By Peter Boyle
"If you want the last of Australia's ancient forests protected, don't vote Labor." This blunt comment from Wilderness Society spokesperson Alec Marr indicates how badly relations have soured between peak environmental groups and the Hawke government as a result of the latter's decision to introduce "resource security" legislation guaranteeing access to native forests for large pulp mill projects.
Disillusionment with Labor has been growing among environmentalists since the last federal election, but the resource security legislation appears to have pushed two of the peak environmental lobbies — the Wilderness Society and the Australian Conservation Foundation — to reconsider their attitude to the ALP. Both organisations helped direct critical preference votes to Labor in the 1990 election.
Marr said that the resources decision "was destined to change voting patterns across Australia" because "many who voted for the Labor Party in the last election because they believed they would protect the last of Australia's native forests will feel their trust has been betrayed".
The ACF was angry that Hawke had broken a promise given in private to its executive director Phillip Toyne and president Peter Garrett that resources security legislation would not be introduced. At first Hawke denied giving such an assurance but later admitted that he had simply changed his mind.
Tasmanian green independent MP Bob Brown said that Labor had thrown down the gauntlet and the greens had picked it up. Australian politics from now on would be marked by a new divide: Labor and Liberal on one side and the greens and the Democrats on the other.
Environmental task force
At the centre of the ALP's strategy to tie up the green vote was the establishment of the task force into ecologically sustainable development (ESD). Working groups comprising environmentalists, industry and union representatives have been meeting for some months on agriculture, forest use, fisheries, mining, energy production, manufacturing, transport, energy use and tourism. Some $4 million is expected to be spent on this process.
Coopting and controlling movements through tripartite bodies was very successful when applied to the trade union movement, but some environmental organisations were wary of being drawn into a similar process. The Wilderness Society refused to join the ESD task force from the start, saying that it did not have time to help the government carry out "window dressing" while it was giving in to logging in national estate forests in south-east NSW. But the ACF, World Wildlife Fund and Greenpeace (which has stayed out of electoral politics) joined the task force.
When the resource security decision was taken, Greenpeace withdrew. Greenpeace executive director Paul Gilding explained that it pulled ment decision had "demolished" the ESD process.
Greenpeace expected that the government would continue to make investment decisions during the ESD process. It even accepted that the "son of Wesleyvale" (Wesleyvale was the site of a proposed chlorine-bleach pulp mill blocked by Tasmanian environmentalists) would probably be embraced in principle by Hawke. What it did not count on was "a total U-turn on something as fundamental as the management of public-owned resources".
To achieve ecological sustainability for the pulp and paper sectors there must be a transition, in the shortest period of time, from native forests to eucalypt plantations on already cleared land, said Gilding. Hawke's resource decision did the opposite.
The government would sacrifice its major means of ensuring ecologically sustainable development by guaranteeing industry access to public resources. The ESD process, he concluded, could then only be viewed as "token, politically motivated window dressing".
Some ACF representatives on ESD working groups expressed their willingness to walk out, even though they had put months of work into the process. Jane Elix, ACF's representative on the agriculture group, said that there had been some progress in discussing key issues with unions and industry, but she would be prepared to support a decision to pull out of the process. ACF spokesperson Paul Rutherford said that the government had given in to demands from the forest and pulp industry.
However, the ACF deferred its decision till after details of the resources security proposals were announced in the March 12 economic statement. Hawke told the press that the ACF's criticism would soften when the "fine print" of his proposal was revealed.
But the statement contained nothing in the fine print to assuage environmentalists' concerns.
On March 16, the ACF executive decided (after what Toyne said was a "very, very difficult debate") to stay in the ESD process. It explained that, although the Hawke government's decision demonstrated its lack of commitment to a genuine ESD process, the ACF's participation was now "more critical than ever". Garrett said that the ACF and the World Wildlife Fund could still play a "crucial and creative role in the development of economic activity which is ecologically sustainable".
Electoral politics
A Sydney Morning Herald report of environmentalists' response to the legislation said that unnamed "conservation sources" warned moves were well advanced towards founding a Green Party in Australia. It was suggested that Garrett (who stood as Nuclear Disarmament Party Senate candidate in NSW in 1984) might be a candidate for such a party. Garrett denied he had been approached but refused to rule out running again.
Some in the ALP look to a new Green Party as a way of channelling preferences of disgruntled voters back to Labor. ALP on (who gained popularity among some environmental groups as the Hawke government's first environment minister) speculated that the green movement could be "very successful" if it ran as a unified group and stood "big names" as candidates. Richardson's statement, made on the eve of the ACF executive meeting, was accompanied by a plea for the environment groups to stay in the ESD process.
Chris Harris, a spokesperson for the Wilderness Society in Tasmania, told 91×ÔÅÄÂÛ̳ that the organisation would discuss what stand to take in the next federal elections at its national meeting in April. The ALP had "no chance of getting the support of the Wilderness Society, or probably any other environmental group unless they dramatically changed their policy". He said that most people were keen on throwing their weight behind a new Green Party.
The 'Melbourne Group'
Is there a new federal Green Party in the offing? Apparently a group of environmentalists and politicians have been meeting secretly to consider such a move. This "Melbourne Group", as it has come to be known, has met at least twice, in June and February.
These closed meetings are reported to have been attended by Phillip Toyne, leaders of the Australian Democrats, Senator Jo Vallentine (of the WA Greens), leaders of the Rainbow Alliance and Bob Brown.
At the February meeting, Toyne and the Democrats are said to have proposed the formation of a party called the "Green Democrats", but the meeting failed to agree. Instead it decided to prepare structural documents, investigate certain practicalities and reconsider the proposal at a future meeting.
One of these practicalities is the fact that the federal registration of the name "Greens" is held by an open coalition of grassroots-based green activists in NSW. These greens are united around the four basic principles first outlined by the West German Greens: ecological sustainability, disarmament and non-violence, social and economic justice and grassroots democracy.
In the last federal election, local Greens ran candidates who won between 4 and 14% of the vote. Many intend to contest the upcoming NSW state elections.
The Greens welcomed the Democrats, the NDP, other progressive parties and the peak environmental groups to participate in an open and democratic organisation to contest the elections. They were met with hostility from the peak bodies, which boycotted the process and condemned the Greens before the press for being too radical.
This hostility to the more radical wing of the green movement has not abated. Some peak bodies have sought to present themselves as the "responsible" environmentalists. After Hawke's resource security decision, for instance, ACF spokesperson Paul Rutherford protested that the government had "done a lot to drive the ACF into the arms of radical environmentalists".
The Democrats have tried to keep all avenues open. With Labor he right, many reform-minded voters are looking to the Democrats and to Greens and independents. But where Democrats have run against Greens, they have lost votes. In the last federal elections they were decisively outpolled by the Greens in WA. They were neck and neck with Green candidates in several electorates in other states.
Some members of the Democrats (including Jonathan King, now heading the Democrat ticket for the NSW upper house) participated in the meetings organised by the NSW Green Alliance in the lead-up to the 1990 federal elections. King dropped out when the group did not select him to head its Senate ticket. There was also an attempt to have the Democrat Senate ticket adopted as that of the Alliance. When that failed, the Democrats dropped out of the process.
Brisbane experiment
Another political experiment is taking place in Brisbane, where the Green Alliance — a broad alliance of individual activists from most of the city's environmental groups, the Rainbow Alliance, the Australian Democrats, Democratic Socialist Party, Socialist Party of Australia — contested the March 23 Brisbane City Council elections.
Green Alliance lord mayoral candidate Drew Hutton (a key figure in the Rainbow Alliance) told 91×ÔÅÄÂÛ̳ that the alliance had worked very well. Other activists agree.
But most leaders of the peak environmental groups, some of the green independents in parliament in Tasmania and the Democrats seem to prefer a centralised and parliamentarian-centred political organisation.
The Melbourne Group meetings appear to be trying to put together a leadership and candidate list, in secret, to present to the broad movement as the most viable electoral alternative.
The Denison Greens, formed in Bob Brown's electorate as a pioneer component of a green party in Tasmania, adopted a constitution that permits successful candidates to ignore the group's policy if the parliamentarian believes it goes against her/his conscience or that it contradicts the interests of her/his constituency. The Democrat rank and file share the same absence of control over their parliamentary representatives.
Alienation between politicians and the ranks is a characteristic of all the major parties. Recent studies have recorded the total decline of a once active, if powerless, network of local Labor Party branches. The Liberal and Democrat party structures are demobilised between elections and serve as little more than a means of raising funds and organising people to staff polling booths. A Democrat organiser in WA, Brian Jenkins, admitted recently that his party had only about a dozen members who remained active between elections.
Environmental campaigns are never short of activists full of enthusiasm and energy, but the same cannot be said of the green political formations that have arisen so far. The WA Greens, the most successful green formation in electoral terms after the Tasmanian green independents, is now not very active outside of a handful of ff of Senator Vallentine. Recent meetings have failed for lack of quorums. Other green groups have also experienced difficulty in maintaining rank-and-file activism outside of elections.
The movement has heard a lot about a "new form of politics" and a "real alternative" to the major parties but so far these haven't clearly emerged. Is this a reflection of the green movement itself? Is the base too narrow or transient? Or are the forms used by the greens not democratic or flexible enough to encompass the plurality of politics in the movement today?
Sue Jackson, coordinator of the Northern Territory Environment Centre, told 91×ÔÅÄÂÛ̳ that the resource security decision was not so much a turning point for the Labor government as a turning point for the green movement. The movement now had to move beyond rhetoric and start the process of democratic discussion that would be necessary to build a green political alternative. She was worried that the peak groups may have entrusted too much to working with the Hawke government and that the media postures taken belied the long way still to go in organising a really effective green political voice.
Steve Broadbent of the Movement Against Uranium Mining puts another line of thinking that also is shared by many in the movement. He said that the resource security decision showed that electoral politics should not be the top priority for environmental activists and that big power games played by some peak groups had got nowhere. The movement, he said, should focus on the issues and on providing activists, the public and individual politicians with the facts about environmental problems and solutions.
Whether it has taken the form of lobbying or electoral activity, green politics so far hasn't sufficiently involved the ranks in making the decisions that matter. Labor's latest snub to the peak bodies may weaken the influence of the peak lobbyists' approach and turn many towards independent electoral action. But this strategy will be no more successful if it too fails to put democratic control into the hands of the rank and file.