It’s the environment, stupid. That must be at least part of the message of yesterday’s Canberra by-election as the Greens Party took 13 per cent of the vote _ the highest Green vote in mainland Australian voting.
It must put Federal Labor in a quandary. If it goes for the economy, stupid, in order to win back the middle ground, it can only further alienate the well-organised Greens Party. It is will not be enough to say that Canberra is somehow different from the rest of Australia _ full of armchair greenies and socialists who work for the Government, because yesterday’s vote showed otherwise _ that a largely public-sector town is capable of turning its back on Labor. True, the Democrats did not field a candidate to split the conservation vote, none the less, the Green vote was impressive. It was up from around 8 and a half per cent in last month’s Assembly election. The Greens candidate, James Warden, said the result was a “”timely and powerful message to Labor supporters”. “”Labor supporters must now tell their party that it must now change tack on its social, economic and environmental policies,” Dr Warden said. Even with a lack-lustre Liberal candidate and a Labor candidate with pro-conservation stand, voters wanted to send a message to the Prime Minister Paul Keating, he said. That message was one of disapproval of its forests policy and environmental policies in general, as well as a message against its economic rationalist approach. Voters had worked out that a pro-conservation Sue Robinson would make no difference on her own.
“”The Federal Government has to sit up and take notice of Green policies if it wants to hold on to office nationally,” Dr Warden said. The vote leakage from Labor to the Liberals via the Greens in the by-election was quite large. In past elections, Green preferences have gone about 70 per to Labor. In the by-election it was about 58 per cent to Labor and 42 per cent to the Liberals. This could be accounted for by a general strengthening of Green attitudes among normally Liberal-voting people (the Grey-Green effect and perhaps among women more than men), who then revert to a Liberal second preference. Or it could be a result of a disenchantment with Labor by both normally Labor voters who have voted Green-Liberal as a protest or disenchantment with Labor by normally Green voters who have changed their preferences. More likely a mix.
In which case it spells trouble for Labor, even taking account of the normal by-election protest vote. It means that Labor cannot take the Green preferences for granted on the view that Greens have nowhere else to go _ about 12 per cent of the Greens 10,000-odd voters yesterday thought otherwise, and did go somewhere else. Nationwide that constitutes about 1.5 per cent of the vote being channelled through the Greens from Labor to the Liberals. That would have been enough to have changed the result in the 1990 election for example. The result yesterday shows that former Senator Graham Richardson’s tactic in wooing the Green preferences in that election was correct. Since then a recession changed the electorate’s emphasis to the economy. It now seems the environment is back. The extraordinary things is that had the Liberals stuck by their now-proven-to-be-idiotic thought that they might not stand a candidate in this Labor stronghold, the Greens’ James Warden might have found himself on his way to Federal Parliament. (One can hardly use the metonymic cliche “”on his way to Canberra” in this case.)