Richard Di Natale quits when grass has never been greener
Richard Di Natale’s successor is being urged to focus on climate rather than a smorgasbord of inner-urban issues.
With the nation anxious over bushfires and seemingly keen for its leaders to do more to tackle climate change, by rights this should be a golden time for the Australian Greens.
Richard Di Natale, the doctor turned Greens leader who announced his political departure on Monday, claimed to be leaving the party in good health.
There is some evidence to support his diagnosis: an increased vote at last year’s federal election and gently rising support in polls since.
However, to some — including senior figures within the party — it should be doing a lot better, given the intense concern over global warming triggered by the extended bushfire crisis and perceptions of dithering on the issue by the major parties.
It’s true that Di Natale, as he trumpeted on Monday, presided over an increase in the Greens’ vote; the party achieved a 1.57 per cent swing in the Senate in May last year to secure 10.19 per cent of primary votes, and a 0.17 per cent swing in the House of Representatives to win 10.4 per cent of the vote.
However, this did not deliver a net rise in seats. In terms of representation, the party under Di Natale appears to have been treading water; stuck on nine senators in the past two parliaments, while failing to expand its one seat in the reps.
The party born in the wilds of Tasmania certainly still appears a long way from Di Natale’s bold 2015 prediction of a doubling of its primary vote to 20 per cent in a decade.
‘Great leader’
Plenty of Greens lined up to praise the outgoing leader, who cited a desire to spend more time with his young sons, Luca and Ben, and wife Lucy Quarterman, as a key factor in his resignation as leader and intention to leave parliament.
“He’s been a great leader of the Greens,” says the man who started it all for the Greens at a federal level, former leader Bob Brown.
“He set an enormously strong foundation and pattern for the Greens when he increased the Greens vote at the election in May last year, while the vote for the Coalition and Labor went down.
“He made the stand against the logging of forests in the Tarkine (in Tasmania’s northwest) and in Victoria and NSW when Labor and the Coalition favoured the chainsaws. He made the stand against more coalmines, not least the Adani coalmine, when Labor sat on the fence and the Coalition pressed on the accelerator.
“He of course made the moral stand with the Greens against the appalling behaviour (towards the) … good human beings on Manus and Nauru, when all those people wanted was to find peace in their own lives and to escape from terror.”
All of which might be true, but even the most passionate of Greens believes the party that claims to have the most credibility on climate change ought to be doing more than achieving small vote increases and retaining current seats.
Greens’ time
While also complimentary about Di Natale, his immediate predecessor, Christine Milne, is among those urging the next leader — who insiders tip to be Adam Bandt — to focus on climate change like never before.
“Now is the time for the Greens,” Milne tells Inquirer. “This century was always going to be the century of the environment because it was about survival, and at last … the whole country is now focused on the consequences of inaction.”
Milne argues Di Natale held the party together, making solid gains, at a very difficult time. “Richard has done a very good job in difficult circumstances,” she says.
“He picked up the reins from Bob and I on climate and he has been out the front of that; the same on marriage equality; the same on refugees.
“He had to handle all the difficulties of the dual citizenship, which was very disruptive with Larissa (Waters) and Scott (Ludlam), and then the double dissolution. It hasn’t been an easy period to lead the Greens. So I think he’s done a great job.”
However, while not advocating an end to the party’s campaigning on social issues, Milne and others are calling on the new leader to “step up” on climate change, above all else.
“I think it’s very clear that global warming is the No 1 issue for the Greens,” says Milne, who led the party after Brown’s retirement in 2012, until retiring herself in 2015.
“It has to be. You have no opportunity to have an equal society, a safe and secure future until you deal with global warming. That is the overwhelming issue of the day.
“There are only certain moments when the whole of Australia is focused on a particular issue, and there has never been a moment — never — when the whole country has focused on global warming like they have this summer.
“There’s not a place that has not been affected by smoke, by fire, by the threat or fear of fire, by the consequences of fire. The Greens rarely have these moments when suddenly everyone is focused on an issue — and that is the point at which you need to step up.”
Former Tasmanian state Greens leader Kim Booth is similarly urging the party to use the new leadership to better focus more solidly on climate and the environment.
“The Greens need to make sure they focus on the really big important issues, particularly climate change,” Booth told Inquirer.
“The new leadership team needs to be very clear about those issues and to focus on those core issues, rather than getting distracted and drawn into a smorgasbord of relatively minor issues.
“Or else they (the party) could end up going the way of the Democrats and just become a blancmange. Because you either stand for something or you end up standing for nothing.
“And I think that in some cases, particularly here in Tasmania, that’s been clearly evidenced by the drop in electoral support for the Greens in the past few years.”
The old guard of the party, with its genesis in battles over Tasmanian hydro dams and logging, has always pushed the primacy of environmental issues over the concerns of the party’s urbanites or hard left.
Political window
However, the push for the new leader to focus more sharply on climate above all else — including refugees, LGBTI, health and education — appears broader than in the past.
There is a palpable sense of urgency; of a political window closing if gains are not made now, while there is clear public concern sparked by this summer’s bushfires, drought, record high temperatures, and lingering anger at Scott Morrison’s Hawaiian holiday.
Those of this view stress they are not urging the Greens to become a single-issue party; merely to prioritise and focus energies on the most important — and electorally fruitful — issue.
“You’ve got to rank the issues in order of importance; you’ve got to have some sense of scale,” says Booth.
Brown agrees that the next leader must seize the momentum on climate, including halting native forest logging. “They are in a beautiful position to capitalise on a changed public appreciation not only of how dangerous climate change is but how damaging it is now,” Brown tells Inquirer.
“The next election is going to be very, very strong for the Greens, with an electorate set up, with the big parties leaving Australia at the back of the class on climate change and the environment.
“There is a real change. The events of the last few months have changed the political ether in Australia and we’ve seen the environment go from back of the ranks to the most important issue in the front of minds of people. And that’s where the Greens come in.”
Tensions between the party’s hard left and moderates, and between its urbanites and wilderness campaigners, will continue.
However, it is perhaps this push to better leverage the national mood on climate — without becoming a single-issue party — that will be the greatest challenge for Di Natale’s successor.
Bandt leads pack
Brown on Monday pointed to a “galaxy of great potential leaders”. These include the two current co-deputies, Waters and Bandt, as well as Sarah Hanson-Young, Nick McKim and Peter Whish-Wilson.
However, unless things changed overnight on Monday, party insiders expected Bandt to be elected unopposed.
They said a contest was possible for deputy, although it was unclear whether the model of two 2ICs would be followed.
If Bandt takes charge of the party, a Senate leader would be needed.
Di Natale, who as a doctor worked in Aboriginal health in the Northern Territory, as well as HIV prevention in India and the drug and alcohol sector, would not back a successor but did nominate his political career highlights.
These, he said, included the carbon price the Greens negotiated with the Gillard Labor government in 2010, the banking and disability royal commissions, and the legalisation of gay marriage.
Others nominated his advocacy on climate change, for a federal anti-corruption watchdog, higher standards of conduct among MPs and medicinal use of cannabis.
The Victorian, who turns 50 in June, will also be remembered by some for leading the Greens’ walkout during Pauline Hanson’s first speech after her election to the Senate in 2016.
Di Natale made it clear he did not believe former leaders should linger, suggesting he would leave the Senate, providing his successor with nothing more than this phone number.
After a decade in the Senate, and almost five years as leader, the former GP said the rationale oft-cited by departing MPs of “spending more time with the family” was not just a cliche. “As it turns out, in some cases it’s true,” he said. “My boys are nine and 11 years old and they have only ever known their dad as a busy, tired and sometimes grumpy politician.
“As they grow up quickly to become young men, I want to spend more time by their side than a relentless political schedule allows.”
It was an echo of a very different politician, former Tasmanian Liberal premier Will Hodgman, who last month quit as premier halfway into his second term, citing in large part the toll his career had taken on his young family.
Bandt, a former public-interest lawyer, also has a family: wife Claudia and two young daughters, Wren and Elke.
Having two successive leaders from Victoria completes the power shift of the Greens from Tasmania, but Bandt appears to have broad support across the party.
“(Another urban mainland leader) has nothing to do with it,” argues Brown. “The best person should get the leadership, whether from Burnie or Broome.”
The member for Melbourne — the Greens’ sole House of Representatives MP — since 2010, Bandt was the first Green to win a Reps seat at a general election. The 47-year-old is the party’s climate change spokesman; another factor in his favour, given the internal mood to turbocharge the issue.
“I will be standing for Greens Leader,” Bandt tweeted. “Thank you Richard for your leadership and service to Aust. I look forward to talking with my colleagues about how we share leadership across the House & Senate as we fight the climate emergency and inequality with a Green New Deal.”
For all this summer’s focus on fires and climate, Newspoll has the Greens on precisely the same primary vote at the beginning of this month (January 29 to February 1) as it had in October last year (October 17 to 19): 13 per cent.
If the lofty aims of the party espoused by the likes of Milne, Brown and Di Natale are to be realised, the new leader will need to do a whole lot better and sustain any gains long after the smoke clears and the winter rains fall.
Additional reporting: Rosie Lewis, agencies