New-found Greens trot to an old beat
December 13, 2004
Peter Garrett joined Labor because he knew what the alternative really stood for, writes Paul Sheehan.
There's a rip at Maroubra Beach. At the northern end, it gets so vicious it has a name. "Dunnybowl". Dunnybowl almost got its grip on a new member of parliament on Saturday morning, November 27. The surf was rough. Peter Garrett was bodysurfing. He began to feel faint. If he'd blacked out in the heavy swell, the undertow might have taken him to Dunnybowl and down he would have gone. Instead, he struggled inshore before collapsing in shallow water. His next nine hours were spent in hospital.
As a result, Garrett only belatedly delivered his maiden speech last Wednesday, at 9.30am, the model of mainstream pragmatism in a dark blue suit, pale blue shirt and subdued tie. Up in the public gallery, three tall, blonde teenage girls watched expectantly. Garrett's daughters. His most important achievement. His wife, Doris, was absent. She is a professional with her own practice and couldn't get away. In other words, a typical Australian family, hard to pin down, even for a maiden speech in the House of Representatives.
Also absent, for very different reasons, was Dick Adams, the Tasmanian Labor backbencher who closed ranks with John Howard during the federal election over Tasmanian forest policy. Otherwise, almost the entire Labor caucus was there, including the Leader of the Opposition, Mark Latham.
Don't be fooled by Garrett's rock musician pedigree. He has always been a politician. The music was always a message. His great-great-great-grandfather, John Garrett, served in the NSW parliament. So did his great-great-grandfather, Tom Garrett.
Between them, they spent 30 years in parliament. The family has been part of Sydney's life for more than 150 years. (I've known Garrett for 32 of those years, but don't hold that against him.)
On Wednesday, after delivering the usual niceties, he couldn't help himself. When it came time to talk about the environment, Garrett surfed along the edge of the convention that you don't bucket people in your maiden speech:
"Our track record in Australia remains abysmally poor. The measurements of ecological health do not lie and what they tell us is that, by most standards and in most areas, we are going backwards. Lamentably, much of this has happened on this Government's watch, for we are now a continent in ecological reverse. Our river systems are sick, salted up and stressed, used beyond their environmental limits. Majestic river red gums on the Murray River are dying, literally, for a drink of water. The scourge of salinity is spreading across the land, eating away at our communities ...
"And there is no sign that we are adequately responding to the unfolding tragedy ... The truth is that this Government fiddles while Australia burns."
He's right. As a former president of the Australian Conservation Foundation, Garrett knows more about the environment than anyone in Labor. He's also a lawyer, and led the foundation to build alliances with the mining industry and National Farmers Federation. Now he's a backbencher and he will rot there indefinitely unless he decides to join the factional system that both drives and cripples the ALP.
So why didn't he join the Greens? God knows they asked him enough. He probably would have walked into Parliament on October 9 if he'd headed the Greens ticket in NSW. He'd have had no local constituency to crowd his days, a national profile, and would have given the Greens a possibly crucial vote in the Senate. And he would have been heir apparent to the Greens leader, Bob Brown, who turns 60 in two weeks.
But Garrett didn't join the Greens for the same reason most of the electorate didn't vote for them on October 9. Because the Greens are not green.
The environment is merely a flag of convenience for a large faction of the party, a mother-earth issue onto which they have parasited their real agenda. That's why Brown and several hectorers on the Green Senate tickets spent so much time talking about everything but the environment during the election campaign. They couldn't help themselves. They fought the election on the Iraq war. Why? Because while many Greens are dedicated environmentalists, the party is basically a branding exercise, a new package around an old product that most political consumers will never buy.
Take Lee Rhiannon, a Greens member of the upper house in NSW. Her mother was Freda Brown, for many years the head of the Union of Australian Women, a communist front in the 1940s, '50s and '60s. Rhiannon also started in politics through a communist front, the Eureka Youth League. She came to notice during a campaign in support of the Moscow Olympics in 1980, working for another communist-dominated organisation, the Seamans Union of Australia, which raised funds, of questionable origin, to help send a remnant Australian team to Moscow in defiance of the federal government's boycott.
Or take Sylvia Hale, another Green in the NSW upper house. Her political career began as a Trotskyite at Sydney University in the mid-'60s, where she and Hall Greenland ran a front called the ALP Club, which had nothing to do with the ALP. She later morphed into the Greens and was elected to Parliament last year.
Garrett learnt the hard way about how Trots operate when he made his first tilt at parliament 20 years ago as a Senate candidate for the Nuclear Disarmament Party. He thought he could control the Trots, but the Socialist Workers Party took over the NDP and Garrett was gone by 1985. Like most hosts invaded by the Trot virus, the party died.
There are many reasons why Garrett didn't join the Greens, but given the party's power structure there was no guarantee he could parachute into the No.1 spot on the Senate ticket in NSW. It was also obvious that the excessive influence of the post-Trots meant the party was dominated by a brand of politics that was self-ghettoising.
This should have been the breakthrough year for the Greens. The Democrats were disintegrating. Iraq had gone bad. Drought and climate change were ravaging the environment. Labor had abandoned the left. Yet the Greens got 7.4 per cent of the Senate vote and 732,000 votes, an increase of 163,000, but a very modest harvest considering the 1.2 million votes for progressive parties three years earlier. And they did not win control of the Senate.
The progressive vote sank this year. Down the Dunnybowl. And Peter Garrett walked into Parliament, knowing the environmental crisis was too important to be left to the Greens.
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