As someone who helped start and shape The Greens political party in the early 1990s, I find it sad and painful to watch the ructions that are currently tearing that party apart.
I should begin by clarifying that I now view all this as an outside observer rather than an active participant.
I’m no longer a member of The Greens, having not renewed my membership this year after 28 years of continuous membership.
This included eight years as Newcastle’s first Greens councillor (between 1991 and 1999) and many other experiences as an active member, including heading The Greens NSW Senate ticket in 1998, running as The Greens Lord Mayoral candidate in Newcastle in 2012, and filling many other roles for The Greens at local, state, national and international level.
Naturally, when people who know my long-term association with The Greens find out that I’m no longer a member, they want to know why.
My reasons have more to do with what was happening with the local Newcastle Greens group than with the state and federal Greens, and I made my decision not to renew well before the recent furore surrounding sexual assault allegations against NSW Greens MLC Jeremy Buckingham.
But I do recognise patterns in what’s happening now from my own long experience in The Greens.
The Greens are now mired in factionalism.
In the NSW Greens, factions emerged slowly from personality-based conflicts between key members in the 1990s (particularly between early NSW state MPs and their supporters), which then gradually merged with geographical affinities (e.g., country v city) and different philosophical and ideological emphases (e.g., individualist v collectivist and environment v social justice).
Mixed with personal political ambitions and agendas, mistrust, and plain bad behaviour, the divisive potential of this has festered slowly but relentlessly into the factional fracas we see today.
Ironically, some of the most factionalist members of The Greens are those who most stridently deny and decry factionalism. The bald, self-centred hypocrisy of some of these members in invoking principles that they have previously demonstrated they don’t really believe in is startling.
Another key problem for The Greens has been an influx of members who are attracted to the party from a vague sense of political affinity, or from friendship or social networks, and who join online or via mass on-the-spot recruitment campaigns, but who have little understanding of, or care for, The Greens four core principles (ecological sustainability, social and economic justice, grassroots democracy, and peace and nonviolence).
One of the key reasons for my disillusionment is that the four key principles on which we founded The Greens in the ‘90s are hardly known by many current members and rarely discussed or considered inside the party.
Raising them with some members these days is more likely to arouse a sense of impatience or irritation than interest.
In the early days, I was particularly attracted to The Greens commitment to “doing politics differently”. These days, The Greens have all but abandoned that project. They've become instead a process-averse organisation.
Some Greens members regard the very word “process” with thinly veiled contempt, with no apparent awareness of what this represents for a party with a professed commitment to grassroots democracy and “doing politics differently”, both of which are pretty much all about process.
The Greens are now paying a high price for this process-aversion. If the recent Victorian state election is anything to go by, they could be almost wiped off the state electoral map in March.
I still have enormous respect and admiration for the integrity and achievements of some Greens parliamentarians, such as David Shoebridge, who will head The Greens NSW Legislative Council ticket at the next state election.
I also like and respect Jenny Leong, whose parliamentary work I’ve admired since her breakthrough election as the inaugural state Member for Newtown in 2015.
But she made a significant error of judgement recently in using parliamentary privilege to override due process and call on Jeremy Buckingham to resign from parliament on the grounds that she believed the sexual assault allegations against him to be true.
Like Ms Leong and many other Greens members, my personal view is that the version of events outlined by Ella Buckland, the woman who made the allegations against Mr Buckingham, are sincere and credible.
However, I also believe in the presumption of innocence and the principles of procedural justice, and I don’t believe that my personal view should trump the application of these key principles.
It’s one thing to believe someone, and quite another to presume the role of judge and jury: that’s the pathway to kangaroo courts and lynch mobs.
And that’s the line that Jenny Leong transgressed in her understandable desire to stand in support of Ms Buckland.
In doing this, she has opened herself up to criticism from those who support Mr Buckingham, many of whom bear the greatest responsibility for factionalising The Greens.
I’ve witnessed first-hand how some of these people operate, particularly in Newcastle, and I know from personal experience that most of them have no real understanding of these principles, and no genuine commitment to them: for them, they are merely arguments of immediate convenience, readily ditched when it suits their agendas.
Today’s Greens party is almost unrecognisable to me as the party I helped to form, and I’m not sorry to be out of it, though it hurts to see what it’s becoming.
For all that, I still consider The Greens policies to be superior to those of any other parliamentary party, and on these grounds I’m likely to remain a Greens voter.
I also know that The Greens membership still includes many talented, intelligent, committed and principled people, and I wish them well in their struggle to re-orient the party back toward its core principles, and to a proper understanding and respect for the role of process in grassroots democracy.
Ultimately, that's all that will save The Greens from a tragic descent into political obscurity.
