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The Greens: More Than Just Eco-Warriors?

After a landmark victory at the 2010 election, winning their first seat in the legislative House of Representatives, the Greens are a minor party with a major agenda. Having held the balance of power in the Senate for the last three years and being key in the formation of the Gillard minority government – agreeing to support Labor after serious negotiations and many a deal struck – the Greens have drunk from the waters of success and power.

At the upcoming election on September 7th the Greens have a mammoth challenge ahead of them. Not only does Adam Bandt need to campaign hard for his reelection in the lower house seat of Melbourne, but the Greens will also need to fight to maintain their power in the Senate and against either of the major parties gaining absolute majority.

It has been a busy three years for the Greens. They introduced Denticare, a program offering free dental work for children from families of lower socio-economic status on Family Tax Benefit A. Similarly, they worked with the Gillard government to legislate the Carbon Tax, a monumental moment in Australian politics, as short-lived and highly unpopular as that policy was. They secured $10 billion in renewable energy funding and also set up the Parliamentary Budget Office to ensure all policies and election promises are properly costed.

However in a political climate where approximately 90% of Australians do not consider themselves ‘Green voters’ the Greens face an uphill battle. Polls suggest that support is down from 12% of the primary vote at the last election to 9%. Despite this, when I spoke with Christine Milne, the leader of the Austra­lian Greens, she said there is “no doubt” that the party will one day garner enough support to govern in their own right.

Branding the main parties as “the old parties” the Greens often use rhetoric of progressiveness when describing themselves and backwardness and age when describing the ALP and the Coalition. Thus, to Milne it is a matter of changing old habits and showing voters there are more options than just the two major parties to change minds and get votes.

“I think if you say to people ‘Do you care about the environment? Are you worried about the sort of world your children are going to inherit? Do you care about social justice? Do you care about the poor in Australia and the unemployed?’ Most people would say ‘Yes I do’ but then they may not necessarily see them­selves as Green. So the challenge that we have is for people to think about voting something other than the old political philosophies of last century,” she said.

There is a certain stigma associated with the Greens in mainstream Australia. You need only look to The Chaser’s War on Everything’s election special Yes we Canberra! from 2010 whose parody of the Greens election adver­tising campaign summed up the thoughts of many Australians:

“I’m an inner city trendy who’s never had to deal with real issues like drought, transport or having to run your own business, that’s why I voted Greens”

“I’m a cool hipster from Melbourne who always votes Greens to look alternative, that’s why I voted Greens”

“I was stoned on election day, that’s why I voted Greens”

“The Greens – the wankers choice since 1972”

Of course, this is comedy and satire, but it does illustrate a new stereotype. Where once many (especially older) Australians saw the Greens as radical environmentalist hippies, covered in dirt and chained to trees, the image of the urban yuppy who takes the moral high ground on social issues and has no fiscal sense has also developed. These are stereotypes that the Greens will need to shift before they have any conceivable chance of forming govern­ment.

A key challenge for the Greens is the need to convince the Australian public of their economic credentials. The party is regular­ly slammed for being ‘fiscally irresponsible’ despite the fact that they established the Parliamentary Budget Office; an institution set up as an independent body to analyse the government’s budgets and cost all party’s – not only the governing party’s – election policy promises. Indeed the Greens are the only political party to have had all of their policies fully costed in the lead up to this year’s federal election.

When asked to explain this damaging and somewhat unfounded popular perception, Milne suggests that it comes down to how vot­ers conceive of established roles for each party.

The “traditional mindset of Australians [is that] they’re either for the workers or they’re for the owners of capital” and so vote for the parties that best represent these two interests; Labor being forged out of the union movement and thus for the rights of workers, or the traditional Liberal party – now a coali­tion between the Liberals and the Nationals.

“Traditionally it has been thought that the owners of capital, who represent the interests of business –the Liberal party – are best equipped to manage the economy as they are the ones who want to maximize profits and maximize the amount of money in the econ­omy” Milne said. It is within this framework that the idea that the Liberals are the only ones who can properly handle the economy and bring about the ever-elusive economic surplus arose and has stuck.

It seems almost ironic that despite this, it’s the Greens, not the Liberals, whose policies could raise $43 billion over the next four years. How? In their election platform, a 0.2% levy on the big four banks in Australia on profits over $100 billion has been proposed. They would also abolish ‘clean-coal’ funding, increase the marginal tax rate on millionaires and restructure Labor’s ineffective mining tax.

In speaking to the ABC’s Barrie Cassidy on Insiders, Milne said “These huge [mining] companies – 80% of the shareholders are from overseas – are making mega profits in spite of the fall off of the commodity prices. We should get a fair return for our resources so that we can invest in education, so we can get people out of poverty. We need to transform this economy and they can afford to pay”.

So what exactly do the Greens want to do with the $43 billion they could raise? Social justice is high on the agenda with a proposed $50 a week increase to the Newstart allow­ance. “In a rich country like ours we ought not to be keeping people in poverty … this is what is fair and just and decent” Milne said.

On the issue of university funding, The Greens are the only party to be advocating for an increase, in comparison to Labor’s $2.3 billion “dumb cuts” which have been support­ed by Tony Abbott and the Coalition.

Milne’s message is simple:

“If you’re going to transition from an economy that is based on digging up, cutting down, and shipping away, to a smart, diversi­fied economy where you have critical thinking, innovation; you have the roll out of research and development, new industries, new jobs, then you back universities. You have to back education from early childhood, right through schools and into universities.”

And thus the Greens are proposing a 10% increase in university funding over the next four years as well as a $2 billion increase in schools funding on top of Labor’s Gonski re­forms. “If you’re talking about the future of the country, you have to recognise the driver of the future of a low-carbon economy and a smarter economy is through education,” she said.

In the wake of Labor’s leapfrog to the right with the so-called ‘PNG solution’ – whereby all refugees who arrive in Australia by boat will face processing and re-settlement in Papua New Guinea – the Greens are looking at a surge in support. Quick to come out against the policy, they have launched a social media campaign denouncing the plan with language such as: “shameful”, “ totally unacceptable”, “ a new disgraceful low” and nothing but “fear mongering and playing politics with the lives of vulnerable people”.

In comparison to Rudd’s hard-line approach and Abbott’s equally reprehensible military border control rhetoric with “Oper­ation Sovereign Borders”, the Greens have a “Plan To Save Lives”. This would include the resettlement of “many more” assessed refugees from Indonesia and Malaysia (though exactly how “many more” is yet to be seen), increased funding to the United Nations High Commis­sioner for Refugees in Indonesia to help fasten the assessment process, the opening of more family reunion places, a review on the ban on people seeking asylum from some countries by air, delinking the onshore and offshore quotas, the codification of Australia’s sea rescue policies and the establishment of an Australian Ambassador for refugee protection.

While branching out to tackle social justice and economics issues, the Greens con­tinue to promote environmentalism. As Milne explains,

“People are increasingly recognising that the environment is critical to survival.”

“The old parties grew out of an era when everyone considered the earth to be free” but this is “the century of the environment” a global crisis, driven by climate change and “the need to recognise we live on a finite planet”.

And environmentalism remains an important draw card for potential Greens sup­porters. This is especially true of young people who are becoming increasingly involved with movements such as The Australian Youth Climate Coalition, which recently held a con­ference in Melbourne. With over 1,500 young people in attendance from all over the country, Milne maintains that it is summits such as these which re-energize people, empowering and motivating them to continue agitating for change.

The Greens are no longer merely a protest party advocating for protection of the environment alone. While combatting climate change and strengthening environmental poli­cy remains at the party’s core, policy addressing broader social and economic issues is also being developed, costed and proposed.

Only time will tell what effect the grow­ing environmental youth movement, Labor’s new right-wing agenda, continual negative politics from the Liberal opposition and the Greens more diverse campaign platform will have on this year’s election. They won’t be holding government this time next year – that’s a guarantee – but with swing seats on the table and in the hope that the main parties won’t do a preference deal to keep them out, they may be lucky enough to pick up a few more seats in the lower house, and possibly maintain the balance of power in the Senate. As Milne said, “We want a decent world to live in in 50 years” and it is up to “switched on young people” to make sure we do.

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