[WS:] A very interesting argument, indeed. It explains why a marginal political force still holds to dear life in Australia, but has been all but wiped out in NZ and Germany. However, it does not explain a bigger question - why are Greens a marginal political force?
I do not have a definitive answer, but I am tempted to think that this has something to do with the structure of the movement - it is more of a network than a political party with a central nervous system. To be a political force one needs a party machine that can formulate a coherent political programme, secure consensus on key point of that programme, systematically disseminate that programme, devise and execute political strategies to win votes and seats, stave off the opposition - which invariably involves knowing which battles to pick an directing resources to those battles - and develop a cadre of professional politicians and party activists.
To my knowledge, Greens had very little if any of the above. They were more like a loose collection of various social movements - barely a notch above social media. Expecting them to become a major political force is like expecting Facebook fans to start winning elections, just because they are connected to a hip medium. From this point of view, it is amazing that they scored any political victories at all. One can only wonder what they would have accomplished had they actually become a vanguard political party of a kind that Lenin was talking about.
Wojtek
On Tue, Oct 5, 2010 at 6:20 PM, Mike Beggs <mikejbeggs at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Tue, Oct 5, 2010 at 11:33 PM, Mike Ballard <swillsqueal at yahoo.com.au> wrote:
>
>> Not so in Australia. The Greens here are left of the Labor Party and many of the more militant unionists support them over Labor.
>
> A friend of mine wrote an essay for Overland on the politics of the
> Australian Greens which I highly recommend:
>
> http://web.overland.org.au/previous-issues/feature-tad-tietze/
>
> I'm a member of the Greens (but not very active) and I think there are
> some specific reasons why they're lefter than Green Parties elsewhere.
> A major one is the unusual preferential voting system, whereby people
> can vote for minor parties without 'wasting their vote' because it
> will flow to their second preference. Unlike in non-preferential
> first-past-the-post systems, this has allowed the party to demonstrate
> a reasonable amount of support and get some public funding that comes
> with it, keeping it from being completely marginal. But unlike in
> proportional systems, it has until this year (they won Melbourne) kept
> them out of the lower house because they haven't been able to win
> electorates. So they haven't faced the co-opting pressure of coalition
> government. Meanwhile they have steadily increased their presence in
> the Senates (federal and state), which are proportional - but
> basically review bodies without legislative initiative.
>
> The controls are New Zealand and Germany, with proportional
> representation. The left of the NZ Greens has mostly been purged or
> given up, and the party has fallen to the temptation of becoming a
> centrist 'balance of power' party. Same, as I understand it, in
> Germany - there's a good analysis by Frieder Otto Wolf in the 2007
> Socialist Register:
> http://socialistregister.com/index.php/srv/article/view/5870
>
> There are powerful centrist forces in the Australian Greens, and a
> fairly good chance the party will eventually go that way - but it does
> still feel open to change.
>
> Mike
>
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