Greenage daydreamsBy KEVIN BONHAMI have rarely known a political party that talks up its electoral chances and results as blatantly as the Greens. The premature on-the-night celebration of what is now an uncertain (though fairly likely) Christine Milne Senate victory is not a freak incident, but rather, business as usual. It reminds me of Milne claiming that the party might hold all its seats immediately after the 1998 state poll when it was clearly incapable of holding more than two (it won one), of Bob Brown saying (pre-poll) he was confident Michael Organ would be returned in Cunningham (Organ didn’t even threaten the Liberals for second), of the ludicrous post-Accord “Go! Go !Go! Green Government” push (the party gained no new seats), and more other false messianic predictions than you’ll see anywhere outside the heavy discount bin of a dodgy astrology bookstore. True, talking up your chances is important for morale - to a degree - and everyone likes to think their efforts will be rewarded. Yet not only does massive overconfidence project an image of complete incompetence, but the Greens’ instant-revisionist job on the 2004 election is a clear attempt to disguise what was really a rather mediocre result. Much has been made of the “fact” that the Greens increased their vote in every state and territory. That they did - in the House of Reps, that is. Their share of the Reps vote indeed rose nationwide from 4.9% to 6.9%. This might seem impressive, but what those trumpeting this result are ignoring is that the Australian Democrats’ Reps vote imploded at this election, down from 5.3% to 1.1% (in some cases through simply not fielding a candidate). The Greens captured less than half of this monumental exodus. Indeed, state-by-state results show that the combined Green/Democrat vote declined in the House of Reps in every state and territory, and in the Senate in every state. A couple of especially bad states for the combined Green/Democrat vote deserve special mention. In South Australia, the Greens gained only 1.6% of the total vote while the Democrats lost 8.7% in the Reps and 3.2% while the Democrats lost 10.3% in the Senate (although Meg Lees’ Progressive Alliance polled 1.2% there). In Tasmania, the Dems went from polling 4.5% to not contesting while the Greens only gained 1.6% (Reps), but the real disaster was in the Tasmanian Senate. There, the Democrats slumped from 4.6% to 0.8% and the Greens … also went backwards! Had they held their 2001 level of support they would be shoo-ins for the final Senate seat, but instead the outcome remains (at the time of writing) in some doubt. It shows just how glib the Greens are about their results that Ben Oquist (among others) could trumpet as fact that they gained votes in every state and territory in the Reps where they weren’t going to win a seat anyway, while ignoring a small but potentially critical loss of votes in the Tasmanian Senate. They should have been shoo-ins for the Tassie Senate anyway. On a personal level Christine Milne’s advertising was very cleverly targeted, and I was as surprised as anyone not to see her registering a quota in primaries and then some. Perhaps it came down to the party’s politically immature and pretentious handling of the Family First scare campaign - instead of taking it on the chin as no better or worse than so many things they have said about so many others, (including Bob Brown's inaccurate "extreme right" call about the socially reactionary but otherwise usually moderate Family First themselves), they allowed it to rattle them and hence came across as whingeing and holier-than-thou. Again! Much has also been said by the Greens about the “low” Liberal vote in Tasmania proving that Tasmanians did not support John Howard’s policy on old-growth logging. It’s true that the Coalition achieved its lowest House of Reps primary vote (42.4%) of any state, but this is actually a really good result for the Liberals, all things considered. The party in Tasmania had no incumbent MHRs, had inexperienced candidates, and had been mauled beyond recognition by its own hand at state level. It is most prominently federally represented by socially extreme and uninspiring Senators who would never win a House of Representatives seat (which didn’t stop an enormous scrap over which of them would get to top the ticket), and was further embarrassed during the campaign by Rene Hidding’s ludicrous and peculiar stunt of treating the election as a referendum on forest policy. By any normal standards such a party should have been fighting to beat the Greens into second as it does at state level. Instead, Tasmania saw the Liberals’ second-largest swing by state in both the Reps and the Senate. Furthermore, Labor MHR for Lyons, Dick Adams, stated explicitly that he would block Mark Latham’s forestry package if he held the balance of power, and even took a pro-logging position more extreme than Howard’s. This may well have saved his seat, but more importantly, any assessment of candidates’ attitudes to old-growth logging must include Adams on the side of those who supported the RFA, at which point the RFA-supporting candidates have the majority of House of Reps votes after all. This was supposed to be the election at which the Greens replaced the Democrats as the third force in Australian politics. Yet (albeit hindered by the Democrats still pulling votes but directing preferences to Family First) all they have to show for this effort is one certain, one unclear and one unlikely Senate seat. They will probably not get the five seats needed to secure party status and outnumber the Democrats. Worse still, the Greens’ strategy of holding preferences to the major parties to ransom over forests policy quite simply totally backfired. It resulted in Labor releasing a scratchy, ill-disciplined, too-green policy that clearly conflicted with the industry’s wishes, and then getting totally outmaneuvered by Howard’s counter-offer, which achieved the seemingly impossible feat of reserving 170,000 hectares while getting industry support. Of course, there was a trick: the saved old-growth is old-growth that would not have been logged for another 13 years at minimum anyway, and almost everybody expects that old-growth logging will have been phased out by then - a point opponents of the plan did not communicate at all clearly in their attacks on it. Not only did Labor’s policy forfeit the industry’s vote but it wasn’t even all that scientifically credible. To select a group of areas for an enquiry, some of which had no particular significance beyond “community concern”, and then pre-empt that the enquiry is likely to recommend the reservation of most of these areas was politically reckless and suggested that the enquiries would have been loaded or otherwise pressured to deliver a certain outcome. (There is also much I could say, as a biogeographer, about the defects in Labor’s assumption that a bioregional approach would “fix” the RFA, but that is outside the scope of this piece.) The net outcome of Labor’s forest policy disaster was not only the loss of Braddon, but also the loss of any chance Labor might have had of capturing any SE, NSW and NE Vic timber country seats from the Coalition. Furthermore, the policy does not seem to have done the party any favours in the Senate - especially the Tasmanian Senate. In 1998 the Liberal Senate team headed by Eric Abetz polled a miserable 33.8%. Six years later another Abetz-led team polled 46.8%, almost a full quota more. Let’s be generous and say seven of the thirteen points gained were former Harradine and One Nation voters - there is still no escaping this conclusion: that Howard’s forests policy won votes for the Coalition while Latham’s forest policy won votes for absolutely nobody. Of course, the Greens will be all too quick to tell you that being popular doesn’t matter and being right is more important. Yet that never stopped them from claiming popularity mattered when talking up the results of discredited opinion polls claiming to show majority support for ending old-growth logging. It also hasn’t stopped them from complaining about Christine Milne being at risk of losing to someone she outpolled on primary votes about six to one, even though that in turn is inconsistent with their lack of complaints about Senator Kerry Nettle getting elected on preferences in NSW last time around despite being outpolled by the Democrats and One Nation. Finally, of course, there was the preferencing beat-up. The pieces written by Yulia Onsman and Ari Sharp on this site will give the uninitiated reader some vague idea of the realpolitik of Senate preference negotiations, but actually they only scratch the surface. From my brief inside experience of Senate preference negotiations, the game goes something like this. Party X does everything it can possibly do to exchange preferences with Party Y, unless Party Y is explicitly fascist. If Party Z gets in first with a better deal, then Party X puts out a press release denouncing Party Y as explicitly fascist, slamming Party Z as traitors to the entire progressive (or conservative) cause for dealing with Party Y at all, and pointing out that they would never ever have dealt with Party Y under any circumstances, no siree. It is the way the game is played, and every party knows it, and it will not change until the ridiculous above-the-line voting system is abolished or substantially reformed. Virtually everybody expected the Greens vote to rise at this election, especially with Christine Milne’s campaign clearly pitched conservatively to appeal to former Harradine voters. As such, in Tasmania, they were considered likely to have a spare 0.1-0.2 quotae. Had this happened, Green deals with any of the Democrats, Shayne Murphy or the ALP would have been potentially very beneficial to any of these parties. Instead, all these parties dealt with Family First. In the Saturday Mercury of October 16, Wayne Crawford writes this about the Greens: “Their overconfidence is believed to have been such in the lead-up to the poll that they showed very little interest in negotiating a preference exchange with Labor, which, as a result, made a deal to swap preferences with the church-backed party Family First.” I do not know what the factual basis for Crawford’s comments is, but it figures. If we date the birth of the modern Australian Greens from the formation of the Tasmanian Greens by the five “Independents” following the 1989 state election, then the party is now fifteen years old. As teenagers go, it has had no shortage of life experience, but it still, despite everything, seems to think it is the chosen one that is somehow more special and enlightened than all the other parties. Virtually nothing that happens to it is ever publicly its fault, and while the Democrats and Labor are engaged in forthright, honest and open examination of what the hell happened to them on October the 9th, the only public line the Greens are spinning is that they performed magnificently but were stabbed in the back by everybody else. How melodramatic. How politically immature. If this party wants to be taken seriously as a long-term third force in Australian politics, it is going to have to grow up. Dr Kevin Bonham is an invertebrate ecologist/biogeographer and psephelogical hack. His House of Reps pre-election prediction looks likely to be six seats out, a disappointing four-seat swing against his 2001 punditry skills, but not as bad as all those gutless journalists who thought it would be incredibly close. He is still trying to devise a voting system in which who you put last counts for as much as who you put first.
RAPID RESPONSE EMAIL: What do you think? Wednesday, October 20, 2004 |