With the departure of Ted Baillieu, it’s a good time for a fresh look at one of his key moves as Liberal leader — the decision to preference Labor ahead of the Greens across the board at the last Victorian election.
If those preferences had gone to the Greens instead (as they had in past elections), they would in all probability have taken three of Labor’s inner city seats: Brunswick, Melbourne and Richmond. Three fewer Labor MPs in the current Legislative Assembly would make a big difference to its dynamic.
That’s not to say the Greens would be terribly sympathetic to the current government, which has taken some decisions (alpine grazing, wind farms) that outrage Greens’ supporters. But their presence would give new Premier Denis Napthine some additional options. With relatively poor polling and limited resources the Greens would not be keen on an early election, and they might have been open to some sort of deal (maybe one of them taking the speakership) that would keep the Coalition in power.
Even more so, one might think, since the alternative is having a government in hock to Geoff Shaw, a fundamentalist whose positions are the antithesis of everything the Greens stand for.
Of course, it’s not certain the 2010 election outcome would otherwise have been the same if the decision on preferences had been different. At the time, it was seen as a boost to Baillieu’s standing, showing him to be a decisive leader, and it certainly heightened Labor’s obsession with the Greens and the inner city, which diverted vital resources from its marginal seats.
Maybe without that distraction, Labor would have found the extra 262 votes to hold Bentleigh, creating a hung parliament. We will never know.
But it’s interesting that there seems to have been so little soul-searching among the Liberals as to whether they did the right thing with preferences. The narrative that the Greens are the real enemy has taken firm hold.
And that in turn lends even more interest to tomorrow’s Western Australian election, where the Greens and the Liberals have quite surprisingly managed to come to terms. For the first time since the Queensland state election of 1995 (the koala motorway election), the Greens are directing preferences to the Liberals in two seats, North West Central and Warren-Blackwood, both in an effort to get the Liberals up ahead of the Nationals.
In return, the Liberals are preferencing the Greens ahead of Labor in the only lower house seat that might matter, Fremantle, and also in four of the six upper house regions (my colleague Poll Bludger has the details).
For the Greens, this is a good opportunity to show some flexibility. There’s no real doubt about the overall outcome, and there’s not much in the way of policy difference between the two major parties anyway. Building some bridges to the Liberals is a sensible move.
The Liberals’ motivations are not so clear, but in a sense it’s a case of “Only Nixon can go to China”: because no one would suspect the WA Liberals of being a progressive organisation in the first place, they can afford to be pragmatic about their preferences.
Baillieu had no such flexibility. It didn’t matter that preferencing the Greens had been standard practice in the past, or that it made perfect sense in terms of the Liberal Party’s raison d’etre: (a) beat the ALP; (b) defend the economic interests of the middle class, on both of which the Greens are better allies. Anything that looked like sympathy for the Greens would have just fed the notion that Baillieu was a dangerous radical.
So he decided to placate the Right by shafting the Greens. In the short term it worked well, but as he found out this week, some people really can’t be appeased.
Charles Richardson makes an interesting assumption that the Liberals and Greens have in common at least the economic interests of the middle class- I think he is more or less on the money. But how often are perceptions and policy driven by the hackneyed and tired left/right wing explanations of politics and thus inform public policy. a more useful distinction would be that of corporatism VS the rest- international and domestic corporate interests have dictated free trade agreements, tax policy, fiduciary policy. deregulation et al for at least thirty years and are responsible for the tweedledum tweedledee policy distinctions of contemporary liberal and labor. Corporatism rules ok? and though it would masquerade as capitalism it has nothing at all to do with individual enterprise or the free agency of the individual. In opposing this death force the Greens and the Nationals should be in league against the coporate lobbyists who successfully have managed to sell our resources of cheap, expropriate the profits while sending local industry, jobs and families, be they farmers, manufacturers , to the wall.
Charles. This theory, now accepted by most as historical fact, that by putting the Greens last, Ted Baillieu made himself look decisive and strong. Two things. First, the Vic ALP very kindly released their tracking poll for the election period, as part of their published post 2010 state election review, which shows no sign of a bounce for Baillieu around the time of the preferences announcement. No sign of much movement in the parties votes during the campaign at all, actually. Secondly, he was relentlessly bullied into doing it by the ALP, the Nationals, the media and his own MPs. And in the inner city, one third of Liberal voters ignored him and preferenced Green anyway. He was always a weak leader of a divided party, but no one really doubts that any more do they?
There is no logical reason why Greens can’t be politically conservative. It is an accident of history that the Green movement became a leftist tool, because it was a good one for beating capitalism with in lieu of a defunct class struggle.
Part of being a conservative is to conserve. It is a natural conservative instinct to want to conserve one’s future and the environment that underpins it.
What really pisses me off about the Greens is that they are running the biggest agenda on the planet with an ideological/politcal perspective that is bound to put a solid democratic majority against them and keep them out of power indefinitely, no matter what happens to the environment.
While co-operating with the Liberals on preferences is not exactly ‘ground breaking’ (it might be for them) it is a start.
Unfortunately, the sad fact of the matter is that, around the world (well, the Anglocentric, Murdoch-dominated parts of it anyway), the “conservative” media, political class, and voters by and large reject the idea of conservation, along with any related science.
And yet, the Republican party in the US was the one that established so many national parks – the archetypal conservative conservation policy. It was Nixon who established the EPA. And once, the Republicans were even the party of Lincoln. Sadly, no more. Hopefully, one day they might return from that brink.
@Greg – Thanks; as I said, we’ll never know what difference it made in 2010. Certainly the tone of press coverage at the time changed, and I think it’s quite possible that had a positive effect for the Liberals, but that’s as much as I’d say. I agree that it’s a decision Baillieu was bullied into. And you’re quite right about a third of Liberal voters preferencing the Greens anyway – I drew attention to that at the time.