Victorian Greens head for showdown at RUOK corral

The Victorian Greens, and the party nationally, is heading for either a new round of civil war or a wave of expulsions today as leadership awaits the results of recent elections to the state council.

The elections have been a staging ground for the continuing battle between one “gender” group arguing for a restriction on internal debate around trans, gender and identity issues, and another “debate” group arguing for a more pluralist framework in which different positions on the question of identity can be debated.

The “gender” group wants, and has recently got, the state party to commit completely to the total “gender affirmation” model — you is whatever you say you is — and to explicitly ban, and label as transphobic, any internal debate that questions whether categorisation by embodied sex (in state institutions such as hospitals or prisons, for example) should play a role in a more complex modelling of sex and gender in social life.

With this more restrictive model recently voted up as party policy, the “gender” group is gunning for the remnants of the “debate” group (who call themselves the “materialists” and are called TERFs by their opponents), including high-profile Greens such as Linda Gale and Melbourne City Councillor Rohan Leppert.

The composition of the state council, to be determined today for a meeting on the weekend, will decide the future direction of the party. Eight of the 15 positions are up for grabs, with the “debate” group hoping to gain six. However, the council will meet on Sunday, in its old constellation, in which the “gender’ faction has a supermajority, and a free hand to make expulsions.

“I fully expect to be expelled eventually,” one activist told me. “Part of me is almost looking forward to it; I need the rest. I’ve done nothing but this stuff for the past 18 months. On the other hand, I’ll be shattered if it happens.”

The “gender” group, whose most visible public face is the activist Bianca Haven, has prospered with the support of state Greens Leader Samantha Ratnam and Senator Janet Rice. Initially a younger insurgent group, it had been recruiting hard — “recruiting? It’s a stack!”, said the same Green activist — on this issue, gaining as many as 400 members for the party.

The “debate” group has been furiously trying to get existing members of a more mainstream disposition to vote in the state council elections, to have lapsed members revive their membership, in order to head off the rise of the new faction.

The war has spilled out beyond party confines and into Nine media, with duelling pieces by Chip Le Grand — who recently wrote a sympathetic piece on Melbourne University philosopher Holly Lawford-Smith, self-described as a “gender-critical” feminist and recently targeted as a “transphobe” by a student campaign — and Broede Carmody, who adopted the standard usage of “TERF” to describe the arguments of the “debate” group.

Arguments about the coverage of these interrelated matters are said to have raged across The Age and been fought out in the house committee of the largely pro-“gender” group of journalists. As a compromise, Le Grand and Carmody were yoked to write a piece covering the introduction of the speech-restrictive guidelines.

The debate has also raged across the party nationally, with veteran activists targeted for expulsion in other states.

In Queensland, perhaps the most fervently “genderist” of all branches, Drew Hutton — a founder of the branch, and then of Lock the Gate — is said to have been the subject of an internal inquiry lasting more than a year.

During the recent bitter contest to remove the leader of the materialist/debate group, Gale, from the convenor position, the Queensland branch issued a condemnation of the Victorian branch for its alleged transphobia.

A number of Victorian Greens have formed a branch of the Queensland party, and tried to register as affiliated to that state branch rather than Victoria’s. The People’s Front of Judea is apparently not answering their calls.

What effect a mass expulsion would have on the Greens’ wider electoral chances remains to be seen. Their vote is reasonably solid, and probably highly pro-gender in the inner-city strongholds, with other supporters — the migrant groups that support federal Greens Leader Adam Bandt, for example — turning a blind eye to the shenanigans. Bandt and his office have remained resolutely separated from involvement in the stoush.

However, it seems reasonable to say that the “teal” space the Greens might once have seen as a place to expand, as inroads into working-class communities stalled, has now itself stalled. The party’s turnover has been substantial, especially during the pandemic, when Zoom meetings tended to favour the hyperdigital younger generation.

“Older members now just feel alien in these meetings, which have never gone back to being live,” one branch member from the hyper-hip Brunswick area said. “I’m sticking it out, but I really get the sense I’m not wanted in there.”

There is talk of forming a network or organisation of sorts if there is a mass expulsion; there is also a weariness about organisation and starting again.

“Part of me wants to save this party,” another targeted person said. “But I also think, let them have it, and see what happens. They’ll divide against themselves. Let’s see what phoenix rises from the ashes.”

All of which is to affirm again that it’s not easy being… oh you’ve heard it?