One week down and three to go in the Victorian election campaign, and still the media just can’t get enough of the Greens. In Friday night’s leaders’ debate, the first questions were all about the other parties’ attitudes to them (perhaps as a sort of backhanded apology to the Greens for not being invited). Then yesterday the Greens’ official campaign launch gave them extra attention and a new crop of media stories.
For Labor, this is all a giant distraction, albeit one that it’s largely brought on itself. It won’t lose the election in the inner city, but it could well lose it in the outer suburbs and regional areas if it fixates on the Greens.
For the Coalition, by contrast, it represents opportunity. Every day that Labor spends worrying about the Greens is a day that it’s not trying to beat its actual opponents. And Opposition leader Ted Baillieu clearly realises that, needling John Brumby on the issue with evident relish on Friday.
Brumby got himself into trouble with the assertion that Labor would come first on primaries in the inner-city seats, with the Greens second and Liberals third. Baillieu called this “an extraordinarily arrogant assumption” — with some justice, since in Melbourne and Richmond it’s quite possible the Greens will lead the primary vote. The substantive point, however, was correct: Labor will not come third, so its preferences have no relevance; they will never get counted.
But that doesn’t get Labor off the hook. For a major party, preferences are usually just symbolic anyway, which is why the Liberals are happier dealing with the debate at that level. If the Greens are really the evil monsters that Labor is trying to paint them, why not make the symbolic gesture of preferencing against them, even if it will have no effect?
Labor will do no such thing. The Greens will certainly get Labor preferences, although Prahran is the only lower house seat where they might be any use. But if Labor won’t make even a symbolic gesture against the Greens, it just risks looking foolish when it tries to bully the Liberals into making a preference decision that would have real costs.
Labor and the anti-Baillieu camp on the right are trying to make out that the Liberals will face a backlash from their own supporters if they give preferences to the Greens. But that’s nothing compared to what they’ll face if their preferences re-elect two Labor cabinet ministers who would otherwise have been ignominiously defeated.
One day, of course, the Liberals may have to deal with a Green threat in their own seats; by 2014 the Greens, with Labor preferences, will be snapping at the heels of the Liberals in seats such as Kew, Hawthorn and Malvern. But Liberal strategists typically have a range of vision extending to about a week, so it will be some time before they start worrying about that.
And that’s what gives the Liberal position its great strength. At a fundamental level, they just don’t care about the Greens; for all the shadow-boxing about preferences, they can happily treat the whole thing as a side issue. For its own good, Labor should do the same — but because the inner city is its ancestral heartland, it’s incapable of doing so.
This all works both ways of course. The article above says: “If the Greens are really the evil monsters that Labor is trying to paint them, why not make the symbolic gesture of preferencing against them, even if it will have no effect?”
The Liberals like to paint the greens as evil too, lets not forget. And yet they happily preference the Greens when it suits them.
Even ex-PM Howard said so the other day: better to have a labor govt in power than a Labor-green minority govt. Labor and Liberals are much closer in policy than Labor and the Greens most of the time….
But Howard conceding this and recommending Liberals preference labor, shows what a continuing hypocrite he was and is. He preferenced the Greens before the Labor party in the election that got him tossed from his seat. So… why does he now think the Liberals should stop preferencing the Greens? By all accounts the greens are becoming less extreme as the years pass. Why would the Liberals preference them in the past but not in the present?
One answer and only one: political opportunism. The article above is right when it says that the vision of the Liberal party extends to about a week!
I agree with Jim Reiher, or at least the import of his quote from Howard. A Labor-Green coalition would surely be more left wing than Labor governing in its own right so the Liberals should preference Labor ahead of the Greens.
Jim Reiher, why is it “hypocritical” for anyone to change his mind after he sees what a previous stand can do? We made a similar mistake preferencing Family First in a previous Victorian Senate Ticket, but dropped that approach once we saw what it did. Politicans can’t always avoid making decisions they don’t like, or changing their stands as circumstances change. The Bob Brown’s purist Tassie Greens, for example, advocated the building of a thermal power station using incredibly polluting (not to mention expensive) Fingal Valley coal, because it suited their election strategy, and “Greenhouse Emissions” weren’t as important as election results at that time. The great man himself, Bob Brown, stood up in the Tasmanian Parliament when hostilities had wound down in Gulf War I, urging (with no requirement of fresh U.N. approval) RE-NEWED military intervention in Iraq. I understand his position now he’s a Senator might be somewhat different? Bob and Howard do seem to have some things in common?
@Jim: yes, there’s certainly hypocrisy on both sides. But the difference is that the Liberals’ hypocrisy (or whatever you want to call it) is peripheral to its campaign – it just doesn’t care that much about the inner city. Labor is caught because it can’t preference against the Greens, and it can’t just ignore them, whereas the Liberals can do either or both.
@Gavin: it depends what you mean by “left wing”. There’s a whole lot of issues – particularly around openness and probity in government – on which the Greens are much closer to the Coalition’s position than Labor is. But if you’re News Ltd, and the issues you care most about are the US alliance, gay marriage, drugs, euthanasia and funding for private schools, then the Greens don’t have a lot to offer.
I understand many question the significance of ideology in these post modern times, but for me the criterion is clear. A party or person is more left wing to the extent that they support the redistribution of wealth from the rich to the poor.
On the rare occasions that one is to distinguish between 2 equally redistributive positions, the more left wing is the one which would do more to dismantle the class structure. Very much more commonly, one distinguishes between 2 equally regressive positions by the extent to which they would entrench the class structure.
As a short cut, a position that seeks to strengthen the role of the state is usually more left wing than a position that seeks to weaken the role of the state.
So on this analysis the Greens are more left wing than Labor which is more left wing than the Nationals which are less right wing than the Liberals.