Prominent member of the Australian Greens, Jonathan Sriranganathan, a twice-elected councillor in South Brisbane, recently published a long piece on his website, “Queensland Greens vs the new Queensland Socialists: How different are they?”
While welcoming the emergence of a new left-wing force, Sriranganathan concluded that there wasn’t much difference between the two. Yes, there are conservative tendencies among the Greens’ elected representatives, reflecting powerful establishment pressures on them. Yes, the Queensland Socialists (QS) come out against capitalism and for socialism while the Greens don’t. But “currently, both parties are essentially pushing in the same direction”. It is unfair, then, for QS to criticise the Greens for being “more interested in maintaining the capitalist system than transforming it”. That, Sriranganathan argued, is “a superficial and unsophisticated misdiagnosis of what’s really going on”.
Yet it turns out that the socialists’ supposedly “superficial and unsophisticated misdiagnosis” hits the nail squarely on the head. Barely 24 hours after publication, the idea that the Greens represent as much of a challenge to the status quo as QS was blown out of the water by the party’s decision to issue an open ticket for the Stafford by-election in Brisbane. The party’s how-to-vote card nominates the Greens candidate at number one and then urges voters to fill in the remaining eight boxes however they like.
By publishing an open ticket, the Greens are indicating that they see no in-principle difference between the Liberal National Party (LNP) and the Queensland Socialists, nor between the far-right Independent and the ALP.
An open ticket indicates to the party’s supporters and voters that the Greens are not concerned by the prospect of their preferences being used to boost the LNP’s chances of winning or gaining from the election, which would embolden the Crisafulli government to press ahead with its right-wing agenda attacking Indigenous people, cutting public-sector wages, banning free speech and locking up supporters of Palestine.
Quite rightly, the Queensland Council of Unions has condemned the Greens’ refusal to campaign against the LNP, stating that it gives “the LNP a free pass for their attacks on workers’ rights and safety”. Even the Murdoch-owned Courier Mail can see what is at stake: “It is unclear why the party would ditch Labor at the upcoming Stafford election when LNP policies put forward under the Crisafulli government, including ‘adult crime, adult time’, pill testing, drug diversion, hate speech and e-safety laws, have been at odds with Greens values”.
Some Greens members are angry about the decision by the state campaign committee and Brisbane North branch to issue an open ticket for Stafford. They are certainly grumbling about it at pre-polling. But the most Sriranganathan can come up with in a Facebook post responding to the dispute is to declare, “on balance ... it’s probably the wrong call”. In coming down weakly against the decision, he gives as much credence to the other side in his argumentation, most of which centres on electoral expediency rather than what helps advance the struggle against the reactionary state government.
Yes, the LNP might take the seat, he argues, but don’t blame it on the Greens, as an open ticket will only swing at most a few hundred votes to the LNP. Yes, it’d be bad if the LNP wins Stafford, but the ALP are dreadful too. Yes, an LNP win will give the party a morale boost, but there are also “some very obvious benefits”, as Labor losing the seat “will make federal Labor more responsive to pressure from the Greens and left-wing social movements”. Yes, he disagrees with the decision, but “doesn’t feel particularly strongly about it” and certainly can’t find it in himself to criticise the party bodies that made the decision because they are only exercising “local branch autonomy”.
These thin rationales for the open ticket are all cop-outs, a way to fudge the important question. Lost in all this tactical Tetris is the fundamental point of principle: do the Greens want to contribute to building a left that can fight the right? Do they even see politics as a battle of left versus right?
Electoral politics isn’t everything, but it does matter insofar as it affects mass consciousness and the potential direction of struggles on the ground. The fact that the Greens have been missing in action on this front—the party has had little to no presence at demonstrations for many years and could only muster up a couple of dozen people for its contingent at the thousands-strong Labour Day march in Brisbane this year—perhaps hints at why the party could be so unconcerned about potentially giving a boost to the class enemy LNP.
And the idea that the Greens’ refusal to preference Labor, potentially causing the ALP to lose Stafford, will force Labor leftwards flies in the face of history. All it will do is shift the political climate to the right and demoralise those who do want to fight.
And even if the Greens felt they couldn’t preference Labor because they’re so dreadful and right wing (even though the Greens’ entire rationale for the past decade has been to form working coalitions with Labor governments and to pass Labor legislation barely amended), why not preference Queensland Socialists with whom Sriranganathan claims such close kinship? QS candidate Liam Parry is the first person charged with challenging the Crisafulli government’s legal attacks on the Palestine movement and potentially faces a two-year jail sentence. But the Greens, who regularly send representatives to speak at Palestine rallies, can’t even stir themselves to tell their supporters to preference Liam as an act of basic solidarity. As far as they’re concerned, there’s nothing to choose between the LNP prosecutor and the socialist defendant. Needless to say, QS is preferencing the Greens above every other party, and Labor before the LNP.
Sriranganathan concluded his lengthy treatment of the relationship between the Greens and QS with the challenge: “For Socialists who think the Greens are too centrist or reformist, the key question remains: what in practice are you actually doing differently to ensure you don’t go down the same path?” That’s pretty simple: standing up for principled left-wing positions and class solidarity. A vote for Queensland Socialists at this by-election is a vote in that spirit. The same can’t be said of a vote for the Greens.
