Lately there has been a bit of fuss over the high percentage of people favouring the Greens in opinion polls. As a result there have been quite a few articles about the Greens on the websites of the various media organisations and political blogs. A common feature in the comments threads are comments along the lines of “I would vote for the Greens but … ” or “you may think you want to vote for the Greens but shouldn’t because of …”. In this post I would like to explore some of the common reasons given for not voting for the Greens and explain what I think is wrong with them. I want to be clear that this isn’t a post on why you should vote Green, it is aimed at those who have decided that the Greens are the party that best deserves their vote but feel that there is a good reason for not voting for them anyway.
I’ll also just note that I’m a Greens member. Anything I say here is not on behalf of the party, I hold no office and am not active in the running of the party at any level. It is all just my own opinion.
- They seem friendly and moderate but are hiding a secret extreme agenda.
The Greens are a very open and democratic party. Before believing what their opponents have to say about them you should try reading their charter and policies on their website. One of the four guiding principles of the Greens is Grassroots Democracy and this applies to internal party processes. The fact that the Greens have much less coverage in the press than the old parties may mean that people know less about them but that does not mean they are hiding a secret agenda. Mostly the Greens get press coverage on environmental issues but they do want other people to know about their views on a wide range of issues. The fact that they get less coverage is not due to any desire on the part of the Greens party. - A vote for a minor party is throwing away your vote.
I’ve dealt with this sort of argument in an earlier post, I’ll repeat some of the key points here. Due to preferential voting you are free to vote for whoever you want and still get a say in picking who you like out of whoever ends up being the last two contenders. If you know that either Labor or Liberal are bound to win your electorate then why not just vote for one of them? There are a couple of reasons. One is that if they win on preferences from the Greens then it will send a message about the priorities of the electorate and may influence the policies of the major party. Another is that parties are awarded public funding based on the number of first preferences they receive. If you don’t really like the major parties but vote for them anyway then you are giving them funding to help continue their dominance and at the same time denying funding to the party you do like who will continue to find it difficult to challenge this dominance. Vote for the party you like, they’ll get the funding (if they get over the threshold), and then with your preferences you can still have a say in who wins the seat (and who forms Government). - A vote for the greens is just a vote for Labor / They aren’t preferencing Labor so they might help Tony Abbott to get in.
The first of these two contradictory statements is the traditional one, but the second is turning up a bit now. The key point is that each voter gets to decide for themselves where their preferences go. Worrying about where preferences go is a silly reason not to vote for the party you like, you choose the prefences yourself. In the lower house you have to write in all the preferences yourself anyway (someone might give you a how to vote card but you don’t need to follow it), and in the Senate you can look at the AEC website to find out the above the line ticket before election day or just number the boxes below the line if you’re concerned about it. The second comment seems to result from some comments from Bob Brown about how people can decide their own preferences. Labor people seem to be trying to make people think this means that the Greens want the Liberals to get into Government, really I think what it is about is convincing those moderate Liberals who don’t like the current Liberal leadership, but who also don’t like Labor, to consider voting for the Greens instead – making it clear that such people (who are always going to preference Libs over Labor) can still vote Green. - I don’t want my vote to go either Labor or Liberal, but it will because of the preferential voting system so I’ll vote informal.
I’ve seen variations of this one a bit lately and find it quite bizarre. These people seem to think that preferential voting is some sort of scam on the part of the major parties so that they (eventually) get everyone’s vote. Without preferences it would be much harder for a third party to break into the two party system as those voting for them (before they were well established enough to seriously contest seats) would be giving up any opportunity to have a say in the actual outcome. In reality this would mean that many potential Green voters would stay with Labor so that they don’t help the Liberals win power and then the ALP could safely ignore “green” issues. On the other hand, suppose you hate both the majors and like the Greens in our preferential system. So you vote for the Greens, but they don’t get elected. One of Labor or Liberal will get elected – the fact that your preference is carried on doesn’t make this happen, it is happening anyway, the party you voted for didn’t get enough votes to win. So under these circumstances, no matter how much you dislike both majors, isn’t it better to get a say in which one gets elected? And the option of voting informally is even worse since it denies resources to the Greens, meaning that it is harder for them to challenge to dominance of Labor and Liberals in the future. - The Greens didn’t support the ETS.
Already dealt with previously – but in short: you want action on climate change, so rather than vote for the Greens you are going to vote for either a) the party who claimed they’d take action but then put up pissweak, flawed legislation instead (which largely ignored the expert advice they’d commissioned) and refused to even talk to the Greens about it, or b) the party that also did not support the legislation, and with some prominent members who think that it is all a communist conspiracy. - I like their policy on A,B and C but don’t like their policy on X.
For a start you should check the website to see if the policy on X is what you think it is since there is quite a bit of disinformation about Greens policies out there. Now suppose that you have seen the actual policy and don’t like it. Given that the assumption here is that you would otherwise vote for Greens then clearly you don’t agree with all of the policies of any other party either or you would have decided to vote for them. Chances are you are not going to find a single party who agree with you on absolutely every issue, you have to weigh it up overall. There is chance that there is one thing that’s a real deal breaker, but apply the same standards to all parties before rejecting one on the basis of a single policy. - They haven’t done anything.
The Greens Senators are very active, you can read about what they do here. It might not be in the news much, but it doesn’t mean they aren’t doing anything. You can go and read speeches, debates, questions, motions and press releases at the Greens MPs site and see that the Greens are active on a wide range of issues (which are in some cases otherwise ignored). It’s worth checking out their contributions to Senate Estimates as well. The fact is that much of the work of the Senate (not just the Greens senators) is not everyday news, which tends to focus on announcements by the Government and responses by the Coalition. The Greens are of course limited in what can be achieved with just a small representation in the Senate, but a look over the transcripts from parliament show that they are not slacking off. Also, you might try thinking of what your other Senators have done lately. Have a look at Open Australia to see what all the members of parliament have been up to.
My friend said he started going to Greens meetings about 5 years ago.
But the guy running the meeting would stop it to smoke a bong, finish up and then continue the meeting.
lol
Jon, that doesn’t sound remotely like any meeting I’ve been to (or facilitated) and I’ve been to plenty – branch meetings, state councils, election campaign committees, policy working groups and various others. It hasn’t happened and would not be considered even remotely acceptable. I will say a bit about greens meetings in response (and all that follows is addressed to all readers in general).
Greens aren’t drug smoking hippies – in my experience they are academics, scientists, teachers, accountants, doctors, public servants and other professionals, not exactly a random cross-section of society, they tend to skew towards being tertiary educated (and I’ve met plenty of fellow academics in the Greens as well), but not exclusively so. Quite a lot are former members of the democrats or the ALP. There is also diversity in the ages of members, often meetings will have a spread of ages from 20’s to 60’s (and sometimes younger or older). None of this suggests anything in particular but is to set the context a bit and possibly challenge preconceptions that some people may have about who the greens members are.
Meetings can vary, unfortunately sometimes their taken up by fairly tedious administrative detail, on the other hand sometimes there’s rather heated discussion on policy directions. Often they are fairly small apart from at election times when they are taken up by all the work of getting an election organised (which requires a lot of effort on the part of volunteers in a small party). Some branches organise guest speakers (usually from outside the party), sometimes they get visits from elected members to talk about what they are up to. Many branches hold their meetings in local cafes, pubs or community centres. To a large extent meetings aren’t really ‘run’ by anyone, there is a facilitator (chosen at the start of the meeting by the group) who keeps things moving along according to the agenda, but no one is in charge, everything is done by consensus. If anyone out there is a Greens member and have not attended a local branch meeting then they should give it a go, it can be a bit daunting for new members since they usually deal with a lot of ongoing business (often dealing with issues arising from meetings at state level), but will give an idea of how the party runs and what you can do to help, as well as giving you a chance to meet other members. For anyone interested in the Greens at all, in particular thinking about becoming a member but with some reservations, possibly because of negative stereotypes then much like my recommendations about policies (before you criticise them based on hearsay read them for yourself), my recommendation if you want to know about the people in the Greens and what they do is to contact your local branch. For SA there are branch contacts here, or to find out about events see here (but note that these are not all run and endorsed by the Greens). More info on how to get involved here.)
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