The teals are in a climate war. There’s no time for the bitter tears of Sally Von Won’t

There’s an event in the life of every cineaste or film student that counts as one of life’s great “before” and “after” moments, and that is when one first sees The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant, a bizarre hothouse weepie featuring the emotionally entangled Sturm und Drang of a group of women, all taking place in the apartment of the eponymous anti-hero, a fashion designer with a tendency to histrionics, and a shagpile carpet so deep it threatens to swallow all comers. Sadism, masochism, emotional blackmail, blurred boundaries, acting out, psychic fugue and the perverse meanderings of ambition and desire all play out pretty much while you’re still shuffling to your seat, trying not to spill your popcorn.  

Throughout two hours of Petra’s monstrous, deranged, pathetic exchanges with her mother, her unrequited love object and others, her much put-upon secretary Marlene keeps typing in the background. In the final scene, after a full crisis has transformed Petra, she tells Marlene of her shame at mistreating her, and how everything will be better from now on. At which point Marlene pulls out her little suitcase and begins packing her few things to leave and never return. 

The lesson of this movie for film students is: do a STEM degree. For the mature viewer, it’s a sort of universal workbook; all human love is contained in those two hours of shagpile. For the teal movement, it might serve as a workplace training video, with a warning about how you put an office together. That’s certainly the impression one gets from the very regrettable and utterly delicious revelations in the lawsuit by activist and author Sally Rugg against her former boss, Kooyong MHR Monique Ryan. 

Rugg, for those who don’t care to linger over these things during a long Saturday brunch, two coffees and lashings of buttered toast, was hired by Ryan to run her office as chief of staff, and the two seem to have become (were) friends. But Rugg began to object to the long hours being demanded of a staffer, the request to manage Ryan’s political community building, and, it seems, being walked in front of by Ryan, as well as sundry other matters. Mediation broke down, and Rugg’s demands included being reinstated in the office. Now, the case is going to court, with the reinstatement demand included. Bitter tears indeed.

This is not a great look for the teals, who ran on highly personalised campaigns, and now need to try and become normal local members while still keeping a political focus on the universal issues of climate change and biosphere destruction that they ran on. It points to the problems that arise in networked movements that draw on the knowledge class and liberal bourgeois voters, and which succeed by mobilising the individualised conscience to collective action.

The teals’ cry was “we can no longer support this with our inaction” — the “this” being the Coalition’s non-policy on climate change, and the inaction being voting Labor or Green in a seat that neither seemed able to win. The teals succeeded magnificently across the country, but they now face the challenge of back-building some sort of stable movement, or at least community network, in their seats.

The problem is that such movements gain their energy from the individualistic notion that the thing only has to be done once, and then ’tis done. The sort of individual who feels called to such a movement reaffirms the particularity of their individuality by participating in it. This plays to, and reinforces, the notion that the conscience-exercising self is something pretty special, distinct, and that its rights stem from the same moral absolute as the need to stop the planet from being destroyed. 

People who join political parties don’t feel that as much. They feel it more in the Greens than they do in Labor, and more in Labor than they do in socialist parties. Labor members brief against each other to the media for factional purposes; Greens members brief against each other in somewhat atomised personal clashes. The “walking in front of me” stuff started appearing in the several internal complaints flying around the Victorian Greens over the past few years, including the classic “X looked at me in a funny way while I was giving a speech” complaint of one inner-city Greens councillor against another. (The hard-right sue each other all the time, but they’re a bunch of paranoids, whose “movement” really consists of the overlapping areas of their deranged obsessions.) 

But by and large, the Greens haven’t gone to the courts to sort it out. The Rugg case represents a new level of atomisation, and a new degree of mobilisation of moral self-demand. It’s something more than mere entitlement — it’s the sense that, by pushing an office work-process breakdown to the front pages, one is actually carrying through the morality of the movement itself. Once convinced of that, one can licence oneself to any sort of mayhem in the name not only of rights, but of right.

Such claims are, of course, nonsense. Rugg is raining down the sort of blows on the teal movement that the Coalition couldn’t have landed in their dreams. This piece of intra-office lawfare is playing to every suspicion that wavering voters in their electorates might have had about such candidates, even if they voted for them. It’s the sense of a new elite, moving smoothly into a power occupied by the old Melbourne establishment, and bound up with their own soap operas. Furthermore, the claim to right — that this is about unreasonable working hours — makes the larger issues of climate change and other matters look like a mere extension of a battle of precious subjectivities. 

This sort of stuff is the greatest danger the teals will face if they seek to be a social liberal movement whose life extends beyond a single term. Nothing that comes from the outside matches the internal contradictions of a movement based on the notion of individual virtue and conscience. This is exactly what happened to the Australian Democrats, which might have survived as a useful centrist force as the Greens started to rise. Instead, half a dozen senators attached unique virtue to their own ambitions and smashed their party to pieces. 

There’s a very simple ethic in any progressive movement, and that is that any actions by a leader that isn’t complicit in violence should stay out of the courts, and anything that isn’t so toxic as to be corrosive to the party should be basically sucked up and moved on from. If you have any belief at all in the movement you’re working for, the moral-political onus is on the employee to take the hit. 

An independent MP has the same moral-political right to demand that a staffer work a 70-hour week — even if they don’t have a legal one. We’re fighting a war against the likes of Exxon-Mobil, for God’s sake — even on the actual left, the rules we fight to establish for normal workplaces don’t apply to the core positions. If you don’t actively want to work 60 to 70 hours a week on a movement like the teals, you shouldn’t take the gig.

Whatever slack can be taken up by volunteers, there’s no substitute for one or more staffers who are just there continuously, across everything. The lesson for the teals from all this is don’t hire people like you for these jobs. The teals are to be congratulated for introducing a bill today, to tackle appointments cronyism. But that suggests, all the more, the need to mitigate as much as possible the reality and appearance of being an elite outfit. 

The truth is that a lot of the infrastructure of the teal movement was old social movement types who brought with them the necessary forbearance/masochism that makes such movements possible. Some of these came from the left, and some from Indi (the Patrick Lumumba University of community independents). Political solidarity glues the left together (love sure doesn’t), and rural social solidarity grounds the Indi side of things. 

The teals need to hire people for their office who kinda aren’t like them, whose idea of fun is building a supporters’ database and then using it to stage meetings across the electorate, who dress like maths teachers, who unwind by watching NCIS. If teals don’t build the strongest local organisations, if they’re not in their electorate, ready to talk to every person with a planning complaint or a concern about UFOs, they will not only be one-term members, they will render their electorates cynical about non-major-party politics.

To build a grassroots social movement, you need social movement builders at the grassroots. There’s no place in all that for the bitter tears of Sally von Won’t.