of where we’re headed … I think that’s a conversation we need to have as a party.
“That said … we’ve continued to grow our vote, we’ve continued to grow our representation, we’ve continued to ... work with the community on campaigns, we have people who take the lead on certain aspects of it but don’t have the full control over everything, I don’t necessarily see that as a problem.”
Most Greens decline to go on the record about the leadership and are wary about who could end up leader.
Jeremy Buckingham, the Greens member of the legislative council in NSW who has been credited with leading the CSG campaign, dismisses talk of having to choose between campaigning for lower house or upper house seats at the federal election but says the discussion about leadership in the state is likely.
“I certainly don’t think that it’s something we need right now and we should rush into. I think the membership will naturally begin talking about how we manage the party, how we coordinate our MPs. As the party room grows it needs more coordination. That’s something a leader may provide. I wouldn’t be drawn on whether or not we need a leader – what I would say it is a discussion which is inevitable. It’s one of the things we will talk about.”
As for the lessons from the NSW election for the looming federal election, Buckingham says Greens’ parties around the world are preparing for government and broadening their base through city and country.
He says the NSW Labor MLC Walt Secord is as “cunning as a shithouse rat” and says Smith’s win in Ballina is one of the most remarkable in Australia’s history.
“Walt was running northern NSW strategy [for Labor]. He ran a massive push on CSG and health and they were totally ghosting our campaign,” he says.
“Everything we did, they followed. Their approach for voters was ‘Go with Greens lite’. People didn’t swallow it. They wanted the real deal; they wanted a party that would put environment front and centre. I think it’s one of the most remarkable victories in Australian election history.”
He says although there will definitely be different priorities between country and city Greens they are not mutually exclusive, and managing huge campaigns on Sydney’s proposed WestConnex as well as CSG shows the party can walk and chew gum “like most serious parties”.
After the success of the CSG campaign Buckingham says the Greens will turn its attention towards “coal, coal, coal” and it will be one of the three big campaigns run in the next three years.
“We’ve always had limited resources. We’ve run our campaign on the smell of an oily rag and goodwill so allocation of resources has never really been a real fight in the party. That said, we will have very focused campaign in the next election,” he says.
Buckingham pinpoints the Greens success in Ballina as “a seismic shift in politics in Australia” that “foreshadows what will come across large parts of the nation, a competition between Greens and the National party and country Labor for the regional seats. People voted Green because they saw the values that we represent in our fight to stop CSG; they saw those values as always erring on the side of public interest.”
