Global Crisis - AIPS€¦ · next decade what has been just another marginal party may well become...

Global Crisis &Australian Politics: Time for the Greens to Make Their MoveAuthor(s): Peter McMahonReviewed work(s):Source: AQ: Australian Quarterly, Vol. 78, No. 3 (May - Jun., 2006), pp. 22-27Published by: Australian Institute of Policy and ScienceStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20638399 .

Accessed: 09/12/2012 22:53

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

.

Australian Institute of Policy and Science is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend accessto AQ: Australian Quarterly.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded by the authorized user from 192.168.82.215 on Sun, 9 Dec 2012 22:53:01 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=aips

http://www.jstor.org/stable/20638399?origin=JSTOR-pdf

http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp


Global Crisis &

Australian Politics:

Time for the Greens to make their move

By Peter McMahon

The Greens have played a peripheral role in Australian politics since their

beginnings in the early 1990s. However,

developments on both a global and

national level provide the opportunity

for the Greens to claim real power- if

they are up to the challenge. If so, over the

next decade what has been just another

marginal party may well become the third

force in national political life.

Only half way through, it is already clear that 2006 is a pivotal year in world history. Debate about 'whether' global warming is happening is being replaced by debate

about what to do about it, and the idea of'peak oil' is

gaining wide acceptance. This is epochal change, because together these two issues indicate the end of two centuries of socioeconomic development based in

mass industrial development guided by an ideology of economic liberalism.

This dramatic transformation will generate new

politics, which will eventually transform governance nationally and globally. The political parties of the west evolved out of the great contests for power within the overall process of industrial development; as the maxim

goes, politics was the power to decide 'who gets what'. Politics tended to split into two basic positions, often embodied in political parties. One group represented the interests of structural power

- business and finance,

plus established authorities in education, medicine, the

military, etc - while the other represented the structur

ally powerless, mostly lower class workers. This division could be affected by specifics of national or even local

history, but by and large this contest for structural power

shaped politics in the developed world after 1815.

Under this overall framework, conservative or liberal

parties would normally claim government, since as

the representatives of structural power, they typically claimed support from the decisive institutions, such as finance, industry, mass media, the military, and the like. They were in actuality the default governing party. The alternative labour or leftist parties usually only claimed government when they mobilised enough support outside their usual constituency, typically a situation brought on by some kind of crisis (such as

war). Otherwise, if the conservative governments were

egregiously incompetent or corrupt, or the Labour/left

parties moved so far towards the centre they become

acceptable to the structural powers, Labour/left parties could gain government, but always conditionally.

In fact, the victory of neo-liberal ideology over social democrat and Keynesian ideology after the 1960s, due

mainly to the effects of globalisation, have caused sustained crisis for Labour/left parties. They simply have no ideological basis any more, due to changes in class structure domestically and the new global economic relations. The post-war boom -

largely due to

redistributive, nation-building policies of post-war gov ernments -

paradoxically undermined class solidarity as the new consumerist individualism gained currency, and unions rested on their laurels and grew fat and lazy. Labour/left parties and unions were increasingly taken over by careerists with a view to personal aggrandise

ment.

These problems have all but wrecked the Australian Labor Party, allowing the unprecedented ascendancy of John Howard. In retrospect the writing was on the wall for the ALP when Treasurer Paul Keating replaced the populist but Labour/left traditionalist, Bob Hawke as Prime Minister. Hawke's trade union background kept them in the picture, as indicated by the industrial relations 'Accords', but Keating's ready acceptance of

neo-liberal ideology as treasurer foreclosed alterna

tives (such as the Scandinavian model pushed by the

ACTU). In fact the Hawke/Keating governments did much of the hard work necessary to install neo-liberal ideas and integrate Australia into the global economy

with minimal socio-cultural or environmental safe

guards. When Keating was defeated the Liberal party was

able to build on Labor's reforms, claiming credit for PeterMcMahon has taught politics and political economy and is currently completing his second book.

22 AQ May-^June 2006



Global Crisis & Australian Politics

^^ J?R?f' w^B^m^W ^^S^.-M?^f' "imS^ ^^^^^^^ ^^B^^^H ^H^i^^H ^RI^^^V

the economic benefits that were starting to occur and

extending the neo-liberal push, including in the area of industrial relations. Meanwhile, the ALP, with Keating gone and ideologically adrift, endured a crisis of lead

ership. Assuming loss of office was a blip after the successful Hawke/Keating years, Labor opted for Kim

Beazley, an experienced but also inherently conserva tive politician. When Beazley's faux neo-liberalism failed at the polls (the voters opted for the real thing), a revolving leadership, shared by Beazley, Simon Crean and Mark Latham, ensued as Labor concentrated on this media-centric matter instead of carrying out other

necessary reforms in policy and party structure. In fact the ALP's problem was twofold. First, in terms

of policy they were so close to the Liberals voters saw no point in risking them, a response that only grew as more marginal lower class workers joined the real estate boom. Second, and this was the core reason

why Labor had no alternative 'narrative', was that the

party was now sclerotic, corrupt at the micro-level and run by career politicians. There were too few people or

processes in place within the ALP to develop effective

policy and sell it to the electorate. The ALP was not the only party in trouble. The Aus

tralian Democrats, facing redundancy as the great conservative - labour/left synthesis crumbled, tried

for third force legitimacy under Meg Lees' leader

ship, and failed. They could not recover credibility and now look to be finished. The National Party, similarly, found life tough in the brave new world of neo-liberal

globalisation. Their once important role of accom

modating conservative policies to the circumstances of rural life, achieving what has been termed 'Country Party socialism', was under growing pressure as neo

liberal policy cut away the role of government. The

ongoing sell-off of Telstra, against rural sentiment, just highlighted the impotence of the current Nationals.

Except for the Nationals, all major political parties were haemorrhaging membership. This least worried the Liberals, who as essentially the political arm of big industry and finance, always had access to abundant

funding. The flow of ideas from the corporate sector,

increasingly shaped by well-funded think tanks, also meant the Liberal Party required less able politicians (really only those necessary to fill the front benches and a few spares). Labor, which did need talent within the

party to maintain a flow of progressive ideas, felt the loss of talent much more acutely.

However, the Liberals are in trouble also. The

complete dominance of John Howard hides their

problems, just as Menzies' long reign did. When he

goes, the leadership issue will cause serious disruption

AQ May-^June 2006 23




as the forces so contained by Howard's iron rule come to the surface. He has fundamentally changed the character of the Liberal Party, and the way for instance both front-runners for leadership, Costello and Abbot, flaunt their religious beliefs spells trouble for con

servative coherence. Overall, the Australian political landscape is looking very rocky. The half of the elec torate that do not support Howard will be extremely restive, the Liberals will be in ever greater turmoil as

Howard's end looms, the ALP will be on the ropes as it realises no leader can resuscitate such a dead horse, and the Democrats will be wrapping up and sliding off into oblivion.

The major parties in crisis, the Democrats out of the

way and with the strongest national representation ever, the Greens look in good shape to exploit the upheaval. Nationallytheyhave four good quality senators, astrong presence in Bob Brown and reasonably effective col laboration within the Green membership. And they've been around long enough, weathered enough storms, to show they are here to stay. With these attributes, their

prospects of moving beyond ten percent marginality to

creating a genuine third force in national politics looks

promising.

And then, of course, there is the great global crisis that looms over all politics now. The roots of this transformation are in the accumulating effects of

mass industrial development, specifically pollution and resources depletion. There are multiple kinds of

pollution, but the one that has come to prominence over the last decade or so are the so-called Greenhouse

gases that are causing global warming. There is now

scientific consensus that global warming is occurring, that the basic mechanisms are understood, and that human activity is the primary factor in its causation. Even the American and Australian governments now

accept this position, if not the remedial program laid out in the Kyoto agreement. As for resources, the fresh water situation is becoming dire (especially in

the boom countries of China and India), but it is the likelihood of imminent peak oil that is generating

most concern. Peak oil, when half the world's known oil reserves are used, will push prices into the strato

sphere, ending the age of what was, in retrospect,

absurdly cheap energy. These two limiting factors

- pollution and resource

The major parties in crisis, the Democrats

out of the way and with the strongest national representation ever, the Greens

look in good shape to exploit the upheaval

depletion -

present basic problems for neo-liberal

ideology which assumes conditions enabling limitless

growth. This ideology has been instrumental in the

weakening of governments as social agents and the rise

of corporations and markets. Unfortunately, corpora

tions and markets do not have to accept responsibility for problems in the way governments are supposed to, and despite talk of setting up carbon markets and the

like, they show little sign of being able to play a core

role in dealing with the environmental crisis. Indeed, so far corporations have only played a negative role,

muddying the water in relation to Greenhouse research

and supplying inaccurate figures on remaining oil reserves.

Anyway, the point is that the basic ideology behind most commercial and political activity is now obsolete. It only ever applied in a narrow window when markets and institutions were developed enough to operate with some efficiency, but the costs of mass industriali

sation and the decline of crucial fossil fuel reserves were

not yet apparent. Because it coincided with a century of

remarkable economic growth (if not peace and general prosperity) neo-liberal ideology took on an almost

mystical quality. Globalisation, with its long product chains and

global infrastructure, is the material embodiment





Bob Brown Phow.AAP

of neo-liberal ideas. Both the disruptions caused by climate change

- initially, more and worse storms, but

later rising sea levels and permanently altered weather - and peak oil will undermine the bases of globalisation, especially socio-political stability and cheap energy. In the worse case scenario the powerful nations will

attempt to push the costs onto the weaker popula tions, including through the use of military force. So

along with the upheaval caused by climate change and

depleting oil will go rising social unrest and perhaps even warfare.

In the best case scenario the world will act cohesively to deal with what is after all a planet-wide problem affecting the entire human species. Some form of global governance structure will need to be established to deal with problems of weather, disease, famine, etc, shifting resources about as they are required. Also, rational use of the remaining oil stocks should be negotiated to minimise the impact of declining oil supplies.

Realistically, it is only governments that can provide the legitimacy and resources to provide such global coordination. Government will again become abso

lutely central, and politics will again be about much more than optimising and distributing wealth. No doubt the currently prevailing elites will attempt to maintain their privileged positions, and dealing with

their increasingly desperate efforts to do so will be a

large part of early twenty-first century politics. There is a precedent of sorts to this dire situation.

The great social crisis brought on by the spreading mass industrialisation of the latter nineteenth

century eventually resulted in devastating global war, prolonged global depression and general socio

political upheaval. Following the worst wars in history, this problem was in large part resolved due to the rise of Labour/left political parties (here we include the New Deal Democrats) which provided a bridge between the new industrial economy and wider society. Based in

Keynesian economic policy, various forms of welfare state emerged in the developed countries, which effec

tively fended off the attractions of those extremist socio-cultural reactions, fascism and communism.

Only Labour/left governments could carry out this historic compromise, which dealt with the core

problems and enabled three decades of reconstruction, and in most cases even their conservative opponents accepted the basic ideas.

The Labour/left parties embodied a new vision, had new ideas, were made up of new people and mani fested a new kind of popular politics. A century on, they are tired, devoid of new ideas and run by political pro fessionals with no 'fire in the belly'. This is partly the

AQ Ma^June 2006 25




expected atrophy of old organisations, but mostly it is because the core role of the Labour/left party in history is now marginal. Promoting the interests of the lower classes must now take a back seat to optimising the chances of populations surviving the emerging global crisis. The world's current population level, including that of Australia, is only viable because of the benign climate and abundant, cheap oil; if either of these con ditions were to change quickly the effects would be

catastrophic.

Based as they now both are in liberal economic

ideology, neither the ALP or the Liberals can respond meaningfully to this problem. They have neither the ideas nor the people to do so.

Which brings us back to the Greens. The Greens have been quietly developing a host of policies which make sense in the sort of volatile world we are heading into. In a way the main theme of much Greens policy has been

dissolving big systems and relying on local, negotiated relationships while doing with materially less. The con comitant of this is a different kind of politics, based in sustained debate and shared power. This underlying ideological basis to Greens politics is mostly unknown to the national electorate due to the usual media dis interest in policy generally and a basic institutional

antipathy to non-market driven change. To succeed the Greens need to get smarter and

tougher, and there remain some major obstacles to a better functioning Green party. First, the party suffers from that Australian problem, the state branches are very different and often don't like each other or

attempts to make them cooperate. Second, the Greens are full of nice middle-class people who just want

things to be nicer, and have no real theoretical under

standing or existential incentive to act. In the rise of the Labour /left, the existential reality of working class life acted as real motivation to mobilising the necessary collective effort. The Greens also contain more than their fair share of energetic and aware activists, some of

whom are proud of their isolation from the mainstream and will find it hard to subordinate their ideals to

political necessity. This is an experience - from activist

movement to political party - that all activist organisa

tions go through, as exemplified by the winding path to

power taken by the European Greens. It is vital that the Greens maintain quality control over

their elected politicians. This means they need to make their party more accessible to different kinds of people. The ALP is a closed shop to unaffiliated newcomers, cold and harsh, but being in the Greens is too often like

attending a kids' birthday party, noisy and chaotic with minimal results. The Greens' orientation to open, nego

tiated politics is both laudable and ultimately logical in a world increasingly shaped by information technol

ogy, but some things will have to be stream-lined, some

people given more structural power, as timely decision

making becomes essential.

The issue of leadership within the Greens is a par

ticularly contentious one, and reasonably so given the

problems it causes in all parties. The harsh reality is that the mass media concentrate on personality over

policy, and leadership is sexy. Unfortunately, as the ALP has found to its cost over the years, real debate and

negotiation is presented by the media as division and vacillation. But it is necessary to use the media, and so the Greens will have to choose leaders and give them

enough room to speak and act with authority. Of course, the problems of leadership and identity more generally can be ameliorated by creating a healthy party culture that integrates members, staff and politicians. The decline of such a culture within the ALP over the last few decades has been a major reason for the rampant car reerism and factional division that has grown up within that party.

Future Australian governments will have two major tasks: first, to minimise disruption to Australian society by the global crisis; second, to maximise collabora tion with other governments to respond on a global sale to the crisis (again, interestingly, this is very much what the post-war governments faced; their ultimate relative failure was mainly due to the spurious threat of domestic and international communism). How would a Green presence in national government measure up?

The answer to this question lies in whether or not the Greens can establish a core, integrating ideology, or 'narrative'. Currently the Greens want to be both a soft left party, with otherwise largely unconnected policies, and a pro-environment party. The hard truth is that soft left politics these days is reactive, attempting to amel iorate the initiatives of the neo-liberal agenda. If the Greens are to make a real impact they need to consoli date their core concerns into one basic story.





^'^M^î^^^H^^' ^^^^^ î^^ ̂̂ ^^^HUH^^^H

' ^''^^^SS^^ j^^^^^^^B n^^^^^L j^^^^^Sll^l . ^-rss^^?P^ ^^^^^^^^^L ^^H^B^^^^^B ^^^^HEPÎii^ln

The obvious way to do this lies in the matters discussed above - the imminent global crisis and the failure of political vision. To succeed, the Greens must situate themselves as the party with the most relevant but radical ideas to deal with what is undoubtedly the most critical challenge facing modern civilisation. Because there are no viable solutions to the global crisis within the neo-liberal paradigm, new ways of

dealing with social organisation, economic develop ment, technology and political negotiation must be found. If the Greens can shape their core concerns to construct a coherent alternative ideological position, then they can seize the initiative and present a new way for Australia, and perhaps a new example for the rest of the world.

There is one final point I would make: the window of opportunity for the Greens is a small one. This is not so much because the other parties will get their act together, but because it is highly likely that politics as we know it will collapse under the pressure of the

growing crisis. The threat to life, property and public order presented by the global crisis is in the same order as major war; as we know, a sense of emergency severely constrains democratic politics.

As the crisis takes shape, people will react with

growing desperation, even panic, unless they perceive a viable solution at hand. In political terms, this des

peration will likely unleash an authoritarian response. If the Greens have been able to position their alterna tive approach in the public mind, there will be a viable solution and the Greens will be in a position of real influence.

So time is short, and the work of developing alterna tive ideas and popularising them needs to be done soon, before things generally go feral. The Greens will need to shift away from their softly, softly approach to make the

problem plain and the solutions apparent. They need to become more focused on the global environmental

crisis, and its implications, which will inevitably mean less effort towards other issues. But of course, dealing

with the crisis is also an opportunity to achieve changes to make the world a fairer place.

Can the Greens grab the opportunity and gain a place in government, either alone or in coalition? History, the

long story of socioeconomic development on planet earth, is on their side. But there will need to be changes within the Greens - real power always comes at a hefty price, and not all within the Greens may be prepared to

pay it. ao_

AQ May-^June 2006 27



Global Crisis - AIPS€¦ · next decade what has been just another marginal party may well become...

Documents

Transcript of Global Crisis - AIPS€¦ · next decade what has been just another marginal party may well become...