Adam Bandt, The new Australian Greens leader looks to hopeful action on climate catastrophe
“There is no point in telling people there may be jobs in unspecified industries in the future. It is incumbent on us to explain how we will look after people in this transition”. …….
He has opened his period of leadership by talking about a Green New Deal, which he characterises as “a government-led plan of investment and action to build a clean economy and a caring society”.
Adam Bandt: the Greens must provide hope there is an exit strategy from climate catastrophe The new Australian Greens leader says the party has to connect with coal communities if it wants to be taken seriously, Guardian Katharine Murphy Political editor @murpharoo, Fri 7 Feb 2020 For the first time in the party’s history, the leader of the Australian Greens sits in the House of Representatives, not in the Senate. If you have to hold a lower house seat at every election, Adam Bandt says, you have to listen, and you have to be plugged in to the practical concerns of your constituents.
In the seat of Melbourne, Bandt spends more time trying to get people’s Centrelink payments restored, or their broken shower working again in public housing, than he spends campaigning on climate change, and his political machine has built his vote in inner city Melbourne, election by election, by connecting with people who wouldn’t normally vote Green, and fixing practical problems.
While Bandt projects as fiercely ideological, and is, having forged his philosophy in hard left politics in Victoria, his politics has always been bread and butter at the local level. This mindset, he thinks, is the modus operandi for increasing electoral support for the Greens at a national level – an organisational model that he hopes pushes the Greens past the arid debate that has persisted since their founding about whether Australia’s environmental party is a party of protest or should have aspirations to be a potential party of government.
In Melbourne, the strategy has been simple: reach out to people “who would benefit greatly from Greens policies if they were implemented but haven’t yet heard what our policies are. My strategy [as leader] is going to be about getting to those new groups to explain what it is that we stand for,” Bandt, who took over from fellow Victorian Richard Di Natale this week, tells Guardian Australia.
“Experience suggests we do OK when that happens”.
Preaching beyond the converted includes trying to connect with coal communities, where opposition to the post-material evangelism and sloganeering of green politics can be visceral. The new Greens leader starts from a different place from the environmentalists of the party’s founding cadre, having started in Labor politics, and drifted left. He has a framed picture of a coal-fired power plant on his wall – a gift from workers he represented when he was an industrial lawyer during power privatisations in Victoria.
Bandt has been out in coal communities for the past couple of years, talking about the transition to low-emissions energy, in places like Lithgow and Maitland. ……..
Bandt says the progressive side of politics has not yet won the climate war in Australia because it hasn’t stitched together the moral and scientific imperative of trying to avoid the most dangerous impact of climate change with a credible economic transformation story.
“Where things haven’t worked as well as they could for progressive forces in the past is the transition plan needs to be clear, and it needs to be believable,” he says. “There is no point in telling people there may be jobs in unspecified industries in the future. It is incumbent on us to explain how we will look after people in this transition”. …….
He has opened his period of leadership by talking about a Green New Deal, which he characterises as “a government-led plan of investment and action to build a clean economy and a caring society”. Bandt says the purpose of this reframing of what has been a rancorous debate in Australia is to provide hope that there can be an exit strategy from catastrophe……. https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2020/feb/07/adam-bandt-the-greens-must-provide-hope-there-is-an-exit-strategy-from-climate-catastrophe
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of the week – Disrupting War & Militarism in Oceania. Active solidarity. Radical practice.
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I know very little about Adam Bandt and am encouraged by what I read in Katherine Murphy’s article, but there are many unanswered questions.
In my opinion, the last Federal election was lost rather than won and a key factor was the failure to publicly counter the argument that preventing global warming would mean losing jobs. The simple response should have been along the lines of “Yes, jobs will be lost in some areas but just as many will be found in others” followed by details of where new jobs would be created. The fact that this simple message did not get delivered may be due to all sorts of things but to me it appears that the Australian Greens were unprepared.
My limited experience of the SA Greens is that of a stagnant political party whose main trait is that of a Morrison-like, charming, smooth-talking lawyer-cum-politician whose number one priority seems to be control over the party and intolerance to policy other than his own. In other words, the stereotype politician.
The SA Greens have stagnated. In 20 years they still have only one elected Federal MP (in the Senate) and two state MP’s (in the upper house). The solar on every roof phenomenon appears to have happened despite the SA Greens – they have never to my knowledge taken or received credit. The transition was very rocky and probably would have been much smoother if SA Greens policy had been followed.
I’m glad to say that Adam Bandt does not appear to share all of these characteristics, although his apparent coyness about democratic party reform is a concern. That the Australian Greens are only now talking about a “transition plan” suggests that they didn’t take their own policy seriously and despite 30 years of increasing concern by grassroots Australian environmental organisations were totally unprepared for the horrendous impacts of global heating.
These remarks are made in the interests of having a more effective Australian Greens on whose shoulders rests responsibility for preserving what remains of the Australian environment.
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