Federally the Greens are screwing up, a mere four weeks after sweeping to a triumph at the election. But their party leadership knows this. The Victorian branch stoush over the election of convenor Linda Gale, and the question of trans issues, was the start. Now leader Adam Bandt’s refusal to stand next to the Australian flag has given them the quinella.
A party that gained about half a million new voters based on a campaign that tied global climate issues to local inequality, such as the housing crisis, has reverted to ridiculous culture wars. Many people beyond their core voter base will be dismayed that they have snapped into that sort of stuff immediately.
Their dismay will be shared by the leadership, which would have wanted neither controversy.
The signature note of Bandt’s leadership has been to return the party to a more materialist politics, and to link global green issues to economic social justice. Knowing his politics, I would imagine that he did the flag stunt through gritted teeth, enacting a partyroom decision. He will then have to bear a couple of weeks of battering from several directions before the core business of the program can be put front and centre again. Perhaps he did it now while the trans issue was still around to get it all out of the way.
Because this stuff needs to be got out of the way. Both issues came out of the Victorian state branch, by far the worst-performing Greens branch in the country, taking the wattle laurel from NSW. Its cultural ultraist politics is the opposite of the Queensland branch’s grassroots, social activism approach and is undoing much of their good work in presenting the Greens as a party that will fight for climate victims, the poor and the generationally short-changed.
These two Victorian issues now send a message that the Greens are a party of the knowledge class elite, responding to their obsessions.
The Gale stoush was a doozy. Labor’s dirty tricks department couldn’t have come up with anything better. Her election as convenor was challenged on two grounds. One is the quite proper (if true) — but wholly internal — complaint that candidates for the election to the post were not given access to the full membership email list to make their case. But this wasn’t led with. Instead there was an attack on Gale for an internal paper she wrote several years ago, pushing back against the notion that the Greens should adopt a radical gender positioning of pure gender self-determination, with no real social or institutional recognition of embodied sex differences and no debate of such within the party.
These two issues then got tangled, as Senator Janet Rice and others attacked Gale’s position on internal party debate regarding gender and sex, and tied that to the question of membership list access.
There were some other, nastier, accusations of transphobia flying, but any notion that Gale, a veteran social movement leftist, is a trans-hater is absurd (xxx-phobic is a weasel term; it implies one’s only objection to something comes as a psychological defence). The public accusations turn on her defence of internal party free debate around a complex issue that has major institutional ramifications in refuges, hospitals, schools, prisons and more. Gale’s detractors should have stuck to the issue of procedure and left it as purely internal.
The flag issue is also coming from Victoria and most likely from the sway that Senator Lidia Thorpe is said to hold over the Greens partyroom. In recent days Thorpe has made clear that she regards herself as an “infiltrator” into the government of “the colony”, and will operate on those terms.
Well, yeah, but what are the politics of that really? Your party leader doesn’t stand next to a flag, but you get sworn in, sit beneath an enormous coat of arms, and observe all the protocols. Vote yay, nay or abstain, you’re voting, by the nature of your office. The very act of taking your seat confirms the legitimacy of the Parliament. One is tempted to say that if you are infiltrating the parliamentary dining room, try the wild-caught salmon. When both houses are sitting, remember to book your infiltration early.
That’s not very fair. Thorpe’s disruptive tactics in the Senate are a legitimate form of guerilla warfare. But they don’t work as resistance. They simply reinscribe the political-juridical power of the president of the Senate. Sovereignty is thereby expanded, not reduced. The only way to genuinely win an election and then resist is to not take your seat, as Sinn Féin does in some counties/Northern Ireland Westminster seats in the UK. That’s impossible in Australia because two months of non-attendance without leave of absence means you forfeit your seat. So tricky. But once you take your seat, everything you do legitimates the sovereign power. Not standing near a flag doesn’t mean jack.
Do trans issues matter? Yes. Does resistance to the constituted Australian state matter? Yes. But they also, in these symbolic matters, don’t matter nearly as much as the Greens’ core mission, which is to tie real global climate and biosphere action to economic social justice, and to stand with and represent the many, not the few. There are emergencies of occurrence in both areas — violence and direct persecution — that push issues to immediate priority. Otherwise the party looks like the preserve of self-absorbed elites.
Nothing makes that more obvious than the Victorian Greens’ actions on the trans issue. While Gale is being assailed for a position arguing for free debate inside the party, and the mere possibility of such debate is constructed as “hate speech”, the Greens continue to give the whip to Councillor Anab Mohamud at Yarra Council.
Mohamud is charged with an alleged assault of a trans person, arising from a messy altercation at a Chapel Street nightclub (earlier, separate assault charges for another alleged incident were dropped by the prosecutors in early June). Mohamud is innocent until proven guilty, and on those grounds the Greens have not suspended her as a party member.
But this is nonsense. Suspension of privilege and responsibility in many areas has never been dependent on criminal conviction. When cops are accused of crimes, we demand they be immediately suspended. Mohamud may be facing a custodial sentence and hate crime designation if found guilty. The occult nature of the law is such that, if convicted, she will have always been guilty of the crime. Whether she stays on council or not is between her, the courts and the state government, but why on earth is she still representing the Greens?
Why on earth? Because the Greens have a majority on Yarra Council, and without Mohamud they don’t. They fear that if she is suspended, she won’t come back. How is it possible to have an alleged criminal assaulter of a trans person voting as a Green, while waging an internal war against a party figure for the opinions they hold on internal free speech, and the questions of sex and gender? It isn’t. It is hypocrisy pure and simple, and can be widely seen as such.
Australia has 0.3% of the world’s population. Australian First Nations and trans people are about 4% of that. In India and Bangladesh’s equatorial heat belt, tens of thousands are dying, because they must work during 45 degree-plus temperatures. Across the equatorial belt, hundreds of millions face illness and hunger right now due to global heating. Hundreds of thousands of Australians are in permanent housing precarity and homelessness.
Now is the time for the Greens to decisively reject the idea that they don’t need to prioritise, and to affirm, that they stand with these mass causes (which is central to First Nations peoples; how long before central Australia is uninhabitable?) and not pretend that every cultural, symbolic and rights issue can be serviced equally alongside them.
Cancelling convenors while the world burns? Good on ya. Push back harder in the partyroom, and among the membership, those in the party who disagree with this. This fight has to be had now. And live up to the policies you campaigned on, to stand up for those of us who want a living planet and a fair society, and the unstinting advocacy of that on the streets, and in whatever forum we happen to be governed by at the moment.
Thanks for this Guy. As a Greens voter for over 20 years, I 100% agree. If they don’t drop this identity politics stuff, I’ll be looking around for an Independent with their environment and social policies but not this rubbish.
Totally agree. This is completely suicidal behaviour by the Greens. It makes the Judean People’s Front, and its vicious battles with the People’s Front of Judea in the old Monty Python film, look comparitively sensible.
Splitter!!!
peeples frunt of jewdea
Like Woopwoop I did not vote for the Greens this time. My vote was usually ALP House of Reps with Greens in the Senate. This time it was Labor all round because the Greens brand of being so pious and principled has become a joke as we and the world at large have had to confront the realities of pandemic and climate catastrophe. Pragmatic governments standing for social justice and good old-fashioned public health measures won the confidence and support of their people. Meanwhile the ALP have finally recognised that they must address climate change in a genuine muscular fashion to win back support from the Greens. This last week will have taught us all that transition is not a fanciful, optional notion but an urgent critical need for us all and not least the coal communities. They are not spared by clinging to the status quo.
Yes, agreed. I campaigned for the Greens in Brisbane…for an apparently sensible approach to the issues that matter. Now all this nonsense is coming out of the woodwork. Gawd, Greens, have you learned NOTHING from recent rejections by the populace. We want thoughtful action on climate, housing, multinational pillage of our resources, taxation of those same companies, etc. Get it done.
Yep. Pocock. A Green Clive, only nicer.
Unless the Greens stop indulging in BS antics, they will go backward at the next election. I recall emailing a State Greens MP in Tasmania, pleading for more attention to mainstream issues and less radical activism. Her response was unapologetic – the Greens would keep pursuing a radical agenda. The Greens seem intent on alienating as many people as they can. Their holier-than-thou attitude pisses many off. I voted Greens this last election but would have preferred a Teal candidate, had I been given a choice. This flag protest is not going to win them any more friends. The Greens will remain on the fringe if they continue with this rubbish.
Yes, it events like this they keep reminding me why I don’t vote Greens…
PS: I love Tom’s cartoon! (and most of them actually)
Agreed! But it’s a struggle in some electorates, especially here in the Deep Nawth, because the choices are often the three majors, the Greens and the right-wing loonies, with nary a Teal in sight. Had to vote ALP as the lesser of two weevils….Because as an Australian, I can’t in all seriousness vote Green because of their pathetic, divisive social policies. If they stuck to their knitting on the environment, less inequality, better social housing, etc, they’d be tolerable. But a leader who pisses on the Australian flag? I don’t think so!
GOOD POINT Who Cares.
This is perfectly fine as far as the real fringe stuff goes, but mainstream issues like climate actually need radical activism if we’re to have any hope of staying under 2 degrees, let alone 1.5 degrees of warming.
The stakes couldn’t be higher right now, and whether it’s the Coalition/LNPs in-your-face denialism or the ALP’s milquetoast version of the same, supporting either one at this point means tacitly endorsing civilisational collapse.
I find it insane that someone would refuse to vote for the Greens despite being most aligned with their values and policy platform, on the basis that their fringe obsessions are kind of annoying.
It’s not insane. Why should anyone think the Green’s are serious about the issues that matter when they expend so much effort on this crap? You refer to them as ‘fringe issues’ which is what they should be; but if they were fringe to the Greens, the Greens would ignore them. Clearly these issues are fundamental life-or-death to the Greens, which is why its damned hard to take the Greens seriously.
Yes, we need radical action on climate change but a culture war around flags is not helpful. I prefer a persuasive approach to a combative approach. There are many Greens who think radical action is about getting arrested, chaining yourself to a bulldozer, or living in a treehouse. While this may have worked for Bob Brown 40 years ago, I much prefer the QLD Greens approach.
It is precisely their ‘fringe obsessions’ that stop any reasonable Australian voting for them. I don’t want to live in a country where being gay or trans is mandatory, thanks very much. Or where 4 per cent of the population have the major say in every social policy.
Seems to be a habit for the Greens – whenever they get a bit of power they go berserk. What a waste.
lets get a heap of winnebagoes together and head north..
You’re too late. We already have …
Thanks for articulating what many newbie Greens voters are thinking. Climate change was right up there as a priority for voters in May – we knew the Coalition would do bvgger all, Labor would do too little & that left us with Greens. Here’s hoping we are not stuck with buyers’ remorse.
At the risk of sounding parochial, the Greens we have in local council, at state level & now federal in Brisbane seem to be cut from a different cloth than the lot in NSW & Victoria.
Yeah, the Greens should avoid engaging in obvious culture wars. As important as treatise and indigenous recognition is, doing these things at a time when people are looking to the new parliament with a glimmer of hope is not helpful.
No offence Chris. “Yeah, the Greens should avoid engaging in obvious culture wars.” That may be so for others, but in the North . . . It could be war! Adam’s cultural ie intellectual – political skirmish as evidenced by his rejection of our National Flag has strong potential to divide. Based solely upon racial grounds alone. Never-mind broader heritage or historical and emotional values associated to and with National Flag by many, many Australians. Both Indigenous and Non Indigenous. I would rate Adam’s action . . as playing with fire. And in the North, that could mean literally.
And yet I could have sworn there was Adam on the tele yesterday, belting out the national anthem at the citizenship ceremony held for Mason Cox at the MCG
Exactly, take a leaf out of Albanese’s playbook and simply dismiss the culture wars for what they are. Acknowledge that vulnerable people are being used for political purposes then take the high ground. It completely sucks the oxygen away from News Corp, which is great
The Terrorgraph & 2GB have been seriously hammering it all week.