6

NEGOTIATE BETTER RELATIONSHIPS WITH OPPONENTS ON THE SAME SIDE OF POLITICS

The Adani reflection hits you like a hammer. You are hurt, angry and defiant on every other front, but the party’s devastation in Queensland has got to you personally. You underestimated the task. Looking north from the mouth of the cave, you see now that trying to slide through to election day hoping it would all be okay wasn’t good enough. You had years to embed yourself there, get to know all sides well, listen carefully in long unhurried visits, and open up conversations within regional communities to find a way together through disparate, deeply held views. You didn’t. The realisation you dodged this makes you rear up in despair. You have to get out of the cave. You’ve been banged up in too small a space with too much angst for too long. You need physical relief from the psychological pain. Where are your runners? You get into your T-shirt and running shorts, lace on your shoes, and power out of the cave fuelled by anger energy. After several kilometres, you begin to feel almost calm for the first time since election night. You reach the café, buy an espresso, and go to sit down, but there, right next to your regular table, is one of those Stop Adani Convoy leaders. You baulk, rage surging through you at the thought of how it hurt your Queensland vote. The government only won by two seats! You turn to the other side of the café, but sitting there is that mouthy Labor faction member whose public baiting and badgering made it hard to negotiate workable positions on sensitive issues over the past few years. You go back to the counter, chug the espresso, nod to the barista and go on your way, all the good from the run undone by the sight of people who seemed to deliberately set out to get you.

Most of the café’s customers are not in the least interested in the internecine ins and outs of politics. They just want to know why they got stuck with the Liberals for another three years instead of getting the Labor government they expected, to do the obvious things that need doing. The customers who follow politics a bit more are also riled the Labor and Greens figures at the café got outplayed by the government – that they blew it, again.

Ajournalist friend, Jane Nicholls, once asked in an agonised voice during one period of unspeakable political madness or another, ‘But why does politics have to be so, be so … political?’ Needless to say, she was not a political journalist but rather started working in Sydney straight out of school in the Packer magazine empire, and eventually rose to become deputy-editor of the then Time Warner owned People magazine in New York, with a three million–plus circulation and readership at least ten times bigger. This question, posed by someone outside politics who had to understand and appeal to regular people to sell them millions of magazines each week, is the one I have most often recalled and repeated over the years in Canberra – usually to break the spell of some act of political bastardry and get people to laugh, reset and get going again. Because that’s politics. Getting up, dusting yourself off, getting going again. And again. And again.

Why does politics have to be so, so political? Partly because people go into politics for different reasons, and those reasons don’t always align with what needs to be done.¹ Max Weber in ‘Politics as a Vocation’ said those with their ‘hand on the wheel of history’ needed three things joined up in the one person: ‘Passion, a feeling of responsibility and a sense of proportion.’²

Weber recognised the difficulties of manifesting and maintaining a ‘warm passion’ and ‘cool sense of proportion’ in the same person. Cultivating a sense of ‘detachment’, especially towards oneself, is critical, he said, because ‘daily and hourly the politician inwardly has to overcome a quite trivial and all-too-human enemy: a quite vulgar vanity, the deadly enemy of all matter-of-fact devotion to a cause’.³ Elsewhere I have written about ‘need, greed and deeds’ being contemporary politicians’ primary motivators.⁴ The emotionally needy, and the purely greedy, satisfy their narcissistic personal needs and selfish wants over doing what should be done.

In contrast, those motivated by ‘deeds’ – the drive to get something really important done for the wider good – set their own needs and wants aside to achieve a bigger mission. Of course, there is the danger of starting out motivated by deeds and, through vulnerability to the corrosive vanity Weber points to, becoming needy and/or greedy. If this is you, start practising Weberian ‘detachment’ and get yourself in hand.

Many more politicians are motivated by deeds rather than need or greed than people realise. However, the complicating institutional layers to the situation are the focus of this chapter. For the purpose of grappling with it, let’s assume that all Labor and Greens people are motivated by deeds, not need or greed, and let’s use environment policy as the prism.

Two friends, Christie and Inger, are extremely concerned about the environment and decide to go into politics and do something about it. Do they join Labor or the Greens? Christie joins Labor for several reasons, but most importantly because in the timeframe necessary for action to make a difference Labor, not the Greens, is likely to win enough seats to form government and enact good environment policies. Inger joins the Greens because she doesn’t think Labor puts a high enough priority on the environment and she’s worried pro-coal mining elements inside it – including the CFMEU – will stop meaningful action against new fossil fuel developments.⁵ Christie gets Labor preselection and Inger gets Greens preselection to contest the marginal New South Wales seat of Eden-Monaro where the sitting MP is a Liberal, Peter. Christie and Inger have the same goal but are now competing against each other for the same voters as well as competing against Peter in a three-cornered contest. If the conservative government wins office again – and that may come down to who wins the marginal seat of Eden-Monaro – environment policy will remain dire. How Christie and Inger compete could be crucial to who forms government and therefore whether environment policy improves. Here are a few simple, possible scenarios.⁶

Christie and Inger could have a spectacular falling out over their decisions to join different parties, setting the scene for a bitter fight turning voters off one, the other or both of them, shrinking the overall environment vote in Eden-Monaro and returning Peter to parliament for another term in a re-elected Liberal government. Christie and Inger lose doubly: neither wins the seat and environment policy remains dire.

Or Christie and Inger could be friendly rivals, behave respectfully towards each other’s campaigns, and try and grow the overall environment vote in the hope one of them will defeat Peter and help an environment-friendly Labor government get elected; and one of them does. Christie and Inger both win – environment policy is going to be better under a Labor government than under the Liberals – and one of them will win doubly, being the new member for Eden-Monaro as well.

But there is another layer. Irrespective of Christie and Inger’s views, at the leadership and party organisation level either Labor, or the Greens, or both, could compete bitterly against each other in a way that shrinks the environment vote, helping Peter and therefore the conservative government get re-elected. In this case the needs and greeds of individual leaders and parties – more votes, more seats, more power for an individual party, not to mention the ego satisfaction of besting a rival party leader you perceive as out to steal your voters – can take priority over shared deeds to which both aspire.

As layer upon layer of political history and institutional dealings build up, deep enmities can too, until they become a habit. Parties and those who lead them can lose sight of the desired deeds they share and focus instead on leader and party needs and greeds. This always helps the other side of politics win, the side over which you must jointly prevail to get better policies in the areas that really matter.

This is not particular to progressive politics. Bitterness can be spectacular on the conservative side of politics. However, the conservatives also demonstrate how to prioritise winning and holding power over personal and institutional enmities. Consider Liberal prime minister Robert Menzies, diplomatically described in the Australian Dictionary of Biography as ‘a man with no love for the Country Party’ (since renamed the National Party). Menzies famously loathed it but learned to subsume his obvious loathing in the interests of winning enough seats together to, in coalition, win many elections.⁷

Menzies’ father James’s career in the Victorian parliament ended when he lost his seat to a candidate fielded by the Victorian Farmers’ Union, a National Party forerunner. The most vicious attack Menzies himself suffered in politics was from Country Party leader Earle Page, who tried to block him from succeeding United Australia Party (UAP) prime minister Joseph Lyons upon Lyons’ death in office in 1939. Page accused Menzies in parliament of ‘cowardice for not having enlisted in World War I and of disloyalty to his leader which had hastened Lyon’s death’, historian Carl Bridge recounts: ‘Such a man, he argued, was not fit to lead his country, especially as war was again imminent.’⁸

Page did not prevail and lost the Country Party leadership over his failed gambit. Menzies excluded the Country Party from the UAP government of which he became prime minister. Yet less than a year later he allowed the Country Party back into the government, and shortly after that allowed Page himself back into cabinet.⁹

Historical learning from this period lives on in the Liberals’ strategic approach to power. Even on rare occasions when the Liberals win enough seats in their own right to form government without the Nationals, they still go into coalition government with them. Backroom negotiations occur in advance of elections to avoid three-cornered contests where rival Liberal and National candidates running in the same seat might help Labor to win it from the coalition. Many of their MPs and party officials still hate each other but, like an unhappy but high-functioning society marriage, they keep it to themselves.

Labor and the Greens cannot co-exist in a Liberal–Nationals style coalition relationship, the Labor election review makes clear. Given the extent to which the Liberal and National parties have demonised the Greens, that is likely correct. A Labor–Greens agreement that enabled a minority Labor government to exist in Tasmania from 2010–2014 caused lasting suspicion there among many low-income Labor voters who see the Greens as ‘implacably hostile to their interests, values and livelihood’.¹⁰ This view is now common among low-income voters in other areas across Australia where Labor must restore support to win government. Indeed, if you stop and listen to family members from far-flung parts who come together for festive season meals you will hear it and be surprised by its vehemence – and your disagreement does not make it an illegitimate view. It cannot be wished away by magical thinking but rather needs to be listened to, acknowledged, understood and then be the subject of a patient, persuasive response. The underlying concern must be dealt with, which can be summed up in one word: jobs.

On the other hand, Labor’s election review doesn’t mention the continuing, constructive Australian Capital Territory (ACT) Labor–Greens agreement which sees the Greens allocated one cabinet position in exchange for supporting a minority Labor government, a matter of no local remark or feeling in the ACT whatever. This is a story of different socioeconomics. Canberra has the highest average education and income levels in Australia. There are many, many more seats in Australia with demographics like that in Tasmania and Queensland than like the ACT. Labor–Green agreements, coalitions and the like are therefore not an option for the foreseeable future.

Better relationships between Labor and the Greens informally are important to cultivate. Really important. There needs to be more conversation and tacit understanding about constructive spaces and methods of competition to achieve the shared strategic goal of fewer conservative election wins in the interests of drastically better climate, energy and environmental policies overall. The question for the Greens is, does it want to be a party that makes better policies possible and help turn them into enforceable laws? Or does it want to be a party of permanent opposition, pursuing old-fashioned Leninist methods of intensifying the conflict – that is, making things much worse in the short term to corral people into more extreme positions, some of whom will move to the Greens in frustration, but which will keep getting conservative governments elected?

The latter does not seem to be a terrifically constructive option in a climate emergency with fast foreclosing time horizons. If the 2022 election’s version of the Greens’ Stop Adani Convoy through Queensland is a Stop Adani Laneway Music Festival in Melbourne, we will know the informal relationship building has done its job. If there is a 2022 Stop Adani Convoy through Queensland, expect the re-election of the Liberal–National coalition government.

For its part, Labor has to do the same sort of relationship building and shared sense of direction on environment policy internally as is needed informally between Labor and the Greens externally. Labor cannot go to another federal election without a genuine reconciliation and shared policy program between its resource state members in Queensland and Western Australia, and those in the rest of Australia who, while enjoying the national income benefits of mining exports, are not up for turning Earth into toast. Labor needs a full-blooded environment policy agenda alongside a full-blooded agenda for bridging regional resource state communities from sunset to sunrise industries, a project in which the rapid spread of robotic mining operations should heighten interest.

There are precedents. The Hawke Government was re-elected repeatedly while its Steel Industry Plan transitioned steelworkers in Newcastle and Wollongong, and its Textile Clothing and Footwear Plan transitioned workers in Victoria, to life in the contemporary posttariff economy of the 1980s and 1990s.

If it means building extra layers of help into comparable transition plans for families in today’s coal communities – adding free board-and-tuition tertiary training for their children, for example, so they can do the data science and desk jockey mining jobs supplanting the onsite mining jobs of their parents – so be it. That is just one small example of what might help, in one specific respect, in relation to one industry, but Labor has to start somewhere and soon.

Each of us needs to have the intellectual and moral humility to accept that we won’t each get everything we want in its purest form, that the beliefs and concerns of others must also weigh in the balance. It’s called democracy. To do what needs to be done you have to first win the election. That requires putting individual and institutional greeds and needs aside and, in the interests of getting shared deeds done, welding enough different kinds of people together to win more seats than the other side. It has been done in the past. It can be done in the future. But it cannot be done by making the perfect the enemy of the good.