As I wrote in The Monthly in July:
“If, on election night, the Greens do win the balance of power in the Senate and gain a toehold in the House of Representatives, the sun will still shine the following day. The major parties will still run the show and vote together on most issues. But we may have taken an important step towards ensuring this country stops avoiding its hardest policy challenges. By providing the political duopoly with some competition, we will have given our democracy a timely impetus for renewal.”
Well, the sun came up on Sunday, the impetus for renewal is here, and while not everyone recognises it yet, this election was a great victory for Australian democracy. Labor deserved this rebuke, the Coalition earned no mandate, and the Greens and Independents are being taken seriously. The number of Green MPs appears to have doubled, including the Senate balance of power and an historic first seat in the House of Representatives, where Independents appear to have the balance of power in a hung parliament.
The message is loud and clear — Australians want something better than what the most rigid two-party system in the world is delivering.
Not surprisingly, it’s a message the major parties seem inclined to ignore. Both sides still characterise the Greens as left-wing, oblivious to their broadening base. Neither major party yet comprehends how their own policy ineptitude (most obviously on climate change) has contributed to increased Green support. Penny Wong’s performance on Saturday night said it all. She dismissed the Greens as being in an exclusive contest with Labor, as only looking to take votes off Labor, not the Coalition. As it happens, the Greens have taken two Senate seats from the Coalition at this election.
Wong still argues that the Greens vote against the CPRS in the Senate prevented Labor from taking serious action to combat climate change. Lindsay Tanner ran this line ad nauseum, and the electorate has rejected it, most emphatically in the electorate he vacated at the last minute. For Wong and most of her colleagues, the penny still hasn’t dropped that the CPRS would have done nothing to reduce emissions in Australia because it gave the worst polluters over 80% of their emission permits for free, and placed no limit on the number of cheap carbon credits that could be purchased offshore. It paid the polluter, then outsourced the problem.
Meanwhile, though our coal exports already generate more CO2 offshore than our national total, Labor still backs the doubling of coal exports over the next decade. In the lead-up to the election, facing an implicit threat to “change the Prime Minister or we’ll change the government”, coal union bosses ruthlessly installed a Prime Minister likely to be more sympathetic to the interests of the biggest coal miners.
Julia Gillard famously “threw open the doors of the government to the mining industry” and a deal to protect their profits was done in a matter of days. The significance of what was arguably the first successful mining industry-run political coup d’état in the Western world, went largely unreported.
The sad reality is that Labor is as much a hostage to the coal industry as the Coalition, and the difference between the climate policies of the two major parties is negligible. Both parties aim to meet woefully inadequate emission targets through creative accounting — Labor mainly by outsourcing emissions cuts through dubious forest protection deals in PNG and Indonesia, the Coalition mainly by paying farmers for good gardening to retain more carbon in soils.
Both sides are determined to protect the biggest polluters and avoid the essential shift from fossil to renewable energy.
Under the circumstances, little effective action on climate change is likely this term from whichever major party forms the new government. The Labor Party might ultimately agree to brave a carbon levy, but you can bet it will be one that is as polluter friendly as its CPRS. There are, of course, numerous issues to be weighed other than climate change and on many of them, most Greens (me included) loathe the prospect of an Abbott administration.
Even so, taking a long-term view, it’s hard not to wonder whether the national interest and democratic renewal are best served not by propping up the incumbent government, but allowing it to fall, and learn from its mistakes sooner rather than later.
Guy Pearse is a Research Fellow at the Global Change Institute at the University of Queensland. A member or the Liberal Party for 19 years, he joined the Greens in 2008.
What staggering hubris. And when you’ve installed the Coalition, led by a reformed (?) climate skeptic and leader of a party with even more links to the mining industry, you’ll “let them fail” too if they don’t do you tell them to, Mr Pearse?
The biggest tragedy in Australian politics, is, as Guy writes,
the penny still hasn’t dropped that the CPRS would have done nothing to reduce emissions in Australia…. Both sides are determined to protect the biggest polluters and avoid the essential shift from fossil to renewable energy.
It is a pity that the two biggest parties are populated by hateful men and women who care more about their own careers, than the country.
So let me get this straight- the fibs should be put back in to teach Labor a valuable lesson, so its death to the school reforms, health reforms and the NBN. Not to mention Rupe will want his quid pro quo or that the greens will stop his bs.
I have a different take on the results.
Tony is so toxic to the voters that the fibs only scored a 1.7% swing despite the massive, massive campaign swung against Labor (and the Greens) by the media and other vested interests. All tony had to do, like Barnaby, was keep his mouth shut.
Labor might have hemorrhaged votes but the informal vote got a higher swing than the coalition. You can dress it up anyway you like but the Fibs got done in the washup considering all the resources used to get them elected.
And you can expect the boys to shoot their mouths off without engaging their brains in the near future and the coalition stocks to fall again to where even Rupert, Janet and the rest of the conga line won’t save them.
If Abbott is willing to give the NBN and anything else (that he slagged off) to the independents to be PM he shows that he always was a man of little substance.
If he lasts two months I will be surprised.
‘The number of Green MPs appears to have doubled’
While obviously an acronym for Member of Parliament, in this country ‘MP’ refers specifically to Members of the House of Representatives. You may have noticed that Members of the House of Representatives have the initials ‘MP’ following their name while Senators do not (and have the word ‘Senator’ preceding theirs). To use ‘MP’ in the broader sense is just plain misleading.
‘an historic first seat in the House of Representatives’
Sheesh. A Greens MP (Michael Organ) was elected to the federal seat of Cunningham in 2002.
If this was a high school essay, you’d already have failed before the teacher even began analysing the bizarre logic that to teach Labor to be Greener, the Greens should reward a more mining-friendly climate skeptic with the top job in the country.
Guy, as I wrote in reply to you in The Monthly, there simply isn’t evidence that the Greens’ base has become progressively broader in a political (rather than numerical) sense. Quite the contrary, as I explained in my article in Overland Journal before the election (here: http://web.overland.org.au/previous-issues/feature-tad-tietze/), the Greens’ constituency represents an overwhelming Left of Labor political force.
Pre-election opinion polls and reports of preference flows on Saturday also indicate that Greens voters remain overwhelmingly ALP-oriented, but of course deeply critical.
Like you, I am no fan of the ALP and have been thrilled by the Greens’ result on the weekend. But I am less confident that the ALP will learn any significant lessons from a spell in the wilderness. Thirty plus years of neoliberalism have decimated the personnel who could drive any process of reassessment. And the trade union leaders, passive and conservative, are just as likely to go along with the right-wing ideology that dominates the party.
If the Greens are in a position to support confidence in a minority ALP government, that would be the least worst result out of the ones on offer. Currently we are seeing the business elite and the Murdoch media mount a campaign (similar to their anti-RSPT crusade) to subvert the electorate’s rejection of both major parties and install Abbott to drive an austerity program to cement Australia’s “competitiveness” in unstable economic times.
If the Greens can stop that happening but also refuse to give the ALP a free hand to continue its rightward drift, the party can build on the progressive constituency it has already snared. Simply letting Abbott fall into power unopposed would give him more legitimacy than even the ALP has managed to hand him to date.
That would be seen as a betrayal by those Left voters who form the vast majority of Greens supporters, and who in Melbourne delivered such a historic victory for Adam Bandt.