Australian Politics

At all elections I've voted in, the Greens have been the first out of the noteworthy parties on my ballot, but I have variously put other smaller parties ahead of them, especially in the Senate. Pirate Party comes to mind as one example. In 2016 I think I did Pirate Party 1, Greens 2.

My reasoning for that was: even though I might agree with more of the Greens' policies, at the time I placed a high priority on the kinds of things the Pirate Party was advocating for. I still care a lot for intellectual property rights, but the importance of climate policy, housing, education, healthcare, and other things where the Greens perform better than Pirates has gone up over time.

To be honest, more recently I've turned more and more towards the Greens. I don't always agree with their methods and the way they prioritise things, but I can name very, very few of their policies that I actually disagree with. And frankly, the most recent example I can think of where I disagreed with their methods, they proved me wrong. Specifically, on the housing bill last year, I thought Labor's initial plan was bad, and the Greens got a good compromise out of them. I then thought the Greens should have accepted that compromise as "good enough", lest they get tagged yet again with the "letting the perfect be the enemy of the good" label that has unfairly haunted them since Rudd's climate policy.* But then the Greens kept at it, and ended up getting further compromise out of Labor, and only then supporting the Bill. Excellent work.

I’ve been voting in this country for 30 years, and for the last 20, it doesn’t seem to make a difference beyond undoing the last governments work

Hard to disagree with that, to be honest. I have complex feelings about this, from a bunch of different angles.

First: this is in no small part a Labor + LNP problem. I genuinely do believe that if the Greens had a majority in the House and Senate, it would make a huge really beneficial change. Partly, there is evidence for this. The Gillard minority Government is one of the most successful federal Governments we've ever had, and I believe that was in no small part thanks to the Greens and independents Labor was forced to compromise with in order to govern. The ACT government has long had Labor/Greens coalitions and though I don't follow it very closely, I've heard mostly good things. I can also point to governments elsewhere in the world where coalition governments are more commonplace, and at least when voters choose to vote more strongly left-wing, you tend to get better results than when Australia votes more left-wing.

And that segues me quite nicely to point 2. Our voting system. IRV is not a very good system. It's the best you can get with single-winner seats, but any single-winner system is always going to be worse than proportional systems. Our Senate uses STV, which is quasi-proportional, and so it's a fair bit better than IRV, but not as good as truly proportional systems. At the last federal election, over 12% of Australians wanted a Greens representative. Less than 3% actually got one. A combined 9% wanted One Nation and United Australia Party. They got 0. Labor got 51% of seats, from less than 33% of votes. The LNP is actually the most fairly-represented party, getting 39% of seats from 36% of votes. With more parties better-represented in Parliament, I think we would get better outcomes, instead of the same two parties over and over again. It would normalise the act of compromise to reach outcomes more people agree with. I think advocating for a change to our voting system to use something like MMP would be one of the best things we can do.

And thirdly, I've been a huge fan of former Brisbane City Councillor and former Greens Lord Mayoral candidate for Brisbane Jonathan Sriranganathan, ever since I started watching BCC meetings and seeing how thoughtful and dedicated he is. He has some really good words to say on the subject of electoralism (or the idea that merely voting better is a way to achieve better outcomes). I linked his final speech before leaving Council, which is really good and worth reading (also available in video form at the bottom), but this little bit is particularly powerful:

My time here has shown me the hard limits of electoralism as a standalone strategy for achieving social justice and ecological restoration. This entire system – including the council public service – has been structured to defend an unjust, extractivist order that benefits a privileged few, while brainwashing the majority into believing a better world isn’t possible. It is deeply naïve to think we just have to get a few more ‘good’ people elected and then everything will get better.

When I first won the Gabba ward, I actually had more faith in the potential of progressive government and running for office than I do now. I still think there’s significant strategic value in contesting elections to help tip the scales, but as they say in Barcelona, we must have one foot in the institutions and a thousand feet in the street.

It’s not that the individual politicians in this chamber are all personally corrupt. It’s not even that the major parties still take campaign donations from the corporate sector. It’s because this overly-hierarchical bureaucratic pseudo-democracy eventually reduces everyone who engages with it to faint shadows of what they could be – makes them afraid of deeper transformation. It narrows their thinking and turns them into bickering windbags.

He's been criticised by the major parties on a number of fronts, but one of the biggest ones earlier on was how heavily he gets involved in disruptive protests. His words here explain why he thinks it's such an important tool for political change, and I can't help but agree.

* and as a side note, I say "unfairly", because in the climate instance, it was manifestly unfair. Rudd's policy wasn't "good but not perfect" as Greens detractors would have you believe, it was actively bad. Treasury modelling (i.e., modelling designed to be as unbiased as possible, but likely biased towards the incumbent government if anything) said it would have no effect for 25 years. That means even today, we'd still be almost a decade away from it having any impact. And it included provisions that would mean if we wanted to increase it over time, we would have to pay polluters. Instead, the Greens ended up reaching a good compromise with the Gillard Government and seeing enormous positive change immediately. It's the LNP and the right-wing media that deserve the blame for our current poor position on climate, not the Greens.