By Peter Boyle
A national Green Party was slow to emerge in Australia because the major conservation movements were "romanced" by federal and state Labor governments, according to Peter Christoff, Victoria's assistant commissioner for the environment and a leading light of the newly formed Victorian branch of the Green Party.
Christoff delivered the Phil Tighe Memorial Lecture at the Ecopolitics VI conference in Melbourne. The Commission for the Environment, a Victorian statutory body created by the former Labor government, has the responsibility to produce a "state of the environment report" for the state parliament.
The West German Greens, the inspiration for Green parties around the world, were formed in political conditions very different from those prevailing in Australia over the last few years, Christoff said. In the 1980s there were powerful movements in West Germany against the introduction of cruise and Pershing missiles and against the establishment of new nuclear plants. These movements faced repression from a Social Democratic government which, after a record term of office, had shed its reputation as a party of reform.
In contrast, said Christoff, throughout the 1980s, a sense of political disenchantment with Labor was slow to occur, especially in the conservation movement, which was happy when Labor governments made some concessions on a number of easier non-urban environmental issues. Their "wilderness obsession" reflected the "greater tensions in other issues". ALP governments called upon allegiances in other movements, through the Accord and various "summits", and succeeded in dividing them.
Many conservation groups looked to Labor governments for reforms. Disenchantment grew among leading conservation groups only after Senator Graham Richardson was moved from the federal environment portfolio.
The Green Party was also slow in forming because of "territorial" disputes in the movement, he said. He cited the failure of the 1986 Getting Together Conference, which clashed with the Broad Left Conference (organised by forces around the now dissolved Communist Party of Australia and Labor lefts). He suggested that the Australian Democrats shared some responsibility for this situation. The formation of statewide groups like Rainbow Alliance and the Tasmanian Green Independents was the result of this failure to reach "critical mass".
Christoff suggested that a "coyness about conflict and diversity" endures in the movement today.
The main conservation groups promoted themselves as "peak lobby groups", and this was epitomised by the Australian Conservation p Toyne. But this helped foster a "parochial culture" within the movement, "resistance to alliance building" and "relative ignorance of urban environmental issues".
The movement also fell victim to the "flattening of civic culture" as a result of the conservative ideological offensive in the 1980s which sought to promote the "totalitarianism of global business society". Christoff questioned how well the "public intellectuals" had stood up to their responsibilities in this atmosphere, which promoted a technocratic approach (which discouraged involvement in movement building) and supposedly "value-free" management.
A "self-referential intellectual culture" had held intellectuals back from their responsibility to challenge this conservative push because many were paralysed by the fear of criticism of their "mythic objectivity".
The current attempt to build a Green Party faced four major constraints, Christoff said. The first was set by economic deregulation, which had undermined the ability to bring in a plan. The second was the narrow time frame for ecological action — the 1990s were going to be the turning point. Third, "while the ideological bloom of economic rationalism might have faded, its fragrance will be around for a while", expressed in "fiscal state anorexia" and the "de-legitimisation of central planning". Fourth, there was the possibility that a "total retreat from political engagement" may be hiding behind what now appears as public dissatisfaction with the major political parties.
In the green movement there was now a need to formulate an alternative to economic rationalism beyond a return to "limping reform capitalism".
There was also a need to take on board social justice concerns and to break from the piecemeal approach to politics that "derived from the middle-class origins of the conservation movement". Many in the movement had dismissed Marxist critiques prematurely, Christoff noted.
There was a need think about what a "green state" would look like and consider the meaning of green production.
Finally, Christoff argued, the movement had to pay attention to transferring its ideas and experiences to new generations and recognise that debate was a good incubator for future activists.