Angry Adam Bandt’s challenge

Not long ago, when the Soviet Union’s admirers included former Greens senator Lee Rhiannon, Kremlinologists used to pore over the placement — or sudden disappearance — of politburo members in photos, decoding the shifts in power. On Tuesday, Adam Bandt was elected unopposed as the new leader of the Greens. It was a bloodless succession — this country being a democracy, for all its faults in the eyes of social justice warriors — but the deliberative processes of the party can be strangely furtive and old-fashioned.

No open contest of exuberant candidates for the top job, no town hall debates of competing vision or policy detail, no sense that they — and we — emerge from the process with a firmer grip on what the Greens are all about. On Monday, Bob Brown spruiked the “galaxy of great potential leaders” to replace Richard Di Natale. This makes it sound a tough choice, but with only 10 members the logistics aren’t tricky. The leadership machinations — boring or portentous, who knows? — are a black hole. It’s a reminder that a lot of the worst things said about the party came not from outsiders but from members complaining of factional thuggery and beastly behaviour hidden from the rest of us behind the Green Curtain.

The closed society of the Greens is galling partly because of the propensity of its leaders constantly to demand openness and transparency from every other political actor, often attributing to them all kinds of bad faith and concealed conflicts.

This kind of thing is not only tediously self-righteous but also politically unintelligent. Minor parties don’t have to agree with the majors but they do have to make an effort to understand them if any kind of political collaboration is to work. On Tuesday, as a newly minted leader, Mr Bandt declared himself ready to sit down with Scott Morrison to find common ground on climate change. His idea of smoothing the way was to suggest the Prime Minister’s current policy would kill three times as many people as had died so far in the bushfire season.

A lawyer by training, Mr Bandt comes across as a hanging judge, not a negotiator. In the thick of the bushfire crisis he tweeted a photo of Coalition MPs as “Exhibit A in the upcoming climate trials”. His apocalyptic denunciations of killer companies and criminal politicians — death everywhere — simply don’t jell with his maiden speech renouncing “fear and suspicion”. Back then, too, he paid tribute to former industrial law clients: the “real workers and families” of the Latrobe Valley power stations.

It’s this mainstream reality that should energise Mr Bandt: not hurling courtroom charges or terrifying the mob but being upfront about his priorities while willing to persuade, juggle trade-offs and be part of the common search for workable solutions.