Comment by Jenny Forward
HOBART — The August 29 Tasmanian elections are a crucial point for progressive politics here. For several years, the strength of the environment movement and the proportional Hare-Clark parliamentary system have combined to allow the Tasmanian Greens to hold the balance of power under ALP and Liberal minority governments. Now the Liberal government and the ALP opposition have combined to pass legislation that will make it harder for minor parties to gain parliamentary seats.
The balance of power can obviously be used to help build the movement for social change. Unfortunately, the Greens seem to have elevated it to an end in itself. Green MPs and supporters are equating the threatened end of their parliamentary role with the end of the green movement itself.
The Greens have opted for appeals to parochialism in their bid to keep their parliamentary seats. Their election slogan is one that could easily have been used by the Liberal, Labor or far-right Tasmania First parties: "If you love this island, you'll have to vote for it".
At their campaign launch on August 13, the candidates repeatedly stated that Tasmania was the best place in the world to live, that Tasmania was a "clean, green, clever" island in a world of ecological destruction and that Tasmania alone could lead the world to a sustainable future.
As a socialist and environmentalist, I find this parochialism a cause for concern. It should be unnecessary to point out that if the world goes down the ecological gurgler, Tasmania goes down with it.
Despite worldwide attention at the time of the Franklin Dam campaign — in the early '80s — it is quite a leap to conclude that only Tasmania can show the world how to live sustainably. This is particularly so when one considers that although the Franklin Dam was stopped, the Tarkine Road and the regional forest agreement were not, and that Tasmania is closer to being a leader in forest destruction than in forest conservation.
It is absurdly arrogant to assume that we have more to teach than to learn from the rest of the world. Green leaders should encourage global thinking that challenges the parochial, nationalist and western-centric biases of the mainstream instead of reinforcing the tendency not to think beyond Tasmania.
The candidates at the Green campaign launch emphasised that they have a vision for Tasmania: to give up polluting and resource-destroying industries and embrace clean, new, alternative technology. Democratic Socialists have a similar vision (for the world, not just Tasmania) but believe that fundamental social change is needed to bring it about.
We believe that sustainable production will be possible when decisions about production and distribution are made democratically, by the whole of society. We see a need to take control of production out of private hands.
We see the top-down parliamentary system, with its big party machines, its overpaid, unaccountable professional politicians, its unelected judiciary, its corporate media monopolies controlling information and its lack of grass-roots participation, as one based on private, undemocratic control of the economy.
Environmental sustainability requires a participatory, grassroots, democratic management of human affairs. Such a democracy can be created only from the grassroots up, which is why our election campaign has an emphasis on involving people in movement events such as the August 28 anti-racism rally.
The main concrete proposal the Greens advanced to achieve sustainability was a computers for schools program to create a computer literate society. It was acknowledged that the Liberals had a similar program but pointed out that they were planning to fund it by the socially regressive step of selling the Hydro Electric Corporation, to be operated by a private company for profit. The Greens, on the other hand, would fund computers in schools by leasing the Hydro, to be operated by a private company for profit.
Another prominent vision was that of non-adversarial, cooperative politics — certainly an appealing notion. But as a strategy to take into a parliament dominated by two big business parties, it is a disaster.
In practice, non-adversarial politics has meant surrendering the opportunity to use parliamentary positions to build a mobilised people's opposition to the Liberal-Labor agenda.
Instead the Greens have passed Liberal budgets that have been very adversarial towards ordinary people's living standards and proposed leasing the Hydro as a compromise in the debate on privatisation. This has allowed the ALP and Tasmania First to outflank them from the left by opposing the Hydro sale.
The consequence of this non-adversarial approach is policy goals that don't go beyond the acceptable limits of mainstream politics.
The Greens' policy statement on women's rights, for example, emphasised helping relatively privileged women break through the glass ceiling: quotas designed to increase female participation on public boards, in parliament and as public service heads of departments, a Women's Executive Program and so on.
As a working-class single parent and a long-term activist in the feminist movement, I was struck by the absence of any mention of abortion rights, equal pay, child-care, funding for shelters, rape crisis services, welfare rights and countless other issues that ordinary women are struggling over and yet to win.
When the Tasmanian Greens broke into parliamentary politics, it was a victory for the environmental and other activist movements. However, because of their failure to understand the nature of parliament as an instrument of capitalist class rule, parliament has changed the Greens' politics far more than they could hope to change parliament. The result is an election campaign based on the conservative, mainstream ideology of parochialism.
I am standing, with Mathew Munro, as a Democratic Socialist, to promote a different politics. In contrast to the Greens, we say: "If you love this planet, you'll have to struggle for it".
[Jenny Forward is the Democratic Socialist (group B) candidate in the electorate of Denison.]