The pitfalls of gesture politics

Richard Di Natale, who was talked up as the pragmatist to make the Greens a mainstream party, is escaping federal politics. His young sons and wife have more claim on him now than the party, which he leaves in tip-top form — or so he said on Monday when explaining his resignation as leader. In 2015, when this ambitious GP took over from Christine Milne, he irritated Labor by declaring the Greens to be “the natural home of progressive, mainstream Australian voters”. He reckoned his mob’s primary vote could be doubled to 20 per cent in a decade. On Monday he was still in hopeful mode: the major parties’ vote was doomed to keep declining and the Greens as a third force would rise to the opportunity of power-sharing.

Political reality may not be so obliging. Since the election in May last year, the primary vote of the Greens has ticked up, but some of this support may well return to Labor come the next federal poll and it’s distinctly possible that the Greens will settle back to their plateau level of around 10 per cent. Dr Di Natale inherited a party with 11 members and leaves with 10. Hope that last year’s election would boost the numbers came to nothing, and in 2018 a lot of Greens hype failed to deliver the Batman by-election in Melbourne.

Part of the story has been ugly internal conflict and complaints of a toxic culture, not only in Victoria but also a long history of futile intriguing by the hard-left NSW faction of Lee Rhiannon. The Greens’ grey eminence, Bob Brown, inspired environmental campaigns — over Tasmania’s Franklin River, for example — that galvanised support but were co-opted by the major parties. Across time this has had the perverse effect of making irrelevant paleo-left positions more influential within the Greens, hence the epithet “watermelons”. Ms Rhiannon has gone but obstacles to a constructive centrist role remain. Perhaps because of his idea of the Greens as a major party-in-waiting, Dr Di Natale too often struck a posture of self-righteous moral absolutism rather than seeking to engage and influence the party in power. (Gonski education funding was an exception where his divided party was to blame.) Refugee policy was a case in point; those who didn’t accept the Greens’ position were treated as hateful and to be denounced, not in error and to be persuaded.

The risk for the Greens is that they become ever less patient with the messy but vital business of parliamentary compromise. In the new age of low-effort gestural politics — think GetUp — the Greens spend too much time making personal political attacks and too little crafting policy coalitions. These tendencies, damaging to a workable democratic system, are reinforced by the malign influence of social media. It creates an addictive mirage of vigorous activism but brings no real-world solutions and is deeply alienating to the sensible mainstream. The Greens are confronted with a dilemma. The workings of the party are opaque, at odds with their lofty rhetoric. But if the superficially appealing reform of more power to the membership were adopted, the likely result would be a further Corbynite alienation of the party from the difficult issues that really matter to ordinary voters.