Tasmania has heard Labor’s anti-Green rhetoric before

An attempt at a take-down of the Greens speaks to a problem facing Labor nationally.

Tasmanian opposition leader Rebecca White in her electorate of Campbell Town. Picture: Peter Mathew

Some might find it odd: an opposition leader using a mid-term speech to hammer a minor party at least as much as the incumbent government. 

Rebecca White’s attempt at an oratory take-down of the Greens, however, speaks to a problem facing Labor nationally, not just in Tasmania, where the electoral system makes political marriages of convenience a frequent hazard.

Labor is haemorrhaging support from much of its traditional base — those who feel the party has forgotten them and their core concerns.

White conceded as much yesterday, promising to refocus her party on jobs, public services and the lives of working people.

It was no accident that the party chose as the location for its conference this year the city of Burnie, battered by the winds of economic change threatening its manufacturing foundations, as much as by the prevailing weather and pounding surf of Bass Strait.

Burnie sits in the electorate of Braddon, where the phenomenon of Labor’s shrinking base is most marked in the Tasmanian context. Labor’s perceived flirtations with the Greens on forestry and off-road bush tracks has cost the party dearly in these parts.

White admitted past alliances with the Greens, most recently from 2010-14, had been a mistake. She painted Labor’s former power-sharing partners as arrogant, anti-everything, job-destroying naysayers.

Her quest to distance herself from the tree-huggers went as far as endorsing roo shooting as a pastime.

Her problem is that Tasmanians have heard this song before. Former premier David Bartlett promised never to do a “deal with the (Greens) devil” in 2010, shortly before doing exactly that to cling to power. Many still recall the similar Faustian pact between Julia Gillard and Bob Brown in the same year.

At the last federal election, Labor tried to walk a tightrope between pitching progressive, green policies in urban seats, partly to counter the threat from the Greens in seats such as Grayndler, and retaining support in the regions.

We all saw how that ended.

The dilemma is an ongoing one. In Queensland, the Palaszczuk government is caught between appeasing the Greens, anti-coal sensibilities of inner-city seats such as Jackie Trad’s, without losing the rest of the state. White’s message is as relevant in Bundaberg, Balmain and Bendigo as in Burnie: Labor can’t out-green the Greens and must return to its roots, focusing above all on working people and their needs.