As votes were counted on election night 2016, Richard Di Natale made a valiant, if unconvincing attempt to put a positive spin on things. With the Greens stalling for the second consecutive election, its leader pointed to small rays of light: closer races in Victoria, the re-election of Adam Bandt, a potential new Queensland senator. Striking a triumphant tone, he hailed it as an “extraordinary” night for the party.
Outside the room, a different vibe lingered. Where many supporters had previously felt an aura of inevitability around the party – a sense that, with a bit of patience, the future would be theirs – things now seemed uncertain.
Unsurprisingly, the six months since July’s disappointment have been the most turbulent in the party’s federal history. With plenty of blame to go around, the first signs of Greens factionalism are being made public. In December, “Left Renewal”, the party’s first open grouping, a self-described “tendency” in the movement committed to challenging capitalism, announced its formation.
On one level, this was simply the formalisation of divisions that already existed within the Greens. This was clear in how different parliamentarians reacted to the development. As a prominent figure on the party’s moderate flank, Di Natale dismissed the socialist faction, describing it as an unwanted, alienating distraction. If people wanted to overthrow capitalism, he argued, they could start their own organisation. The party’s more radical edge disagreed. Pushing back, Lee Rhiannon and David Shoebridge portrayed Left Renewal as healthy and sane, a basic expression of internal democracy.
In a deeper sense, though, the arrival of Left Renewal reflects a generational conflict within Greens politics. As a political movement, the global Greens grew out of the “New Left”, made visible by protest movements beginning in the late 1960s. While environmentalism was the most obvious Greens cause, they were also tied to feminism, pacifism, gay rights and multiculturalism. In social science language, these were “postmaterial” issues, centred on cultural recognition rather than class conflict.
The “New Left” materialised when it did for a reason. It came at a moment where, around the developed world, a segment of educated, middle class citizens were rebelling against the post-war consensus that dominated society. Though prosperous, they considered the era spiritually empty. Life was bland, suburban, organised around consumerism and a banal materialism. There was more to life than economic growth.
Members of Left Renewal tend to be much younger than the broader party. As activists, they were politicised at a different historical moment, in the shadow of the global financial crisis. In their eyes, the problem is not the dreariness of full time work – it’s the difficulty of getting it in the first place. If urgency surrounds any policy areas, it’s housing affordability and material inequality. To these and other problems, Left Renewal offers a radical, socialist solution.
Opinions differ within the Greens over the electoral impact of these views. While Di Natale clearly considers them a burden, Left Renewal claim that their anti-capitalist agenda can actually be a popular asset for the party. Taking inspiration from other “populist left” movements – Bernie Sanders in the USA, Jeremy Corbyn in Britain, Podemos in Spain – the faction argue that a socialist message can win over working class voters, adding to the party’s traditional base in the professional middle class.
While this has always been a dream of the socialist minority within the party, particularly in New South Wales, it is an ambitious, unlikely one. When economic populism has succeeded in other countries, it’s rarely been channelled through Greens parties. The fact is, throughout their history, the Australian Greens have consistently struggled to win working class support. This plays out in survey data, as well as the seats the party competes in; the further you travel from the inner city, the poorer the Greens generally do.
The relationship between the Greens and working class voters began on a bad note. In Tasmania, where the party originated, conservationists directly confronted the interests of blue collar unions. This tension continued when the Greens entered state parliament. The first ever Labor and Greens coalition collapsed because of a dispute over forestry policy. Whether fair or unfair, a perception exists that Greens politicians are ambivalent about the economic consequences of environmental regulation.
This is accentuated by cultural policy, where the party’s emphasis on social liberalism can seem distant from working class priorities. As a Labor MP told me in an interview for my doctoral research:
Anyone campaigning on the centrality of same sex marriage in the outer suburbs of Sydney or Melbourne or Brisbane would be struggling for air. I’m not saying there would be hostility, but they want answers to a different set of problems.
At the very least, this creates an image problem for the party. While the Greens are now reliable supporters of trade unions and leftwing economic policies, they have little cultural affinity with most working class communities. There might be some overlap in policy preferences but they aren’t generally united by a shared picture of the good life or society.
It is unclear how Left Renewal, at this stage largely driven by university radicals, plans to reverse this trend. But perhaps Di Natale is right. If the new faction really wants to create a “populist left” surge, grounded in working class concerns, it might be better off starting its own party. While the chances of this succeeding are admittedly slim, it’s unlikely to happen under the Greens banner.