Milne learns it’s not easy being Green

IN his farewell speech to the National Press Club, former Greens leader Bob Brown rejected the lament of the philosopher puppet, Kermit the Frog, who sang “it’s not easy being green”.

But these days Greens leader Christine Milne must be identifying more with Kermit than with Bob, who led the Greens to the peak of their success.

Rather than supplanting Labor as the dominant party of the Left as Brown predicted, the Greens are sliding back to their erstwhile position on the fringes of politics as support in the electorate plummets at a rapid rate.

After lifting their vote in the House of Representatives from 7.8 per cent in 2007 to 11.8 per cent in 2010, in subsequent electoral contests the Greens have inflated expectations only to see them crushed by reality.

The local council elections held across NSW on Saturday are the latest blow to the Greens. In the key Labor-Greens battlegrounds of Leichhardt, Marrickville and Sydney, the Greens were smashed with swings of 7-11 per cent.

In the eastern Sydney councils of Randwick, Waverley and Woollahra they suffered swings of 7-12 per cent.

In other areas across Sydney such as Auburn and Ashfield, and on the central coast, in the Blue Mountains and in the Hunter, the Greens vote collapsed.

It was a comprehensive rejection of the Greens across almost all areas, from the inner city to the suburbs and the regions to the country, linking every possible socioeconomic voter cohort.

After winning the federal Labor seat of Melbourne in 2010 with Liberal Party preferences, the Greens also wrested the state Labor seat of Balmain at the NSW election last year, this time with Labor preferences. Many expected the Greens to continue to collect electoral trophies throughout this year. In February, the Greens contested the South Australian by-elections for the state seats of Ramsay and Port Adelaide. In Ramsay, the Greens were polling 9 per cent ahead of the election, but received only 6.6 per cent of the vote. In Port Adelaide, despite polling 12 per cent, the Greens vote fell to 5.6 per cent. Labor held both seats.

At the Queensland state election in March, the Greens vote fell by 0.8 per cent to just 7.5 per cent. Although Labor suffered a 15 per cent swing, the Greens failed to boost their vote. In a direct contest with Labor in the Melbourne state by-election in July, the Greens won 36.5 per cent of the primary vote to Labor’s 33.4 per cent. Although hardly a good result for Labor, the Greens were expected to win comfortably. Labor held the seat on preferences.

At last month’s Northern Territory election, despite Labor suffering a 7 per cent swing, the Greens vote declined by 1 per cent to a miserable 3.3 per cent.

At the recent Heffron by-election in southern Sydney Labor demolished the Greens, winning 58.9 per cent of the primary vote to the Greens’ 23.3 per cent.

via Milne learns it’s not easy being Green | The Australian.

The rift between Labor and Greens

Two weeks ago Joel Fitzgibbon wrote a column for The Daily Telegraph attacking the Greens over their refusal to allow the parliament to pass offshore processing for asylum seekers.

It was received like Moses’ tablets among the Labor caucus.

A few days later, NSW party secretary Sam Dastyari jumped on board and posed the question at a machine level, about whether Labor should ditch their preferencing deal with the Greens

Then all hell broke lose. The truth is that Dastyari did not expect the issue to take off so quickly and so dramatically. He was after a slower burn on the Greens. As a consequence, he has dumped Julia Gillard into a pot of the proverbial. Everything Gillard seems to have done lately, has been a strategy of adopting what would Rudd do? It is an obvious attempt to deprive him of a platform for a return. But thanks to Dastyari, and the multitude of MPs now backing his call, Rudd now has one.

Gillard’s dilemma is to explain in the midst of this angst over the Greens from within her party, how she can continue to have a formal alliance with the Greens to govern.

Labor’s problem is not desertion to its left, but to the coalition. If the polls are any guide, more than a million of the 3.8 million voters (of about 12.7 formal voters) who gave Labor their first preference in 2010 have lost the faith and switched their loyalty to the coalition.

Without that lost million, Labor is toast – it faces a landslide of Queensland or NSW proportions. It will be lucky to have 30 seats in the House of Representatives. Even if that million came back – but only that million – Labor might not be returned to government. Last time that total gave it only 72 seats of 150.

Are the Labor tacticians bagging the Greens – and Greens supporters – because it thinks the million defectors – or more – have abandoned it because they think that it has swung too far to the left, or become some sort of tail wagged by the Green dog? Hardly? Labor’s problem is not being thought to be standing on the left, but not being seen to stand anywhere on anything.

Is it, as some have suggested, Labor’s revenge because the Greens have refused to be pragmatic over refugee policy, compounding with coalition intransigence to make parliament, and necessarily the Gillard government, look impotent and weak ? Or is it, as coalition leader Tony Abbott suggests a confected squall, designed to create a false appearance of serious ideological differences between Labor and the Greens – the combination that Abbott suggests, somewhat wrongly, makes up the capacity to govern? [It is true that Labor needs the support of the Greens to get legislation through the Senate, and that Labor has a deal with the Greens about Supply and motions of confidence. But Labor’s capacity to govern is rooted in a working majority in the House of Representatives, and the sole Greens member does not, of himself, hold any sort of guillotine over Labor].

Is it, in short, just a put up job, designed to con the public into thinking, wrongly, that the parties are independent of each other? Great theories, but with no evidence whatever.

Another, intrinsically more plausible, theory sees it as a tactical plot by the NSW Right wing Labor machine, designed both to give it some flexibility on the floor of the NSW Labor conference at the weekend, and, perhaps, to give Labor machine men some room to manoeuvre in negotiating preference deals at forthcoming elections and by-elections. And perhaps an alibi, with defeat blamed not on those who failed, but on people so pure that they were unable to compromise.

By rights, one might not expect that Sam Dastyari, in charge of the Sussex Street machine, or the machine itself to be dominating the agenda of this conference. Or to be getting such a charmed run (as one always does) from the Murdoch Press in making the conference issue seem to be the supposed wickedness and folly of the Greens. Are the public, or the Labor faithful, so dumb as to be distracted by such theatre from the basic problem of the ineptness and incompetence and contagion of the Sussex Street machine?

Dastyari, at the top of the NSW machine, and his mentors, particularly Mark Arbib and Karl Bitar, are the geniuses whose political management of NSW caused a utter collapse of Labor support in the state. The scale of voter rejection went far beyond a commonsense judgment that Labor, after more than a decade in government, had run out of ideas and needed the purification of a period in opposition. It involved a verdict on a style of cronyism, corruption, insider deals, and the abandonment of party democracy for rules by professional suits. It involved rejection of the secret deals by factions – including of the deals and operators who saw Kevin Rudd replaced in Canberra – and of the rorting of unions and abuse of union power by leading party figures. It involved the contempt shown to voters by players such as Bob Carr, who moved from the premiership to work for a merchant bank and developer, and Bitar and Arbib, now lobbyists for James Packer and the gambling industry.

What happened in NSW has been repeated in Queensland. Few doubt that voters are preparing the same treatment for a Gillard-led Labor Party – widely perceived as being in thrall to just the sort of factions players voters so emphatically rejected. Gillard has more problems in being perceived (rightly) as a creature of the Labor Right, than of being thought (wrongly) a catspaw of the Greens.

A fake crusade against the Greens has some promise of providing the appearance of ”outcomes” at the NSW conference. Some – such as the appearance of party democracy in a few carefully chosen plebiscites and party primaries – will be said to be ”reforms.” What will not be addressed are continuing cancers of the type seen in the Health Services Union, the power and reach of the AWU, Bill Shorten, Bill Ludwig and Paul Howes, and whether Labor should get itself a whole new team of organisers and a new type of organisation.

Labor is fundamentally different from the Greens. It does need to differentiate itself from them. It also needs to compete with them – about ideas and ideals, about policies, and, (because this is fundamental to Labor’s view of itself) about power and holding on to it.

Labor’s problem, so far as its left is concerned, is that it has let most of the argument go by default. This was not only by being ”pragmatic” on what many in the party have seen as moral issues, including refugee and indigenous policies, and respect for human rights, but by progressively shutting out any sort of debate in the party.

In the process. Labor seems to have lost not only much of its moral appeal, particularly to younger voters, and much of that emotional and social appeal which, over more than a century, saw thousands of men and women meet, plan and organise great campaigns, as well as tedious jobs outside polling booths. They won’t come back for mere abuse, or threats of retribution – from suits whose political lifespan seems certain to be shorter than Green Senators. Would anyone follow Dastyari anywhere? Or Paul Howes? It’s hard enough persuading anyone that Gillard is leading us going to.

SOURCE:  http://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/ and http://www.canberratimes.com.au

Twitter: @luiggiBerrospi