“The Great Barrier Reef, right at this moment, is at risk of being declared World Heritage in danger because the old parties treat it like a coal and gas shipping highway … The Tasmanian devil is at serious risk if the Tarkine is mined. The Leadbeater’s possum heads to extinction if its habitat is logged. September the 7th is Threatened Species Day …”

Gripping the lectern, clad in a jacket as green as a rainforest or a roulette baize, Greens leader Christine Milne is in full flight, but stops for the laugh. Reminds herself, perhaps, to stop for the laugh. “I know, but it’s true …” Then she ploughs on. She looks Margaret Thatcher, she looks like your schoolteacher, she looks like a church lady, most ungreen, her delivery is wooden, reserved, there’s something held back, but she’s wowing the crowd, a couple of hundred Greens, come in from Canberra and the backblocks, all the senators and Adam Bandt people looking at them with “wow, there’s quite a lot of us, we’re kinda of a real party”, and a few enthusiasts/tragics flown in from the event.

Her speech on Saturday at the Greens’ national campaign launch is hard-edged, upfront political, and eschews a lot of the more spiritual themes that former leader Bob Brown might have put in. She announces refugee treatment inquiries, a Clean Air Act, a party whip vote on equal marriage; every time, rolling back Labor’s welfare cuts, bang, bang, bang, and you get a picture of her parliamentary style: no-nonsense and forthright.

Alas, also wooden and waxy, Milne’s curse, one interestingly, that she shares with Julia Gillard — a stepping back too far from intimate engagement when speaking publicly, an officialness. She’s the only leader so far to touch a poetic note the campaign, hitting first Gandhi (“a nation’s greatness is measured by how it treats its weakest members”), the name itself getting a little sigh even before the quote comes out, and then Thoreau, more obscure and interesting:

“As Henry Thoreau said: ‘I do not wish to take a cabin passage, but rather to go before the deck of the world, for there I could best see the moonlight amid the mountains. I do not wish to go below now.’ I ask Australians, not to go below now — not to go below to cruelty, to backward and legacy thinking — but instead to join the Greens ..”

Which gets a more quizzical response since you have to know a little about 19th-century ship ticketing to get what she’s talking about. Bit of a buzz of confusion. Cabin passages? What? Stop the boat metaphors.

Low key and lo-fi, the launch had opened at the spacey no-zonish National Convention Centre in Canberra with a welcome to country, an intro by candidates Simon Sheikh and Adam Bandt and then the full speech by Milne. Before that there’d been a big reunion sort of, as people had poured into the foyer from all points of the country, the white Commonwealth cars of the senators pulling up, other people looking for a space in ratty old Volvos, some even coming in off the bus — the bus! — who knew there were such things any more.

There’s quite a few 50- and 60-somethings, favouring coloured sweaters, Kathmandu pants, ethnic skirts, shoes made in a yurt somewhere, and a lot of the 20-something crowd, the officials and staffers favouring the grey suit and open neck white shirt, women in carefully chosen earth tones, or upmarket casual about as far from a sodding rainbow as you can get. Fewer people from the ages between.

Things have changed a little. I remember the last time I was here for a Greens thing, about a decade ago, for a Global Greens Conference, that the party — then with only two senators — had organised. That should have been a sign right there, that this was something more than a rehashed Australian Democrats outfit. Star turn was Ingrid Betancourt, the Colombian Green leader, kidnapped and held by the Revolutionary Armed Forces for six years, a couple of months after leaving the conference. No one there that day forgot meeting her. There were freaks and ferals, a lot of bare torsos and scarification, old Melbourne marxists in chunky sweaters, and the old Greens, in from the Lismore hills, hippie homesteaders in bib overalls and knit hessian — didn’t know the war was over, and we lost. The few suits, the party’s then small “reali” faction, were moving around, whispering to each other, while outside there was juggling and unicycles. Quite a lot of that. Fire-eaters, too. Sometime in the ’80s, a lot of people I know had come to the conclusion that power would flow to whichever party had the most circus skills, by a process of logic I still haven’t worked out yet.

But god it was fun. After a big dinner at Parliament House, there was a kind of fire-eater collective performance outside, the image of the flames leaping off the long convex of the white facade, the drums — I mean, of course there were drums — echoing into the night. It was primal, confronting, and maybe a little silly, but it coursed through the veins.

But in the ensuing decade, something happened for better and worse and better. The Old Guard are still there, the boomers in coloured knits, and there’s even a few of the old old guard, people in their 80s, old peace marchers in khaki and brown, with their own lunch in Tupperware tubs. But the middle folk have disappeared. The firestarters and stiltwalkers are largely gone — they’re teaching circus skills at NMIT and juggling a West Heidelberg mortgage, and good luck to ’em — and the few who survived, well they’re in the grey suit and the open-necked white shirt, and in the mix. The Greens have turned over like a clean engine … or a machine. Ironic in a way, this party, 40 years old in one form or another, is like the proverbial axe — changed the head three times and the handle twice, but it was too good to get rid of.

Brown’s still there, sauntering round the room, enjoying the luxury of having more relaxed conversations. He’s in a suit of course, but [pullquote position=”right”]Brown in a suit is like Nick Cave in a suit, worn effortlessly, rocked out because you know he’s spent more of his life in anything but one[/pullquote]. Now he’s free of the red benches, does he plan a big tome? “Well, I’m putting together a book of anecdotes …” No big Whitlam/Hawke doorstopper? “Ohhhhh, I’ll let others say what I’ve done if they want to, and I think I’ll,” he starts to smile broadly, “do what I’m going to do.” Animated now. “I mean, I was in the Tarkine a few days ago with 15 protesters, so it doesn’t stop.” Someone buttonholes him, one of the few remaining genuine ferals, a shaggy man-mountain wanting to talk about a dam somewhere. And the crowd closes around him, a distinguished man, but also now just a member of the Greens, a party that every instapundit said would collapse without him, just another bloke in the tea ‘n’ biscuits queue, as the party sails forward. (Note to self: stop the boat metaphors.)Milne and a half-dozen senators and their staff are already working out their next hop, tapping next-gen smartphones sent from the future by Greens who invented a time machines. In this crowd of sharp young things, you would imagine were you to stumble across it and take it in, you’d assume that what you was was a nice Liberal lady, stumbled into the wring convention, the Liberal lady being, of course, Christine. Outside as we all pile into the Priuses, Canberra is as it always is, clear, spacey, timeless, like the video from a lab camera trained on glass, waiting for it to flow like a liquid. It’s the only city you can cast your eye over and all but see a digital timecode ticking at the bottom of your vision. Filled out with backset houses of different eras, nothing has deranged its eerie calm. Canberra is a future we never got, a mix of Jetsons cool and garden city rationality, and here, today, the Greens feel like they own the joint and maybe the future.

****

“Would you like a coffee? I can order one by text.” Hours earlier, at Kingston Shopping Centre, Senator Sarah Hason-Young is smart-caffeining. We were at — mirabile dictu — Green Square shopping mall, about as historic as Canberra gets. Kingston was the city’s first suburb, the place where its staff of public servants were dropped in when the city was founded in the ’20s. Down the road? Telopea Park School, most famous alumnus is Gough Whitlam, son of a public servant, a man who detoured through poetry and dilettantism before coming back to the world of government. Green Square still has an art deco air, crowded now with SESs and Australian National University staff, peeling open the Weekend Australia to hate it at leisure. Outside the newsagents, fliers for the most popular magazines: The Economist, Philosophy Today. The old ’30s baby health centre across the road now houses a Blockbuster. Blockbuster?

Green Square is Green central — in other words, a ground zero for the cultural/knowledge workers who form its class base. Here, Greens ACT Senate candidate Simon Sheikh is doing an hour or so campaigning before the launch, overseen by his street campaigning co-ordinator Jenny Rose, who is also, erm, his mother-in-law, mother of his wife, Anna Rose, former co-ordinator of the Australian Youth Climate Coalition. “We usually do the bigger malls,” Sheikh says, angling around to give a pamphlet to a greybeard, who probably invented a new quantum computer yesterday and is about to read the style section of The Sydney Morning Herald.

“We’re aiming for the Liberal vote.” Middle-aged PhDs are trucking through on the way to eggs benedict, and some Islander kids in gangsta style. Sheikh petitions them all “voting in the ACT?” “Already voting for you!” “No brutha!” (laughs). This is Greens central, and Sheikh is after the more marginal areas.

The Greens are a natural fit to the ACT, and last time they came very close, with the previous Green candidate losing by only a few hundred votes to popular Liberal Gary Humphries. Humphries was a moderate social liberal, well fitted to the ACT. But rolled he was, by the burgeoning Christian Right faction NSW Libs, a sort of “great detractor”, ranging out from its epicentre in the Hills district of outer Sydney, across the NSW hinterland. Dim bulbs, evangelicals, with the exception of their wily leader Alex Hawke, rabbits ruled by a stoat. They have come out of their warrens, and infested regional NSW , and their candidate is former ACT Liberal leader Zed Seselja, who rolled Humphries, a sitting senator, in February this year.

Zed is the sort of candidate the Libs are starting to specialise in: a mutliculti favoured son. From one angle that looks like the Libs have got their rainbow on. Look closer, and it’s about the collapse of the party, so that anyone who can command a social bloc, ethnic or evangelical Christian, can get a boy or girl up, dumping members like Humphries, suited to their electorate, and also giving us candidates like the hapless Jaymes Diaz, now forever on history’s blooper reel. Thus, the elevation of Zed to the candidacy has given the Greens their best chance to take the seat, and just possibly deny Tony Abbott bicameral power. Wages of sin, huh?

Sheikh and Co know it, and that’s one big reason the launch was here in Canberra, forbidden city sent from the future to show us how we shall live in the sparkly, clean and ever-so-slightly nightmarish future. It also means they’re working hard. They really need about 2000 extra votes, either first pref or buried in the bowels of deals, to get over the line, to make it secure, but a thousand would do it. His team has largely abandoned the Greens-Labor trade-off and is now focusing on a direct transfer of Liberals to Green. “I’m getting so many people coming up and saying, ‘I’m voting for you,’ from Liberal voters,” Sheikh says. “We’ve got the Liberal Party members, stalwarts, telling us they’ll vote for us, because ‘I don’t like what they did to Gary’. They have Labor people peeling off to hand out, and others who are going to advocate a Greens Senate vote on election day, because, as one says, coming up to get a sheaf of leaflets, ‘I’m disgusted by this stuff about the refugees’.”

Simon is galumphing, enthusiastic, smiling. The former GetUp director was born in 1986, but he has an ageless quality. His past has been extensively explored in print — Dad a Pakistani migrant, originally Arab, Mum an Anglo. Sheikh’s sister died of cancer aged 11, his mum went mad of grief, and Sheikh had to look after her. His dad reappeared, after a heart attack, and egged on by insistent teachers, got him into, of all places, Fort Street High School, alma mater of Doc Evatt, and err, John Kerr. Some people go under from such childhoods, others adult instantly, in a day, and stay that way. You can see it in them, and you can see it in Sheikh.

Indeed, it’s a new Greens style of sorts, fitting with the fact that they are, in some ways, the new natural party of government, not now, not even soon, but sometime, when more of the world looks like Canberra — if it doesn’t all end up looking like Fallujah — and knowledge production has so infused so much of the overall system that social classes have been substantially transformed. That gives the new Greens not only a seriousness, a demeanour that has no special pleading about it, but also, of all things, a mild born-to-rule mien, a new class sheen. When we hit the convention centre after the walkaround, for example, there’s some confusion on the crossing between two cars and a pedestrian, and Sheikh, almost instinctively it seems, steps in to sort it out, before checking himself a little. It’s nothing to object to but a sign of something perhaps and as we walk into the foyer. I, well, as I said I miss the fire-eaters.

On the foyer screen it announces that of all people Joan Baez is playing there next month. “Joan Baez is here next month,” I say to three people. “That’s hilarious!” “Yeah,” they say, humouring. They have no idea who she is. Where have all the flower people gone? On the way there, I’d made a joke or 300 about having your mother-in-law as a campaign wrangler and biggest supporter — “when she sits around the upper house does she really sit around the upper house boom tish” — and Simon had smiled, but I don’t think he really got it. “She’s a nice lady,” I think I saw him thinking. “Why is this dude imitating her and saying, ‘yeah, but to a Senator, you’re no Senator!’ What is that?” Which makes it all the funnier for me. This is why many left-wing people quickly finish their drinks and check the time on their smartphones when they see me coming.

Later, after the event, I hunt around for a few average types to gird my thesis that the Greens are normalising, mainstreaming in the new classes, getting out of the fringe. A group of people ask me to take a photo of them, smiling 30-somethings, knit top, not rainbow, Wilco T-shirt, striped ’30s gangster shirt and cocked fedora. Two social workers, an ex Buddhist monk and an ethnomusicologist. Gah. I approach a few people in suits. They’re all state MPs except one — huzzah! No, he’s the husband of the state MP. I close my notebook and Prius it to the airport with Milne and her staff.

I ride to the airport with Milne, ask her a few questions, and she makes Sheikh sound like Robin Williams when he was still on coke. But there’s also a passion and intensity in her that she somehow doesn’t manage to channel on stage.

“I wasn’t just coming to this as a teacher, with no politics, that’s how I’m sometimes portrayed. I was arrested at the Franklin, and I was … well, it goes right back to Lake Pedder. I’m in this, I’m here now, because we lost Lake Pedder, and I said, a lot of people said, ‘I can’t let this happen again without doing something’. Pedder started a lot.” She wants to get back on to the whole raft of legislation, but the identikit suburbs, built eight minutes ago, are slipping by — McMahon, Barton, Colston, Slipper, Ashby, Leonski, Milat — and I want to know, need to know more about the intensity, the intensity the Greens need to find some way to get on camera.

“What surprised you most about power?” “Meeting people who were totally unscrupulous. I mean …” “You knew they were there, but …” “But I’d never met them. People like Julia Gillard and Tony Abbott, people who will do or say anything …” I’m surprised by that — I thought she meant the utterly corrupt, not the merely ruthless or compromising. “But ummm … Gillard or Abbott still have aims, a value system…” “Yes, but it is the willingness, the willingness to do anything, anything that surprised me.”

We’re in the silent airport’s vast squsre white and glass arrival hall by now. Other Green cars are pulling up outside. “Have a nice trip,” one of the drivers, a pleasant, tubby, mildly goofy guy, yells to two disembarking staffers, but they’re already in their smartphones and don’t see him, and he will not go home with a good memory of them. Milne is being pulled away by her staffers to get the flight, to a barnstorm round the country, arts festival stuff in Melbourne — tautology, that — TV appearances, etc.

Greatest loss from politics? “Family and friends.” Stock answer, but there’s a note on friends of pure sadness, which suggests more than one or two have gone by the wayside. “But …” the energy revs up again, “you have to understand, that at some point I realised that I must do this, that’s the Pedder thing. This is, well, this chooses me. It’s a vocation.” “Perhaps that’s one thing you share with Tony Abbott.” Her bright eyes flash brilliantly, her face quickens, but also darkens. “I’m not even sure we share that.” And she’s gone. Formidable, and with a party at as good a level of support as it’s ever been, she seems ready for whatever may come on Threatened Species Day, September 7.