Green dream turns to ashes

THE Greens and independents should heed their results in the NSW election.

NSW Greens

MUCH of the talk surrounding Saturday's NSW election result has centred on the degree to which it affects the long-term viability of the Labor Party. The size of the defeat has left the once powerful NSW arm of Australia's oldest political party shattered, with possible federal implications for Prime Minister Julia Gillard given the role of the carbon tax during the campaign.

But beyond Labor's poor showing, the results are particularly significant for the Greens and rural independents.

Bob Brown's party had high hopes of winning at least two lower house seats and possibly a third, as well as control of the state's Legislative Council. However, it appears likely the Greens will fall short in Marrickville - where sitting Labor MP Carmel Tebbutt yesterday claimed victory - and Balmain, where Labor's Verity Firth appears to have held out against the Greens challenge.

And the Greens' bid for control of the upper house has failed in the wake of the sizeable primary support for the Coalition, meaning the conservatives will control the Legislative Council with the backing of right-wing minor parties instead of having to seek Greens' support for every vote.

Counting for the Legislative Council has even thrown up the bizarre Greens' recalcitrance in refusing to do a preference deal with Labor, giving Pauline Hanson a narrow window of opportunity to restart her political career.

Late counting will determine whether that plays out, but it could be a case of the bad becoming the enemy of something much worse for the Australian polity.

Expectations management is something the Greens clearly have to learn. The party has a habit of talking itself into a situation where solid minor party performances are viewed as failure.

"A 1.4 per cent increase in the vote across the board when the expectations were huge, is cause for inevitable criticism," says former leader of the Australian Democrats Natasha Stott Despoja.

Even though they won more than 10 per cent of the statewide vote and concentrated that vote in inner-city seats to threaten the two-party stranglehold on the all-important house of government, most of the talk is about how the Greens underperformed at this election.

"It can seem strange that we are debating a minor party's 'failed' election effort when they hit 35 per cent [primary vote in Marrickville], an impressive result for a small party at the best of times," Stott Despoja says.

"However, the Greens are partly responsible for this predicament: they have a tendency to oversell and under-deliver and are rarely called on it. Given the hype and resources spent on this campaign, they are being judged more like the major parties."

And that judgment has found them wanting, certainly with respect to the quality of their candidates in Marrickville and Balmain.

The Greens have an opportunity in the wake of the demise of the Australian Democrats to establish themselves as the clear third force in Australian politics and they are on their way to achieving that. But the lessons from Marrickville and Balmain are not to take voters for granted by preselecting candidates with controversial pedigrees.

Fiona Byrne in Marrickville and Jamie Parker in Balmain both came in for negative media attention during the campaign. Other candidates probably would have won both seats.

"They had both been local mayors, so it wasn't as if voters didn't know who they were or what they stood for," says federal Infrastructure Minister and federal MP for the area that includes Marrickville, Anthony Albanese.

"Usually that should work for state parliamentary candidates, but in their cases it might have worked against them."

Albanese - who is married to Tebbutt - is alluding to the Israel boycott voted for by Byrne on the Marrickville Council. Earlier this month Byrne was caught out by The Australian when she denied having any intention to call on state parliament also to boycott Israel if elected, but a tape exists of her doing exactly that at a press conference last month.

And she wrote to Tebbutt and Albanese in an attempt to wedge them on this issue. It backfired, with inconsistencies in what the Greens were calling for, and to what extent it fitted into the party platform.

"It's important the people recognise that the Greens aren't a social movement, they are a political party," Albanese argues. "There is a big gap between the ideological position of the Greens NSW leadership and those people who vote for them."

Stott Despoja adds: "Arguably, this is the first election in which the Greens have been subject to this scrutiny in one seat at least."

Parker, the Greens candidate for Balmain, had his campaign damaged when it was reported he had promoted alleged "snake oil" natural health products such as Horny Goat Weed when he was marketing director for Cat Media. Parker said his position as marketing director did not include advertising responsibilities. Reports also revealed a business associate of Parker's is set to stand trial for alleged involvement in a car rebirthing scheme. Parker had no knowledge of what was happening and was not contacted by police, but the association couldn't have helped his campaign given Parker's business experience was being used to sell him to the electorate.

Local resident and Australian Workers Union national secretary Paul Howes is convinced that if the Greens had selected another candidate they would have won the seat. "For sure they would have. While Verity [Firth] is a popular local member this should have been the election the Greens won Balmain convincingly. If they don't win it this time they won't win it in the future," Howes argues.

"Frankly, preselecting a candidate with . . . question marks hanging over [them] is not only naive, it's just plain stupid. If either major party had preselected a candidate like [that] there would have been an outcry to disendorse them."

Because the Balmain and Marrickville electorates border each other, the local press circulation overlaps. Voters were left with an impression the Greens weren't the credible political force they seek to project.

Brown tries to put the best spin on the Greens falling short of their own high expectations by pointing out that the party has been elevated to the second party of choice in more than a dozen electorates following the allocation of preferences at the NSW election.

That is true, but Stott Despoja provides the obvious retort: "Unfortunately, there is no silver medal in politics and if you expect to win and do not, you get the same criticism and castigation as the major parties."

If the Greens are disappointed by the weekend's result, the rural independents Tony Windsor and Rob Oakeshott must be alarmed. The swings against the local independents in their areas, especially for Oakeshott, are perhaps a sign that voters aren't happy with the call each of them made to back Labor, especially as their electorates are conservative by nature.

This is the most significant federal implication of the NSW result, notwithstanding that Barry O'Farrell campaigned long and hard against the carbon tax.

"We saw a whole swath of voters come back to the Nationals," says the party's state director Ben Franklin. "I am sure a combination of factors were at play. Good local campaigning by our people, a desire by voters to have a local voice that is part of the new government, but also certainly anger at the actions of Oakeshott and Windsor."

Across rural NSW, independent candidates fared poorly. Three of the four rural independents in the Legislative Assembly lost their seats, including Oakeshott's close friend Peter Besseling, who took over his seat of Port Macquarie when Oakeshott moved into the federal parliament. And Peter Draper lost his seat of Tamworth, which had been held by Windsor before he moved to the federal seat of New England.

Besseling suffered a two-party preferred swing against him of more than 11 per cent and the Nationals candidate won the seat on primaries. Draper was defeated by the candidate preselected by the Nationals under its US-style primaries trial: an effort to give the local community more ownership of their candidate. It worked: Kevin Anderson won with a 12.5 per cent swing.

"Voters in Tamworth clearly welcomed the chance to have a hand in who we picked as their Nationals candidate," Franklin says.

"In fact I wouldn't be surprised if, in the face of Windsor backing a party to remain in government federally that few in Tamworth would ever back, the primary process acted like an insulator to the state member ever acting with such disregard to their interests."

Windsor is expected to retire before the next election, so he may not be all that fussed by what he witnessed on Saturday. But Oakeshott, in his early 40s, hopes to be in politics for some time to come, which means he will need to heal the outrage in his own backyard.

On Sunday, Tony Abbott refused to rule out doing a deal with Oakeshott, offering not to run a Coalition candidate in his seat if he switched sides. That's a remote prospect now, but if Labor's position doesn't improve, Oakeshott may become nervous enough to be amenable to such an offer.

The next federal election is still more than two years off, which, as both independents say, is plenty of time for Labor to get its act together. For Labor to get that much time to right its present predicament it has to rely on the support of Windsor and Oakeshott.

Both men are singing to that song sheet and aggression towards them from the Coalition is hardly likely to change their minds. But the pressure is mounting.