Beyond the wonk: how should the Greens campaign?

A typical “Meet the Candidates” evening on a stuffy weeknight in Endeavour Ponds/Blooropna/Milatville has a full candidates turnout, and you cast your eye down the table at the front of St Aloysius of the Burning Heart of Jesus Hall or the yellow-brick, well-ramped Mal Colston Memorial Community Centre. The Liberal is either a real estate agent (safe seat) or acned IPA suck (unwinnable). The Labor is either a Per Capita suck or, if unwinnable (it’s reversed), a valiant official from the Amalgamated Gruttlers and Flageolets, who now runs the light gauge restoration society, teaches semaphore at the CAE, and is willing to have a third heart attack to nail down the party’s 16% first preference.

Then there’ll be someone from One Nation (female real estate agent and motivational speaker, cruel mouth), from the Sustainable Development/Flux/Informed Medical Options Party (lycra’d, neurolinguistic programming therapist, with Van Dyke beard, former goat breeder, later found erotically auto-asphyxiated), and delusional independents (if woman — wool-clad divorcee, bookkeeper for the nail salon, supports vegan school lunches and the death penalty; if man — Patagonia hiking jacket, hemp trousers, jackboots, has unproduced serial killer screenplay).

The safe seat Liberals and Labor will pork-barrel, just amounts of money and verbs. The Labor placefiller will ask what bastards ruined this once great country with Qantas in private hands, strikes impossible, kids in camps, licking Uncle Sam’s b— etc. The IPA suck will ask whether the state really has a role in emergency dialysis. The right-wing crazies will warn about 5G and ask why we need shoes (“Do your research, people”). And then there’s the Green.

The Green used to be either an encrusted tree canopy protester named Starshine who had walked into town for the event living off pinecones, or a pale thin man named Lionel Snively, who ran PR for something like Bursitis Australia and couldn’t get the Labor nod, or a V-neck-sweatered lecturer/public servant/scientist who speaks Brazilian Portuguese and designed the water supply of the town you’re in. You never knew what you’d get.

Now? Now, the Green candidates are all from the last category. Or a new type: younger, entrepreneurial, T-shirted, dimpled, grinning. They developed a business from their biology thesis training dogs to sort recycling into coloured bins or something. But whether type one or two, or the remnant hippie every(wo)man, they’re all high quality. Over the years, the Greens seem to have gained the right quantity of applicants and the right selection processes to get people who know their stuff backwards, are confident, unfazed by the mainstream process, hardworking, and capable of going off script. So how then should they campaign?

The question arises from this round of “Meet the Candidates” events across New South Wales, in the reports of which, as readers may have noted, the Greens got little mention. The simple reason is that they were all good, all the way through — they made the case that global warming was disastrous and that the Labor plan a total sellout, and rattled off figures on emissions and on how straightforward, and productive, it would be to implement a rapid transition to a green, renewable post-fossil future. They’ve been across the local issues, and able to give a green spin to the matter of the Mafeking Road bypass, or the future of the town’s much-loved Burko museum (“Eighty years of heating fluids, unlidded!”). In every outing, they dismayed no one intending to vote for them, but persuaded no one who wasn’t sure. 

That may not matter at a “Meet the Candidates” event, which rarely has many undecided voters, but it’s evidence of a certain style brought to the whole campaign — and I wonder if the Greens might not prosper electorally somewhat from modifying it. The party now gets a primary vote that’s essentially fixed. It’s about 3% in big pastoral seats, 7% in rural-regional seats, 12-15% in mid-range suburban seats, 23-25% in mid-to-inner-city seats, and then more than 30% in seats they’re winning or have won of the inner core. 

Who do they get? They get the people who prize a certain type of rationality — procedural, numerical, detailed, evidenced. The type that makes a case, backs it up with detail, and in response to pushback finds equally detailed counter-evidence. For Greens, and for the knowledge class from which they come, and which they represent, that is all that rationality is. To those already intending to vote for them, such a discourse is the voice of truth, the refutation of all other arguments. 

Which is why, in an era when they were less trained and disciplined, they used to get angry when some National Party cockie (with a master’s in agricultural science or 10 years with Goldman Sachs), Akubra carefully positioned, wound them up with a “Well, you may have all sorts of figures. But we know the climate’s always been changing…” “But it’s so sssssstupid,” they’d say, tight with frustration, like it was a Dungeons & Dragons argument continued years later.  

Trouble was, people liked being “stupid”. By which they understood: practical, concrete, commonsensical, not lost in figures, defining themselves against the new class the Greens represented. Many still feel this way, even as they have become more accepting of the Greens as a legit political outfit, with relation to knowledge having become a primary class division of our day. So when a Green says something they find plausible — we have a vast housing crisis (a very popular item, for the Greens); we’re letting corporations kill the planet — and then, in debate, piles figures and detail on it, there’s a whole type of voter they actually push away.

So the one thing that might increase the Green vote, presence and role in seats like these — places where a thin base means the “Brisbane strategy” of mass community organisation isn’t so possible — would be to intensively retrain selected candidates to change the relationship of argument to fact, and especially to quantitative fact. This would be a Green presentation — in forums like these, at doorknocks, public meetings, etc — which takes up a more prosecutorial role against the sitting member, makes it pointed, assails them for their failure individually and collectively for not telling people the truth about climate change, one stat about that, imminent damage, one stat about that, etc.

So less stats, but there when required. More direct, more angry, less an account of the general crisis and its solutions than a filleting of the particular opponent as a representative of said crisis, sacking them being the solution, voting Green being the method. 

Such a style, which would take some work, and wouldn’t be possible for every candidate to achieve, would take advantage of the fact that in Australia you don’t need to win someone’s vote — you just need to persuade them to let you borrow it for a while. You’re either asking Labor voters to make it a 1 Green 2 Labor vote to send a message on issues of shared agreement, or you’re trying to get the Liberal or National voter to “jump the switch”: come across to the other side because the party they have supported — their whole lives — is betraying them and their children and their children’s children, etc.

I’ve noticed that Greens get a lot of vocal support on concrete intergenerational issues, such as housing, and that many otherwise conservative people want, and appreciate, a forthright angry denunciation of the major parties on that and other such matters.

The aim then is to make the conversion, make the sale — for the Greens to offer themselves to such voters as the expression of said voters’ anger, their manifestation of it in the vote. Such a vote is then won, not despite the perversity of a personally conservative person from a Labor or Liberal background voting for it,  but because of that perversity.

To offer someone a chance to step outside their “assigned” social role with their vote, and to ask no more of them, might well produce a jump on the dial in certain seats. The current approach — masterful rationality — does the opposite. It sketches out a program that the voters know the candidate will never be in a position to implement (and they don’t much like crafty talk of influence, minority government), and it defuses the anger and demand for representation that such people are looking to find a political home for. That home could be the Greens.

What sort of process am I talking of? The real-deal, week-long, 10-day, 24/7, one-on-one boot camp on candidates assessed as being capable of stepping up to this level. I’m talking drilling, role-playing, quickfire stuff, sparring, training in comebacks and cheap shots, a bit of breaking down of personality and positive mindfucking. You’d want to see, and could see, candidates who take people completely by surprise in terms of what they’ve come to expect from the Greens, who light up an otherwise dull seat campaign, who get a bump in the vote, and who make their issues, their accusations, the ones that the sitting member has to respond to. 

At the national level, the aim is to make the Greens a fully national party, precisely by admitting that there are some seats they can never win or even be close in — and which thus license a wilder strategy of representation through politics, rather than presenting depoliticised rationality as the blueprint of a government they will never be part of.

The more quantitative aim would be to turn those 3%s to 6%s to get the 7%s above 10%s, etc, and in the short run, to get the national vote above the psychologically important point of 15%. When that threshold was crossed, the charge would begin to feed back into the individual seats. It’s the sort of virtuous feedback loop that can, if explained with reference to pumped hydro and in sufficient detail, lose a Green the attention and votes of a drooping audience on a stifling weeknight in Endeavour Ponds/Blooropna/Milatville…