Push comes to shove back

BOB Brown and Julia Gillard need to realise the third party's power is at Labor discretion.

"LABOR is in government but the Greens are in power," Opposition Leader Tony Abbott said during a matter of public importance motion on Wednesday. As far as spin goes it's not a bad line, sure to cause concern among conservative swinging voters in outer metropolitan, marginal electorates.

Voters in seats such as Lindsay and Robertson in NSW didn't re-elect Labor just to see the Greens procure more power and influence. Yet that was the price Labor needed to pay to cobble together a minority government.

Political spin has to carry only a grain of truth to cut through to the minds of voters and Abbott's line satisfies the test. However, on the issue of Green power in the parliament it is important to remember that minor parties, even one on the rise like the Greens, are powerless when the two majors block their agenda. The balance of power in the new Senate that will sit from next July and Labor dependence on the Greens for minority government gives Bob Brown and his colleagues only the power Labor is prepared to part with.

And that is the debate raging inside Labor at the moment: are the Greens pushing the government around needlessly and should Labor push back? Or does Labor need to cover its left flank, pander and thereby stop preferences seeping to the Greens?

The Australian Greens are the political party of the moment. They won their first lower house seat at a federal election when we went to the polls in August. Next year when the half Senate elected at that time formally enters federal parliament the Greens' numbers will surge to nine, a high point for the fledgling minor party.

This week's Newspoll shows the Greens continue to rate well. After securing just shy of 12 per cent of the primary vote at the election, they have consistently polled between 13 per cent and 14 per cent in the polls.

Electoral success isn't the only highlight for the Greens. The policy debates so far this term have been dominated by their agenda. From gay marriage to a carbon tax, Greens can be happy with their influence over the minority Labor government, highlighted by the weekly meetings Brown and Adam Bandt get with Julia Gillard during sitting weeks (fortnightly outside sitting periods).

But today represents the first of what could be a series of road blocks to the continued rise of the Greens. Victorians head to the polls this weekend and, regardless of the answer to the question of who will become premier for the next four years, Greens won't be dominating the Victorian Legislative Assembly the way they have dominated the federal stage.

That's because the Coalition decided against preferencing the Greens ahead of the Labor Party, scuttling its attempts to win otherwise safe inner-city Labor seats.

Only time will tell whether other Liberal divisions emulate Ted Baillieu's courage in standing up to the rise of the Greens. John Howard thinks it was the right move; Peter Costello doesn't agree. Abbott was wary of the approach, telling the Victorian Liberal Party's campaign launch two Sundays ago that it is not its job to save Labor from its left flank. But last Sunday Coalition Senate leader Eric Abetz told Sky News' Australian Agenda that he would like to see the Greens put last on how-to-vote cards across the country at the next election, as Liberals already do in his home state Tasmania.

Questions surrounding the success or failure of the Greens at building further as a dominant minor party don't start and finish with the reactions from the main parties, however.

There is a set of internal party considerations that will play a key role in how the movement goes in the years ahead.

I am talking about the divide between environmentalists and social justice advocates within the party's ranks. Or, as it is sometimes more disparagingly described, between the tree-huggers and the watermelons (green on the outside, red on the inside).

Quantitative evidence as to this divide is difficult to come by (access to membership details is sketchy at best) and being an environmentalist or a social justice advocate isn't always a mutually exclusive choice.

But on the surface the Greens give the impression of developing a divide between members and those who vote for them that is not all that dissimilar to the divide that came to cripple the Australian Democrats.

Democrats voters wanted a centrist party that would "keep the bastards honest", as Don Chipp famously declared. But by the end of the Democrats' life cycle it was well and truly positioned to the left of the Labor Party, which was the placement Democrats members were comfortable with.

Greens voters want the party to focus on the environment, as Brown tends to do. Yet the growing party membership is more keen on many of the radical elements of the Greens' agenda which the likes of Sarah Hanson-Young and Lee Rhiannon are advocating.

Hanson-Young's attempt after the election to unseat an old environmental campaigner such as Christine Milne as party deputy highlights the problems of the future for the Greens. Does open warfare erupt between the party's twin tendencies when Brown, already well into his 60s, decides to give politics away? Probably. Until then he is enough of a cult figure to hold the movement together.

Minor parties dependent on the Senate for representation need only two poor performances to be wiped out. And once parliamentary representation falls below five seats, there is a host of official party status advantages that are lost (staffing, funding and office space).

The prevailing wisdom examines the threats to the Greens that exist externally (the Labor Party adjusting its platform, the Liberals denying the Greens preferences). These are legitimate threats, to be sure, but the biggest threat to the continued growth of the Greens comes from within: the growing divide between the body of the electorate that votes Green and the watermelons taking over the party's membership.

In the meantime, Abbott will continue to warn voters to consider a bigger threat: the power and influence of the Greens over the government.