For the first couple of decades of the green movement, there was little emphasis on the ‘brown’ issues relating to soil and water conservation in outback Australia and air and water pollution in urban Australia. The extension of LandCare—a participatory approach to soil conservation—from a Victorian state initiative to the national stage helped bridge the divide between environmental politics and rural interests, and cities have slowly improved their air quality thanks to tightened laws and standards. Slowly, improved sewerage has come to most metropolitan centres—an exception is Sydney, with its much-publicised problems.
Much of green politics in Australia has comprised campaign politics, rather than programmatic politics, and then usually campaigns to protect some area of natural beauty or ecological significance. Such campaigns have frequently been single-issue campaigns, or sometimes—as with the very successful Wilderness Society—focused on a limited number of related issues: wild rivers, native forests, and so on. Several environmental groups have emerged to populate the political landscape. Some have been local, ad hoc, and transitory, but some have been institutionalised as permanent players.
Besides the Wilderness Society, the Australian Conservation Foundation has endured for more than thirty years as the peak environmental group, but it—along with local, more loosely organised groups—has come into competition for the public eye with transnational players such as Greenpeace, the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) and, to a lesser extent, Friends of the Earth. The transnationals often reflect international perspectives, and while competition among groups allows a diversity of positions, it also limits the coherence of the ‘green’ message.
Green politics in Australia has seen a dynamic mix of ad hoc groups formed in response to some particular environmental problem, together with more institutionalised national and transnational players. It has also ranged in its activities from social movements seeking to transform society, through protest groups and more conventional interest groups, to those seeking to contest elections.
An early group that moved from protest to electoral contest—the United Tasmania Group (UTG)—can lay claim to being the world's first green political party, standing candidates in the 1972 Tasmanian state election in a vain attempt to stop the inundation of Lake Pedder from hydro-electric development. But if there was an expectation that formation of the UTG was the beginning of green electoral politics, it proved to be a false dawn. UTG did not survive the Lake Pedder campaign, and even recurrence of conflict over hydro-electric development in south-west Tasmania in 1979 did not result in a resurgence of green electoral politics—though the issue proved insoluble for a Labor government trying to straddle conservation and development.
This difficulty in finding an accommodation between green political causes and labour—in its industrial or its political manifestation—has been a recurring theme in green politics in Australia. The early portents were promising; the trade unions organised the ‘green bans’ of the 1970s, but, as the south-west Tasmania case suggests, there have been more low-lights than highlights—the most recent being the loss by the Australian Labor Party (—) of two Tasmanian House of Representatives seats in the 2004 federal election as a result of union and state ALP rejection of the federal party policy on old-growth logging. There has been only limited electoral success by green actors to counterbalance such negative experiences.
The green cause was effectively represented in the 1980s by the Australian Democrats, which in 1987 held six seats and the balance of power in the Senate, but the Democrats were never really accepted by the broader green movement as its electoral champions, and the party has ultimately been squeezed out of the centre of Australian politics as the Australian Greens have gathered strength on the left. A Nuclear Disarmament Party appeared briefly, winning a Senate seat in 1985, but attempts at that time to form a green party foundered.
A national Green Party was formed only in 1993, and it has enjoyed some limited electoral success, restricted largely to electoral systems with proportional representation, such as the Commonwealth Senate and the Tasmanian House of Assembly. It has fared less well in other lower houses, where the conditions are less favourable to minor parties. Preferential voting systems have proven to be almost as unpropitious for Green electoral representation as first-past-the-post systems such as that in the United Kingdom—especially where preferential voting is compulsory, for under those systems a vote for a minor party must ultimately be allocated to a major party if it is to be valid. Compulsory preferential voting ultimately requires a vote to be cast for a major party, and this limits the potential for smaller parties to cause damage to major parties by diverting votes, since they can seek only to direct preferences.
This power over preferences was seen as being important in the 1990 federal election; green actors directed preferences to the ALP, and some commentators heralded a ‘greening of Australian politics.’ But this level of importance has not been approached again, and environmental groups have had difficulty since in their relationships with the major parties, especially with the Coalition, which has been in office since 1996.
Any interest group that aligns itself with one party or another creates problems for itself, because it must also deal with the opposing party when it forms government. If it aligns too closely with the ALP—as, arguably, the environmental movement did in 1990—then it will have less influence over the Coalition. In an effort to deal with this problem, the movement gave some grudging endorsement to the Coalition environment policy in the 1996 campaign, especially over the establishment of a Natural Heritage Trust from the proceeds of the part sale of Telstra. Since then, however, they have been generally hostile to the Howard government, especially over its hard line on issues such as ratification of the Kyoto protocol to the Framework Convention on Climate Change. The Howard government has tended to return the favour, severely cutting public funding for environment groups.
At the state level, the Greens have often been out-polled by other minor parties, even under electoral systems that favour minor parties. For example in elections for the New South Wales Legislative Council they have been out-polled variously by the Democrats and One Nation. Where there is no proportional representation the Greens have also fared poorly. There is no upper house in Queensland, and the Greens and Democrats have both campaigned for the reintroduction of such a chamber—doubtless seeing in this their best chance of electoral success. The Greens achieved 2 per cent of the vote in the 1995 Queensland election, thanks to a protest vote over motorway development, which helped unseat the Goss ALP government—but that was a much less impressive performance than what was to come from One Nation, which achieved almost 23 per cent in 1998 and still achieved 11 per cent in 2001. No minor party has fared particularly well in Victoria.
The zenith for Green electoral politics thus far came in the 1989 Tasmanian state elections, which yielded a hung parliament under the state's proportional representation (PR) Hare–Clark system, with the Green Independents holding the balance of power. ALP leader Michael Field was able to form a government thanks to a Labor–Green Accord, which was frequently strained during three years of government and ended with Field vowing never again to do deals with the Greens. A less formal deal allowed the Liberal Party of Tony Rundle to form minority government in Tasmania in 1996–98.
The perceived ‘greening of Australian politics’ in 1990 no doubt encouraged formation of a national Green Party in 1993, but was not without its problems. The Greens in Western Australia constituted a distinct group, with origins in the Nuclear Disarmament Party, and the formation of a national Green Party required incorporation of this party. While they have slowly achieved some success in the Senate and under other proportional representation systems, they have had little direct effect on electoral politics, thanks to the limitation of their influence by this route—being unable to do more than attempt to direct preferences to exert influence at the ballot box. There is one exception to this, but it is an exception that proves the rule: in Queensland in 1995, when an optional preferential system allowed the Greens, disgruntled with the motorway plans of the Goss ALP government, to direct preferences in four seats to the National–Liberal Coalition, which nearly won the election and did take office after a subsequent by-election. The decision to direct preferences was taken in exchange for an undertaking by Nationals leader Rob Borbidge to examine the feasibility of re-establishing an upper house to the Queensland Parliament—an undertaking he subsequently reneged upon after becoming premier.
Support for the main parties has declined at the Commonwealth level, but this has resulted in representation by the Greens only in the Senate, where they have had to compete for a minor party role along with the Democrats, the gun lobby, One Nation, and Family First. One brief exception was the Greens briefly holding the House seat of Cunningham (in the Woollongong region), but this occurred only because the ALP vote was split due to internal conflict; once that was resolved, the seat returned to the ALP in 2004. Since the 1920s there has been relative stability in the parties represented in the House of Representatives, and only in the Senate have the Greens been able to secure continuing representation, thanks to the more propitious proportional representation system in Senate voting, compared with preferential voting in the House.
That level of representation reached a high of four in the 2004 election, when high-profile former state parliamentarian Christine Milne joined her Tasmanian colleague Bob Brown and senators from New South Wales and Western Australia in the Senate, assisted by the retirement of long-time Tasmanian independent Brian Harradine.
It is hard to see this limited Green electoral success as constituting some kind of breakthrough. Green politics has succeeded in changing the agenda of politics, and in stimulating development of environmental protection policies that are now part of the entrenched architecture of all states and the Commonwealth—but it has not transformed politics: the electoral success of green politics has come at the expense of the Australian Democrats, who previously exploited the favourable electoral system of the Senate to frequently hold the balance of power and, in the words of their founder, ‘keep the bastards honest’.
The Greens had some success in displacing the Democrats by positioning themselves to the left and championing a number of issues, in addition to the environment, unencumbered by the fear of having to form office and implement them—but their future remains uncertain.
By the end of 2006 the Democrats were at a low ebb and the Greens at a high. But the governing Coalition has a majority in the Senate and needs the support of neither to pass legislation. The Greens have little relevance to the legislative process, and that is the challenge that now confronts them.
The Oxford Companion to Australian Politics. © 2007
Oxford University Press.
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