>As for John Halle's complaint that I should be out there organizing Greens, well, sorry, I'm pretty busy and I don't have time to do that. And the already-existing Green party - or parties, how many are there, anyway? - looks jumbled and uninspiring. I think Nathan is right that if the Greens ever got 5% and public funding, they'd be taken over by Fulani or some such with more sophisticated notions of organization.
You might be interested in the latest news from here, where the Greens have just made significant political gains. Here's a brief report I wrote up for someone else:
For those interested in proportional representation etc, the news is that Tasmania went to the polls on Saturday. The state Labor government headed by Premier Jim Bacon romped back with a landslide win, crushing the main opposition Liberal party.
The Liberals lost 4 of their 10 seats in the 25 member state parliament, one to the Labor party and 3 to the Greens. The Greens got over 18% of the vote and won 4 seats altogether. This is the best result in percentage terms ever for the Greens, who have a guaranteed minimum income as part of their policy platform. Premier Bacon has conceded that Tasmania now has two opposition parties of roughly equal standing, a humiliation for the Liberals. But Bacon was jubilant in victory, Labor won a massive 52% of the vote and picked up 3 of the 5 seats in each of the 5 multi-member electorates.
The Greens were equally thrilled. In fact they seemed a bit taken aback by the extent of their come-back, after suffering a wipe-out in the last election where they were reduced to only one seat. This was after the Liberal and Labor parties combined to reduce the number of seats in the parliament from 35 to 25, greatly increasing the quota of votes needed to win a seat under the Hare-Clark proportional representation system.
This was certainly a deliberate plot by the two parties to wipe out the Greens, but instead it seems only to have strengthened them. Tasmania is arguably home to the first green political party in the world. I recall voting for Bob Brown's United Tasmania Party back in the early 70's, when I first voted and they were around a bit before that. Born out of a grass-roots campaign to save the beautiful Lake Pedder in the SW wilderness from flooding by the Hydro-Electric Commission. That campaign failed, Lake Pedder is no more, but that galvanised Bob Brown and the other young environmentalists, who went on to be successful in the massive campaign to save the Franklin river from a similar fate a decade later.
With this result, they have become the most successful Green party in the world and perhaps set to get stronger. Though the quality of the candidates is somewhat variable. The Australian leader of the Greens, Senator Bob Brown, is practically a deity. But the fellow elected from my rural electorate of Lyons on the weekend, some bloke called Tim Morris, seemed a bit dazed. Still, I prefer that sort of person to the big names I fear will now start trying to insinuate themselves into the Greens as a result of their success.
Anyhow, for those who have some idea that proportional representation means the end of majority government, this result confirms the opposite. Actually, Tasmania has had PR for over 100 years and majority government by a single political party is the norm. The Labor government seems entrenched now, with many Liberals actually switching their vote to Labor to ensure that the Greens don't get the balance of power again.
But this is tacit acknowledgement of the fact that the Liberal and Labor parties are virtually the same. Once its own supporters accept that, it is a slippery slope for the lesser of the two old parties. The Liberals may never recover, the Greens could quickly come to be seen as the real opposition and eventually as an alternative government.
With that sort of prospect, the wood-chip companies are no doubt wondering how they can speed up their rape of Tasmania's forests. Before its too late.
Bill Bartlett Bracknell Tas