The Greens Party of Australia got its best result in a mainland election to date on Saturday with 13 per cent in the Canberra by-election. I use the full term “”Greens Party of Australia”, rather than “”the Greens” or “”the Green movement” for good reason. The Greens candidate, James Warden, very consciously stood on issues going beyond the forests or conservation in general. He stood on a range of policies, including health, education and economic policy. This approach was taken by the Greens in the ACT election and has been hallmark of the successful Green candidates in Tasmania, notably Bob Brown. Essentially, the Greens are presenting a complete, alternative political philosophy. The Greens have moved far beyond being a single-issue party in the way the aircraft-noise party presented themselves in the NSW election (despite their protestations to the contrary). For good of for bad, they are essentially opposed to the wide extent market forces at present have in determining resource allocation of resources.
They propose alternative medicine and education, with heavy emphasis on ecology, are far more collectivist and are what the Greens Party would call more grassroots democratic than present structures. If it sounds a little Marxist and ideologically doctrinaire, it is perhaps because it is so. As a result, the Greens Party’s success has some fall-out for the conservation movement. This movement comprises a vast range of community and pressure groups such as the Wilderness Society, the Australian Conservation Foundation, various conservation councils and many smaller groups interested in things as diverse as reptiles, old buildings, art and culture. The people in the movement might not especially like the discipline of party politics, or some of the policies the party stands for. In a way conservationists might be in a similar position as trade unionists last century _ do they pursue their claims through the existing parties or do they set up their own with a full range of policies? In Britain last century, unionists thought they could not get a good result from either the Whigs (Liberal Party) or the Tories (Conservative Party), so set up the Labour party. By the 1920s Labour had replaced the Liberals as the second first in a two-party system. It is by no means an exact analogy, but it is certainly a long-term hope of the Greens Party to become government. Dr Brown says that in proportional systems they can creep up gradually; in single-member systems they have to get across a threshold first and then get a large number of seats in one go. Either way, though, the aim is government. At first blush, various conservation groups might applaud the Greens Party success.
However, it may well be that the major parties might turn to them when they put forward their requests and say: “”Well, you have got your own party, now, why don’t you turn to them for help?” _ much as the Tories did to the unions from about 1920 to about 1970. More pertinently, the Labor and Liberal Parties might be more suspicious of conservation groups and less likely to trust them with the confidences of government if they think that the conservation groups’ representatives will immediately dash around to the Greens Party MPs and tell all. This is the sort of concern that conservative Governments have had with unions in the past. So, far from increasing the bargaining power of conservation groups, the success of the Greens Party might weaken it.
This effect might be more pronounced when the nature of other Greens Party policies are more widely understood and many conservationists find the ideology distasteful. I suspect that the many people (especially the grey-greens) who on Saturday turned away from Labor’s Sue Robinson because she was ideologically far left and voted for the Greens’ Dr Warden might be surprised what is in the Greens’ policy. We are seeing a metaphophosis from a single-issue party to a party that presents a comprehensive ideology in doing that, for better or worse, it will inevitably diverge from conservation societies and groups which are quite deliberately and properly single-issue.