(Image: Tom Red/Private Media)

Federally the Greens are screwing up, a mere four weeks after sweeping to a triumph at the election. But their party leadership knows this. The Victorian branch stoush over the election of convenor Linda Gale, and the question of trans issues, was the start. Now leader Adam Bandt’s refusal to stand next to the Australian flag has given them the quinella.

A party that gained about half a million new voters based on a campaign that tied global climate issues to local inequality, such as the housing crisis, has reverted to ridiculous culture wars. Many people beyond their core voter base will be dismayed that they have snapped into that sort of stuff immediately. 

Their dismay will be shared by the leadership, which would have wanted neither controversy.

The signature note of Bandt’s leadership has been to return the party to a more materialist politics, and to link global green issues to economic social justice. Knowing his politics, I would imagine that he did the flag stunt through gritted teeth, enacting a partyroom decision. He will then have to bear a couple of weeks of battering from several directions before the core business of the program can be put front and centre again. Perhaps he did it now while the trans issue was still around to get it all out of the way.

Because this stuff needs to be got out of the way. Both issues came out of the Victorian state branch, by far the worst-performing Greens branch in the country, taking the wattle laurel from NSW. Its cultural ultraist politics is the opposite of the Queensland branch’s grassroots, social activism approach and is undoing much of their good work in presenting the Greens as a party that will fight for climate victims, the poor and the generationally short-changed.

These two Victorian issues now send a message that the Greens are a party of the knowledge class elite, responding to their obsessions.

The Gale stoush was a doozy. Labor’s dirty tricks department couldn’t have come up with anything better. Her election as convenor was challenged on two grounds. One is the quite proper (if true) — but wholly internal — complaint that candidates for the election to the post were not given access to the full membership email list to make their case. But this wasn’t led with. Instead there was an attack on Gale for an internal paper she wrote several years ago, pushing back against the notion that the Greens should adopt a radical gender positioning of pure gender self-determination, with no real social or institutional recognition of embodied sex differences and no debate of such within the party.

These two issues then got tangled, as Senator Janet Rice and others attacked Gale’s position on internal party debate regarding gender and sex, and tied that to the question of membership list access. 

There were some other, nastier, accusations of transphobia flying, but any notion that Gale, a veteran social movement leftist, is a trans-hater is absurd (xxx-phobic is a weasel term; it implies one’s only objection to something comes as a psychological defence). The public accusations turn on her defence of internal party free debate around a complex issue that has major institutional ramifications in refuges, hospitals, schools, prisons and more. Gale’s detractors should have stuck to the issue of procedure and left it as purely internal.

The flag issue is also coming from Victoria and most likely from the sway that Senator Lidia Thorpe is said to hold over the Greens partyroom. In recent days Thorpe has made clear that she regards herself as an “infiltrator” into the government of “the colony”, and will operate on those terms.

Well, yeah, but what are the politics of that really? Your party leader doesn’t stand next to a flag, but you get sworn in, sit beneath an enormous coat of arms, and observe all the protocols. Vote yay, nay or abstain, you’re voting, by the nature of your office. The very act of taking your seat confirms the legitimacy of the Parliament. One is tempted to say that if you are infiltrating the parliamentary dining room, try the wild-caught salmon. When both houses are sitting, remember to book your infiltration early. 

That’s not very fair. Thorpe’s disruptive tactics in the Senate are a legitimate form of guerilla warfare. But they don’t work as resistance. They simply reinscribe the political-juridical power of the president of the Senate. Sovereignty is thereby expanded, not reduced. The only way to genuinely win an election and then resist is to not take your seat, as Sinn Féin does in some counties/Northern Ireland Westminster seats in the UK. That’s impossible in Australia because two months of non-attendance without leave of absence means you forfeit your seat. So tricky. But once you take your seat, everything you do legitimates the sovereign power. Not standing near a flag doesn’t mean jack.

Do trans issues matter? Yes. Does resistance to the constituted Australian state matter? Yes. But they also, in these symbolic matters, don’t matter nearly as much as the Greens’ core mission, which is to tie real global climate and biosphere action to economic social justice, and to stand with and represent the many, not the few. There are emergencies of occurrence in both areas — violence and direct persecution — that push issues to immediate priority. Otherwise the party looks like the preserve of self-absorbed elites.

Nothing makes that more obvious than the Victorian Greens’ actions on the trans issue. While Gale is being assailed for a position arguing for free debate inside the party, and the mere possibility of such debate is constructed as “hate speech”, the Greens continue to give the whip to Councillor Anab Mohamud at Yarra Council.

Mohamud is charged with an alleged assault of a trans person, arising from a messy altercation at a Chapel Street nightclub (earlier, separate assault charges for another alleged incident were dropped by the prosecutors in early June). Mohamud is innocent until proven guilty, and on those grounds the Greens have not suspended her as a party member. 

But this is nonsense. Suspension of privilege and responsibility in many areas has never been dependent on criminal conviction. When cops are accused of crimes, we demand they be immediately suspended. Mohamud may be facing a custodial sentence and hate crime designation if found guilty. The occult nature of the law is such that, if convicted, she will have always been guilty of the crime. Whether she stays on council or not is between her, the courts and the state government, but why on earth is she still representing the Greens?

Why on earth? Because the Greens have a majority on Yarra Council, and without Mohamud they don’t. They fear that if she is suspended, she won’t come back. How is it possible to have an alleged criminal assaulter of a trans person voting as a Green, while waging an internal war against a party figure for the opinions they hold on internal free speech, and the questions of sex and gender? It isn’t. It is hypocrisy pure and simple, and can be widely seen as such. 

Australia has 0.3% of the world’s population. Australian First Nations and trans people are about 4% of that. In India and Bangladesh’s equatorial heat belt, tens of thousands are dying, because they must work during 45 degree-plus temperatures. Across the equatorial belt, hundreds of millions face illness and hunger right now due to global heating. Hundreds of thousands of Australians are in permanent housing precarity and homelessness.

Now is the time for the Greens to decisively reject the idea that they don’t need to prioritise, and to affirm, that they stand with these mass causes (which is central to First Nations peoples; how long before central Australia is uninhabitable?) and not pretend that every cultural, symbolic and rights issue can be serviced equally alongside them.

Cancelling convenors while the world burns? Good on ya. Push back harder in the partyroom, and among the membership, those in the party who disagree with this. This fight has to be had now. And live up to the policies you campaigned on, to stand up for those of us who want a living planet and a fair society, and the unstinting advocacy of that on the streets, and in whatever forum we happen to be governed by at the moment.