When Larissa Waters was elected leader of the Australian Greens, she said she was there to “get shit done”.
True to her word, Waters did something last week—and it was, indeed, shit. Greens MPs gave crucial support in the Senate to the roll-out of a carbon emissions offset scheme so bad that the term “greenwashing” seems generous.
Under the scheme, state governments will now be able to take publicly owned forest, promise not to deforest it, and then convert that promise into “carbon credits”. These credits can then be sold to greenhouse gas emitters to subtract from their overall carbon emissions count.
In NSW, the scheme is being tied to the establishment of a 476,000-hectare koala reserve the state government had already promised back in 2015. This move, according to Larissa Waters, put the Greens in an “impossible position” and forced them to support Labor’s carbon credit scam.
So now, in exchange for doing something it had already said it would do, the NSW Labor government can continue to do nothing to trees that were already there and, in turn, magically generate permits for carbon emitters to carry on emitting carbon.
The Greens are now trying to sell this as a step forward for the planet, Waters describing it as the “first chink in the armour of coal and gas”.
Cartoonist First Dog on the Moon found a visual metaphor much nearer the mark, depicting a Labor MP holding a cuddly koala at gunpoint and threatening the Greens leader: “vote for climate change or the koala gets it”.
Richard Denniss of the Australia Institute—hardly a radical left outfit—likened the Greens decision to “fiddling while the forest burns”. He went on: “In voting with Labor, the Greens ... have tied the protection of trees and koalas to the expansion of gas and coal”.
Labor’s actions come as no surprise, given the party’s longstanding support for Australia’s fossil fuel industry. But why the hell have the Greens gone along with it?
Prominent left-wing Greens figure Jonathan Sriranganathan criticised his party but suggested it was simply a problem of accountability. In a recent Facebook post about the carbon credit vote, he wrote:
“Despite having plenty of time and capacity to do so, the three federal Greens politicians in Queensland didn’t bother seeking out the views of all the people who helped get them elected.”
To be sure, in a party whose sole purpose is to accrue seats in parliament, MPs usually dominate decision-making with little rank-and-file oversight. But internal democracy within the Australian Greens, however scant it may be, is not the real problem.
For one thing, there’s no evidence that Greens members overwhelmingly oppose the way their MPs voted in the Senate, though undoubtedly many do. Even Sriranganathan didn’t venture to say in his post that the Greens MPs who did so were wrong to support the bill.
What it comes down to is politics.
The Greens are a pro-capitalist party. They may not like some of its worst aspects, but the party has never been for overturning the system. They are committed to working within it.
The contradictions of such a project are perhaps most obvious on the question that is so core to the party’s political identity: climate change.
The Greens insist the climate crisis can be tackled without any radical change to the way our society operates. Rejecting any fundamental alternative to the profit-driven logic of capitalism, they instead throw their support behind farcical “market solutions” that shield the fossil fuel industry from real action.
And even when the Greens are critical of greenwashing scams, they aren’t willing to put up a fight lest they be accused of obstructing or “letting the perfect be the enemy of the good”. This isn’t just poor strategy; it stems from wanting to be seen as responsible partners in government.
These endless acrobatics of compromise also send the wrong message to Greens supporters and left-wing people more broadly. Party leaders have to run PR for every shoddy deal they stitch up with Labor, no matter how bad, and sell it as progress. Anyone who disagrees is a helpless idealist, a useful idiot for the side of “perfect” against the side of “good”.
Socialist politics offers an alternative. Socialists never limit our demands to what is palatable to the rich parasites who run this country and their defenders in parliament.
We know that radical social change is possible and that it doesn’t come from parliamentary manoeuvring but instead when working-class people and the oppressed get organised and fight back.
A socialist in parliament would keep that objective front of mind. A socialist MP would have voted Labor’s carbon credit scam down without a moment’s hesitation.
This would not be an “impossible position”, as Waters described it, but a golden opportunity to expose Labor and to encourage a much-needed cynicism about every “market-driven” scam dressed up as an answer to the climate crisis.
The need for a radical political alternative to everything on offer from the pro-capitalist mainstream could not be more urgent. We need more socialists, in workplaces, on campuses, and even in parliament, who can put forward a vision of a different world and throw themselves into fighting for it.
