Hall Greenland, a respected left-wing activist, writer and journalist in Sydney, is the Greens candidate for the inner-west Sydney seat of Grayndler. Greenland was a Leichhardt councillor for the Labor Party in the 1980s, and served a second term as an independent between 1999 and 2004.
He is president of the Friends of Callan Park, a community group which has waged a long struggle against the privatisation of a vital heritage area.
Greenland is also the author of Red Hot, a biography of one of Australia’s earliest Trotskyists, Nick Origlass.
Once a Labor stronghold, Grayndler is now a marginal seat for the ALP, held by minister for transport and infrastructure Anthony Albanese. In the 2010 federal election the ALP had just a 4.2% margin against the Greens after distribution of preferences. In the 2011 NSW election, the ALP beat the Greens by only a 1.8% margin in the seat of Marrickville (which takes in a large part of the federal electorate).
Green Left Weekly’s Peter Boyle spoke to Greenland a day after Greens leader Christine Milne declared, on February 19, her party's alliance with the Gillard ALP government to be dead.
The interview can be watched on Green Left TV here.
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What is the meaning and significance of the announcement by Christine Milne of the end of the federal Greens-Labor agreement?
In some ways it is an overdue separation from a government that has got worse progressively. Its decisions on the Tarkine, the green lighting of the big mines up in the north-west and the big CSG field in Gloucester made it impossible to keep a close alliance going.
It is a pity that the major part of her speech — which was an attack on the mining corporations, how they own the political process, and how the Liberals are in bed with them, and Labor is not much better, and this is why the Greens were now going to make it clear that they were with the people and the community against these mines and CSG development – got overshadowed by the parliamentary manoeuvring.
That turn by the Greens to a more clear-cut position is very important and something to be welcomed.
Was the mining tax a major part of the Greens' disappointment or was it the more recent decisions?
The mining tax is a dud. The tax take on profit of mining companies in Australia runs at an average of 27%. In Norway it’s 70%. In Ecuador it’s 85%, which is next to nationalising. So it is a dud and it has disappointed many.
The Greens went to the Parliamentary budget office and asked how much the Kevin Rudd-Ken Henry tax (which is not socialism or anything) and asked what that would have raised over four years. And they said $29 billion as against the $4 billion dollars [Gillard's] mining tax is budgeted to earn, though it probably won't even rake that in.
With that extra $25 billion, a lot could be done.
The other major area of work that the Greens did with the Labor government was the carbon tax/emissions trade scheme deal. A report that came out just yesterday suggests that this might be as much of a dud as the mining tax because almost all the money raised by the carbon tax is going back in the form of compensation to the biggest polluters who have also passed their costs onto ordinary household in the form of higher bills. So is there a rethinking in the Greens on this?
I think the Greens wanted higher than a 5% target for reduction of emissions. They also were strongly opposed to the export of emissions, which is enormous - via a trebling of our coal exports. And a lot of us in the Greens want direct investment in renewable energy. It's only by public enterprise, especially in renewables that we are going to make a mark in the switch to a de-carbonised economy.
I think the carbon tax and the Clean Energy Fund was a beginning - but only a beginning. The results may be disappointing which seems to simply reinforce the argument that we've got to go further and we've got to go stronger.
It is a big ask to de-carbonise the economy and I think it can only be done by public enterprise, by interventions by communities and by governments. It is not going to be done by the markets and the corporations.
The “negotiations” on the mining tax and the carbon tax scheme have given the “vested interests” that Ross Garnaut warned about a fantastic deal. What is the Greens' solution to this problem which comes clearly from a systematic imbalance of power?
That's the encouraging thing about the speech in Canberra on [February 18] and in earlier speeches Christine Milne has given recently. The official leadership of the Greens now seem to be awake to the fact that they can't achieve anything without a mass movement. That is absolutely crucial. And that parliamentary representatives are alone without the movement out there.
There have been Greens, like [Senator] Lee Rhiannon, who have never stopped saying that we need the extra-parliamentary movement, that we need the movement outside, and that parliamentary representation is not enough.
That line now seems to me to have been taken up by the leadership at the federal level. This move seems to me to be encouraging.
One of the few broad and sustained social movements that we have seen in recent times has been around opposition to coal seam gas mining, and to some extent other unconventional gas mining, such as shale gas. Do you see this movement having had a strong impact on politics?
It is an incredibly potent movement, there is no doubt about that. The successes it’s had in forcing the O'Farrell government [of NSW] to back off the projects in the western suburbs of Sydney and the one in St Peters [in inner-city Sydney] have been real signal victories and the movement can celebrate them. Of course, we've still got big battles to fight.
If you go to northern NSW, for instance, there is an extraordinary amount of community opposition. And this is community opposition that is not just verbal in form. It is community opposition that will get out there and blockade roads, go on marches and demonstrations and public meetings to howl down ministers, and so on. It is a very angry and broadly based movement and I think it pre-figures the future.
When you can get a movement like that going around essentially environmental issue like CSG then it augurs well for the future.
I am very pleased that the Greens are involved in this movement together with a whole lot of other people, with Socialist Alliance and other political groups. It is broad movements like that which we have to build around stopping coal and around other environmental questions.
What do you envisage as an outcome of the coming federal election? It looks very likely that there is going Tony Abbott could win. Do you expect a wipe out in both houses of parliament? And how do you think the Greens will come off in the elections?
The figures don't look good in the opinion polls and there is going to be an almighty challenge. It will take a lot of campaigning and a lot of arousing of the public, it seems to me, to avoid a bad wipe out in both houses of parliament.
Clearly the best result would be what we have got now: a minority Labor government dependent on a larger contingent of Greens in the Senate and the House of Representatives. But that is a long shot. That is what we've got to aim for and in doing this we have got to start to build a movement so that if the Abbott Liberals do get in as government and win a majority in the Senate, we have the beginnings of the resistance that is going to be absolutely necessary.
There seems very little doubt that an Abbott government will begin to wind back the clock as far as the welfare state is concerned and reintroduce the worst elements of Work Choices. They are extraordinarily friendly with the mining corporations. They believe in redistribution of income: upwards.
So it is going to be a very hard period for Australian society if they get in.
The best we can do is try and stop them, and if we can't do that, build a movement that will be the beginnings of a resistance to them.
Why do you think we have got to this point?
On so many of the important questions, the Labor Party and the Labor government has folded. They have adopted policies that were [John] Howard policies or even worse – whether on refugees or on taxation policies.
While inequality has got worse, they have lavished aid on private schools. Slugging single parents and the NT Intervention, these are Howard policies. And Labor has either adopted them or continued them. And that is terribly dispiriting and demobilising for the progressive side of politics.
So it is not surprising that the Tory's are surging back. It is because Labor has dropped the ball.
What do you make of the potency of the refugee issue?
It's been credited for the dip in electoral support for the Greens. I am not entirely convinced that this is the reason for the dip in support. I am certain that in Grayndler and Sydney, where [Children Out of Detention representative] Dianne Hiles is running, we will be running quite principled campaign on refugees.
I think as the refugee issue plays out, with more and more appalling news from Nauru and Manus Island, public opinion will begin to shift to a much more humanitarian and decent stance.
So I don't think this is necessarily going to be a negative for the Greens if they make it a big issue in the campaign.
Both the major parties have been consistently breaking down of the value of human solidarity. The public is constantly being told by them not to value solidarity and this follows through on economic questions. People look to other “solutions” - even desperate ones - to try and protect their jobs or whatever. How can we counter this?
We have seen in Western Europe the rise of neo-fascism and so on. I think this is something that the Greens and others like the Socialist Alliance have in common. We have to encourage that solidarity, a sense of a common future and cooperation. Those kinds of values.
Both major parties are attacking those values. Both major parties champion individualism and neo-liberalism in all its aspects.
So this elections, and the following elections, are going to be a real choice about what kind of society we want: One where solidarity and cooperation are valued or one where its dog eat dog, where it is not a very nice place to live.
You've put your finger on the underlying civilisational/cultural conflict that we are facing in this election and in the future.
An issue that was said to have stung the Greens in the Grayndler area during the NSW elections was the controversy around Marrickville Council's former position in support of the boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) campaign against the Israeli occupation in Palestine. Do you think this is a major factor in the electorate? And what position on Palestine will the Greens be taking to this election?
I am not convinced that it was as potent an issue as the mainstream media wanted to argue. The swing to the Greens in Marrickville was about 3%. In Balmain, next door where it wasn't an issue, it was about 1%. So you might want to argue that the swing to the Greens [in Marrickville] would have been larger but it still was larger than the swing to the Greens next door in Balmain, which the Greens won.
So there doesn't seem to be the empirical evidence that it was as potent a negative factor as people said.
I am a long-time supporter of self-determination and justice for Palestinians and I continue to be. The party's position is no longer to support BDS. But I am a representative of my electorate [if elected] and if there is a push for strong support for BDS or some other action to support Palestinians then people will find an eager listener in their new MP for Grayndler.
You are someone who is a respected figure in the left in Sydney. Do you see the Greens as a broad church that has a place for socialists in it?
This is an argument I have with plenty of people on the left who are outside of the Greens. I do. I think there is a real place for what I might call ecosocialists inside the Greens. There exists inside the Greens a political diversity.
There is no hiding the fact that there are what somebody has called “neoliberals on bikes” inside the Greens. But there are people genuinely looking for a great transformation in the existing society, who know it has to change fundamentally and that we need to learn to do more with less if we are to stop the world cooking or being pillaged of its resources.
I don't want to pooh-pooh people on the left who are organising independently either. But I can't see any reason why people who are fundamentally socialists and who believe in saving the environment can't join the Greens as well.
Isn't the left in the Greens under some pressure though? There have been a few changes and there certainly has been a lot of public discussion of factional conflicts in the Greens. The NSW Greens have been identified as a more left-wing part of the Australian Greens that has come under some pressure. In addition, the last policy conference introduced a new degree of parliamentary “flexibility” and independence and a “generalisation” of policy. These were widely seen as moves to shift the Greens further to the political centre. Is this true?
There has been some, as you say, “flexibility” and some more generalised wording introduced into the policy. I think it has been exaggerated and certainly I don't think it inhibits local representatives or the NSW Greens as a whole from taking up from time to time more advanced positions than other states may want to take up.
The great thing about the NSW Greens is that it has got a constitution that privileges and concentrates power in local groups. And the NSW party coordinates and acts by consensus. So there is still plenty of scope in the platform, and in the way the Greens are set up, for bold, principled initiatives.
So I think, probably, this talk of parliamentary flexibility, a drift to the right, and so on, may well have been exaggerated.
Are the Greens able to project a convincing vision for the future if there is a battle of visions within the Greens? There's the vision of green capitalism, on one hand, and a vision for ecosocialism or some form of cooperative and environmental society, on the other. This is not a settled question so how do the Greens come across, what vision for the future are they projecting?
There is that diversity in the Greens position. But the great challenge of the 21st Century is to come up with a society that embodies the Greens four founding principles, which are grassroots democracy, an ecologically sustainable economy, a non-violent, peaceful world with the maximum social justice. That is a real challenge and there is a real argument going on.
It is a pity it is an argument only going on within the Greens or between people in the Greens and people on the left like the Socialist Alliance. It seems to me that this is a debate that wider circles and, one would hope, large parts of the labour movement.
I don't think we can be very dogmatic about what form this society will take but it will take a different form to that of the society we have got now. There is no doubt about that.
[The Greens' Grayndler campaign will be launched on March 14, 5.30pm at the Coopers Hotel (upstairs), Newtown.]
