Tony Harris
This blog began its life with, and has largely focused on,
the Australian Greens slide away from being an anti-imperialist and genuinely antiwar
party, particularly the party’s gradual acceptance of the “reality” of the
Australia-US alliance. This
blogger rejoined the Greens around 2007/08 after a prolonged absence - I had pulled
out of Green party politics at the beginning of the 1990s, having been involved
in the early foundation of the Greens in NSW.
My involvement in the Greens from the early 1980s was very
much motivated by and anti-imperialist stance – opposition to traditional
imperialism through antiwar politics and opposition to the ecological
imperialism of a capitalism colonising and depleting the natural environment.
For Greens around the world in the 1980s this was linked through the nuclear
question – the threat of nuclear
Armageddon coupled with the ecological threat from nuclear power. With the end
of the Cold War and the post-Chernobyl dampener on nuclear power this anti-imperialist
stance of Green parties waned. This was coupled with a shift of Green parties
to more mainstream politics, preoccupation with electoralism and a move to
neo-liberalism, reflected ultimately in market based solutions to the problems
of global warming (see Elizabeth
Humphrys’ recent Left-Flank contribution to this debate).
This shift to the right appears to have occurred a little
later in Australia than elsewhere but is proceeding apace. Hall Greenland in a
recent post on this blog raised his concerns about the shift to neo-liberalism
in economic policy (see below) at the Adelaide national Greens policy
conference, and more is promised at the follow-up conference in November,
particularly over funding for private education.
But the Adelaide conference also confirmed the drift away
from a genuine antiwar politics for the Greens particularly as regards the
Australia-US alliance. The previous Peace and Security policy nominally
committed the Greens to withdraw from ANZUS. This has been replaced with a
statement that the Greens will seek a “renegotiated defence relationship with
our allies that promotes Australia's independent role in our region”.
With those two words, “our allies”, the Greens have signed on to
military alliances, something that makes it impossible for them to honestly
represent themselves as a party of “Peace and Non Violence”. Alliances
exist to make, and prepare for, war and to mobilise vast armaments expenditure.
They are fundamentally inconsistent with antiwar principles. In other words one
of the “four principles” that motivated the Greens at their foundation globally
in the 1980s has been quietly, and with little discussion, jettisoned. “Our
allies” of course means principally the United States, and through that
relationship privileges other alliance connections such as those with NATO and
Israel.
Of course there are other creditable policies in the Peace
and Security platform that technically undermine this – such as the commitments
to opposition to foreign military bases and nuclear ship visits. This reflects
the something-for-everybody, nature of the Greens policy program reflecting
both the need to obtain consensus, and to offset the political shift to the
right with gestures to left-wing rhetoric. The Greens are moving to the right
but are still in transition.
But the move to the right in terms of written policy is only
part of the story. The main one is the way in which general, vague, and often
contradictory, policies are actually interpreted by the federal party caucus.
Indeed it is the caucus that is driving the current policy review and it is
difficult not to conclude that it is essentially a cynical process aimed at
coming up with policies that give maximum scope for them to call the shots.
This was already happening in the foreign policy/antiwar
field – the subject of many of the earlier blogs below. The move to play down opposition
to the Australia-US alliance began with the 2010 Afghan war debate where
criticism of the war was contained to war policy, and the war-committing, decision-making
processes in parliament, not the alliance itself – bizarre given that the
alliance is the whole reason Australia is in Afghanistan. This carried through
to the obsequious performance of federal Green MPs at the time of the Obama
visit and the failure to take him to task over the development of the new US
war machine based on drone strikes, and special and covert operations. This has
continued by excising the role of the “joint” intelligence facilities from any
implementation of the Greens policy (then and in its new form) of opposing
foreign military bases. The intelligence facilities at Pine Gap and Kojarena
(WA) are directly involved in Obama’s drone wars and covert programs and as
such embroil the Australian government (and by their silence, their Green
parliamentary supporters) in the commission of war crimes - see my article in
the recent Winter edition of NSW Greens, Greenvoice.
Senator Scott Ludlam has in the past probed the function of
these bases, and he and other Green MPs continue to raise important questions
about war and alliance policy. But
a paper put out by Ludlam’s office earlier this year entitled “The Impact of
Military Bases”, which made many good points, contained passing reference to
Pine Gap, and no reference linking intelligence facilities to the drone wars.
An earlier statement in March criticised the possible use of the Cocos Islands
as a drone base, commenting on the civilian deaths involved, but making no
connection to the intelligence facilities.
The reluctance to criticise these intelligence facilitates relates
to the fact that they are the jewels in the crown of the US-Australia alliance
and no sustained critique of their function could be undertaken without calling
the whole alliance into question. In other words, the recent behaviour of the
Green MPs and the latest changes to written policy constrain criticism within
an acceptance of the alliance paradigm, depriving the Greens of a critique of
imperialism in general, US imperialism in particular, and the existential
racial fears that hold the Australia-US alliance together. Thus the Greens are depriving
themselves of a critique of the causes of war and accept an approach that puts
them very firmly on the warpath.
It will be interesting to see how far the Greens can
continue to play this game. A decision to locate a major US naval base in
Western Australia, for example, could see a reenergising of a local antiwar
movement, putting pressure on the WA Greens and their Senators to take up more
strident positions in opposition to the alliance.
To a certain extent this is what has happened in the asylum
seeker debate. The horrific nature of the Government-Coalition stance, and the Greens
policy and genuine advocacy of asylum seeker interests has seen the Green
politicians taking a lead in parliamentary resistance (albeit within the
limitations of the existing policy paradigm of “managing” the “problem” – see
the recent Tad
Tietze Left-Flank post on asylum seekers and open borders). What is likely
to be a reenergised asylum-seeker support and protest movement will keep the
pressure up. And of course a downturn in the mining boom, exposing Australia to
the fury of the GFC may see the Greens newfound love of market-based solutions
start to fray.
All this reflects the fact that the Greens are still in the
process of transition from a party of (at least partially) an oppositional
leftism to one of “sensible” and “moderate” centrism aimed at winning more
seats and presenting the party as a partner in government. But the transition
is quickening.
Underlying all this (and specifically underlying the national
policy review) is the drive by the federal party caucus to arrogate to itself
more power and authority in making and interpreting policy. In this regard the
Greens are duplicating the errors of the Labor Party, developing a federal
party structure dominated by an increasingly non-transparent and unaccountable
caucus, sustained by a growing caste of careerist parliamentary and party
staffers, and characterised by a “consensus” caucus authoritarianism as potent
as the “majoritarian” caucus authoritarianism of Labor. Labor Senator Doug
Cameron in 2010 lamented how the authoritarian caucus system was creating a
party of “zombies”. He of course recently joined the undead on the
asylum-seeker “compromise”. In many ways the Greens are stumbling off down the
same road.
Electorally the Greens are being driven by the hubris and
fantasy that they are going to keep on winning more seats and growing their vote.
The Green vote for the foreseeable future is likely to remain at or below the
10-12 percent range, with minimal opportunities to draw further votes away from
a Labor party unlikely, at this time, to lose its rock-bottom, rusted on, working
class base. Liberal voters are unlikely to shift support to the Greens no
matter how much the party moderates its policies. The Greens may find
themselves in the parliamentary world of the undead centre: the political life
drained out of them by abandoning harder edged left-oppositional approaches
that characterised the Greens rise from the 1980s, yet unloved (if occasionally
necessary) as a presence in a parliamentary and government culture that prizes
the “stability” of the two-party system.
The Greens have been fond of repeating Bob Brown’s line that
unlike the Democrats before them, they are not there to “keep the bastard
honest” but to “replace them”. Unless they change course, the fate that awaits
the Greens is that the only bastards they are likely to replace are the
Democrats themselves.
