By Situation Theatre 11/12/2019

The daily news cycle about Morrison’s increasingly authoritarian nation-burning agenda, in tandem with Labor’s capitulation, is relentlessly depressing. Understandably, progressive responses trade in outrage and despair. Challenging as it may be, we urgently need to devote just as much energy to devising and debating strategies to end this nightmare. To this end, this is the first in a series of Situation Theatre articles suggesting escape routes from the death cult that is Australian politics in 2019.

This first one argues that a reinvigorated Greens politics would not only significantly boost their share of the vote, but also drag Labor back from the dark side.

As if we needed yet another demonstration of the establishment’s catastrophic failure to serve the people it rhetorically represents, along came Australia’s ongoing bushfire crisis.

Having spent 10 years fuelling these fires by repeatedly sabotaging climate action, the Liberals are now embracing their ecocidal agenda with gay abandon. Not content with over 200 environmentally destructive actions in just over two terms of Government, Scott Morrison has taken it upon himself to gaslight 25 million Australians by continually ignoring the desperate pleas of former fire chiefs, denying assistance to volunteer firefighters and claiming they “want to be there”, and responding to six deaths, 1000 destroyed homes, and three million burnt hectares with a press conference about his religious discrimination bill.

The Nationals believe the best way to represent their rural constituents, suffering through horrendous drought conditions thanks to the climate emergency, is to spout ever more hysterical rhetoric against the one party whose policies would actually benefit those drought victims.

For their part, rocket surgeons at Labor Party HQ have chosen the moment in history at which the devastating effects of climate breakdown have never been more obvious, and public concern about the environment has never been higher, to strike up a love affair with coal. Joel Fitzgibbon is spending quality time with Resources Minister Matt Canavan and World Coal Association Chief Michelle Manook, Terri Butler is offering stark warnings about the greatest threat facing humanity, a just transition, and Albo is spruiking coal mines and coal exports using arguments made by notorious climate hero Tony Abbott.

Meanwhile, the mainstream media is doing what it does best, propping up the insane ecocidal death cult that is the status quo, deploying the most putrid of horseshit about “extremists on both sides”. The Murdoch Press is nothing more than the propaganda arm of the Liberal Party, while the once fearsome lion of Australian journalism, the ABC, purrs obediently at Morrison’s feet.

And although much of the responsibility for Morrison’s ongoing popularity, despite his obvious failures to protect the Australian people, does lie with the captured and tamed media, it also rests with the feeble Labor opposition. The May election loss was indeed a cruel blow, but it’s no excuse for abandoning any principles they had left and joining the Liberals in catapulting us all into the nasty, brutish, and short lives of an apocalyptic future on the Australian continent.

It’s with all this in mind that the urgency of the project of transforming and reinvigorating Greens politics in this country comes into focus.

A renewed Greens Party would not only provide realistic hopes for a popularity surge the leadership has been promising for some time, and that Greens parties in Europe have seen recently, but it would also place immense pressure on Labor to come to their senses and re-embrace their identity as the party of Whitlamesque social transformation we so desperately need to them to be.

While the ballad of Peter Garrett showed that Labor cannot be reformed from within, we do know their politics changes drastically due to pressure from without. It was the social movements of the 60s and early 70s from which Gough Whitlam extracted his progressive agenda. It was from the neoliberal projects of Thatcher and Reagan than Hawke, Keating, and every Labor leader since has drawn their inspiration. And it will be the democratic socialist politics of Corbynism, Bernie, AOC, and the Australian Greens, that will shape Labor’s politics of the future, should they wish to not wither and die while mistaking a piece of coal for a life support system.

So, while it seems odd to describe Labor’s politics as consistent in any other way than disappointing, they do consistently move whichever way the political winds blow. While they are currently all aboard Captain Smoko’s Titanic thanks to their unique ability to learn the wrong lesson from almost every single political development, it need not be long before external pressures make them realise things don’t end altogether well for passengers on a structurally defective ship headed for an oncoming disaster (spoiler!).

If The Greens could offer a stark lesson in the viability of left populism in this country, you can guarantee Labor MPs would jump their sinking neoliberal ship quicksmart.

So how can The Greens reinvent themselves and smash through the 10% ceiling that seems to have trapped them over recent years?

That’s a discussion for part two.

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