After snaring three new lower house seats at the federal election, and seizing the balance of power in the Senate, the Australian Greens find themselves wielding more power and influence than ever before.
Voters have given the party, along with climate-friendly teal and independent candidates, an effective mandate to help deliver real action on climate change, and prod the new Labor government to go further than it has promised in cutting emissions, in this Parliamentary term.
However, a month after the poll, few people seem to be talking about the Greens and the environment in the same breath. Instead, internal ructions within the party are getting far more attention.
When Greens leader Adam Bandt refused to stand in front of the national flag at a press conference on Monday, it spoke volumes about the challenges his party still faces on its journey towards being a genuine alternative to the majors and a force for change.
Whether “flag-gate” was a deliberate stunt, as some claimed, or a long-standing practice that had hitherto gone unnoticed, was immaterial. What mattered was that the episode made headlines for the Greens around the country for all the wrong reasons, helped in no small measure by Bandt’s defence that “for many Australians, this flag represents dispossession and the lingering pains of colonisation”.
Firebrand Greens Senator Lidia Thorpe subsequently seized the opportunity to amplify Bandt’s comments to anybody who would listen, claiming the flag “represents dispossession, massacre and genocide”, called the Queen a “coloniser”, and declaring she was only in Parliament to “infiltrate” the “colonial project”.
Adam Bandt MP, Leader of the Australian Greens, with Senator Lidia Thorpe.Credit:Paul Jeffers
It was all a bit undergraduate: deliberately divisive and the sort of dogma you’d expect to hear at a student council meeting. Inappropriate for a party with aspirations of one day governing this country, and which holds the balance of power in the upper house.
Unsurprisingly, Bandt and Thorpe were pilloried by commentators across the political spectrum.
The question, though, is whether this week’s kerfuffle was an isolated incident, a slight diversion off-piste, or if it signals a seismic shift by the Greens from being “greenies” – environmentalists first and foremost – into an ever-growing panoply of activist causes and their attendant ideologies.
Indeed, their election policy platform was a veritable catalogue of progressive causes, from mandating anti-racism training for all members of federal parliament to “unpack white privilege and white fragility” to an impossible-to-fund promise to abolish all student debt.
The Victorian branch, meanwhile, just ousted its newly elected convener, Linda Gale, after a vicious online campaign against her over allegations of historical “transphobia”.
(In 2019 Gale had co-authored an internal discussion paper that pushed back against the increasingly doctrinaire view in the party that statements such as “there are two sexes” and “trans women aren’t the same as biological women” should not be allowed to even be spoken aloud.
Victorian Greens leader Samantha Ratnam set the election result aside, claiming there had been an administrative error, but she also tweeted: “There are limits to all debates. We don’t allow a debate on whether people of colour should have access to the same spaces as white people – because it’s racist. In the same way, the rights of trans people should not be debated – because it is transphobic.”
A “shellshocked” Gale wrote in The Age last Thursday: “I have never questioned the authenticity of transgender identities, nor the right of trans people to dignity or equality. As convener I issued a statement reaffirming the Greens’ commitment to trans and gender-diverse members. But I was not to be judged on my actions in the role. I was to be ousted due to alleged thought-crimes.”
She wasn’t alone: the New South Wales Greens last week expelled another member, Anna Kerr, for her statements on trans issues, which her accusers claimed “inflicted direct harm towards other members and created unsafe spaces within our party”. Such vilification, Kerr told The Age’s Wendy Tuohy, was “a very effective way of silencing dissent”.
None of this plays well on the outside. A month after their electoral triumph, and the Greens risk squandering some of that goodwill: not what the voters who supported their climate policies would have necessarily signed up for.
Nor do they want more extreme members within the party to thwart practical climate measures put up by Labor because they don’t meet some unattainable target, as they did when the Greens thwarted Labor’s Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme in 2009.
The Greens need to remember the job they were elected to do: helping Australia get further down the road to a sustainable, carbon-neutral future. It would be a shame to see them squander that opportunity.
Gay Alcorn sends a newsletter to subscribers each week. Sign up to receive her Note from the Editor.
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