As the head of the Greens' Legislative Council ticket, long-term peace and environmental activist IAN COHEN has a good chance of being elected the first Green member of the NSW parliament on March 25. (He missed out by only a few hundred votes in the 1991 state elections.) He was interviewed for Green Left Weekly by NICK FREDMAN.
The Greens have contested a few elections now. How do you think people have responded to you and your policies in this campaign?
We're breaking through the wall of seeing the Greens as a single-issue party. We've been covering a number of areas and getting a good response from the media on education and youth policy.
Also we've got a men's policy — I think we're the only party taking up this issue — looking at why men die earlier, why the suicide rates are very high, and the fact that rape and domestic violence is not just a women's issue, a victims issue, but also very much an issue that means men have to reassess their role in society.
We've been getting good feedback that the public's appreciating our stand on many of these issues.
The Greens' banner has been prominent at rallies against woodchipping and against the third runway. How do you see the link between electoral campaigns and other forms of campaigning such as mass actions?
We always participate. I've been an issue-based person for many years, on anti-nuclear issues, on forest issues, coastal development. These have been my full-time passion for many years, so I attend those rallies anyway.
But giving a Green political focus is just another opportunity of casting our net out to people and letting them know that, one, we're in solidarity and support their issues, and, two, we can take those issues a step further in the political system. The Greens are there on the airport issue, the Greens are there on the woodchip issue, and we'll represent the community in parliament on those very issues.
You have a good chance of gaining a seat this time around. How do you see yourself using your position in parliament?
We expect to win. We are issues based; we're primarily a group of activists organising in the political system. If we get in, I'll be using both our balance of power position to push those issues and also using that forum to highlight them.
Hopefully, as an elected representative I'll be able to keep in close contact with the community that has supported us. We're really feeling strongly that our voter support and the driving support of people in the campaign gives us a lot of community backup. We are of the community, as opposed to the major political parties.
How do you see the role of the Greens as an organisation after the elections?
I think when elected we'll go from strength to strength. We're looking at maintaining a modest office in the city with equipment we've gathered together for the election campaign, possibly separate from the political office because we don't want to just become a political machine. We'd like to be able to develop a broad-based movement and relate to many other people. So we want a public access type of office.
We've got one candidate, Murray Matson in the seat of Coogee, who's just registered to run in the federal by-election in Wentworth. So we've got the by-election following the state election, and the federal election in the not too distant future. We want to be on a campaign footing and having an office will facilitate that.
If you win, you will most likely be part of the balance of power in a hung upper house. It's not the same situation of supporting a minority government in the lower house, but what lessons do you see from the experience of the Green-ALP accord in Tasmania?
That was a very heart-rending situation. The ALP betrayed the Greens on a number of issues. We're not looking at going into an accord with the ALP; we're looking at maintaining our political and philosophical integrity. So we'll be working issue by issue, and voting and lobbying accordingly rather than saying we're going to be part of an agreement process which then locks us into a certain expectation.
The Greens are growing and are really the party of the future, and we have to act with respect to the fact that it's only going to be a few elections away before our impact won't be just balance of power, it will be major.
Preferences are often very important in upper house elections. How do the Greens decide where to direct preferences?
We make a philosophical decision. Because we where shut out by a number of parties we didn't give preferences as high as we would have liked. For example, even though the Indigenous Peoples Party didn't give us their preference, we gave them a high preference on our ticket as a principled position. We swapped with the Democrats because we have a good working relationship with Richard Jones, we anticipate working with him in parliament and feel we can green the Democrats' agenda with no problem.
We then went to the small parties and gave, in the upper house, a preference to the ALP, because in our assessment if we didn't we could well have been facilitating the election of the Shooters' Party and wanted to avoid that under all circumstances.