Can the Greens come back in Braddon?

Beneath the bright blue sky and a blanket of late summer humidity, Ulverstone drowses. The green fields of the pretty north Tasmanian coastal town, with streets of wooden Edwardian villas, wilting a little in the heat, gardens blooming around them, a high street with ye Englishey sweets and frock shops, seem out of time, stilled. The sepia photos on its cafe walls, men in collars before bare churches, show a place that was once a bastion of Methodism and is now a centre of evangelism. Stern and secure in itself, nothing it seems could disturb its calm. 

Darren Briggs, the Greens lead candidate, is having a crack at it. Two streets in from the main drag, he’s about to knock on the door of one of these places, which has, like most of them, seen better days, paint flaking off the balcony wood ornaments, the wood ornaments falling off the balcony. Darren, in khaki and shorts, tall, slender, very much a Green, hesitates a second before the actual knock on the actual door. The door opens, the screen door doesn’t, and a heavyset woman appears behind it. 

“Hello, I’m Darren Briggs, and I wondered if I could talk to you about the election. I’m wondering what the issues are for you, how things are going. I’m with the Greens. Do you know much about the Greens?” The answer to each of these has been a polite shake of the head, and a quiet no. If ever one was tempted to bail from a doorknock it’s now, and Darren is struggling for a way to hook in. The woman is tired in the heat and the screen gives her a faded painterly quality. It’s like canvassing the drover’s wife. 

“Well, look one of my passions is health…” Darren says.

“Well, I’ve got diabetes, I can’t walk to the shops anymore. I’m renting this, cause we had to sell the house in the divorce.” 

Darren pauses. She pauses.

“I usually vote Liberal,” she says.

Darren pauses again. 

“I’m basically an introvert,” Briggs had said, as we’d prepared with a fortifying coffee at Ulverstone’s one bougie cafe. He was a vet who trained here, then became a GP and returned. Lives in Penguin, spends a lot of time on the wilder west coast side. As regards being an introvert, I hope he already knew that about himself, I’m thinking now, because this would be a hell of a time to find that out.

“That sounds really hard. You have my sympathies.” Good good. “We’ve got a plan to extend regional and rural care, so…” Great. “And we’re going to try and get people back owning. Like, personally I live in a Tiny House, it’s 6.8 metres…” No, Darren! Don’t tell her about Tiny Houses!  

The Greens had a member here before there were Greens — Di Hollister won the seat in 1989 as an “independent Green” with a 10% primary. By 1996, the Greens had four seats in the old 35-seat Parliament; the majors panicked about them becoming a third force and Labor reduced it to 25 seats and chainsawed out the crossbench. Then they got five again in 2010, with a stonking 20% of the vote, and entered government in coalition with Labor, under premier David Bartlett.

They have not come close since, reduced to two seats out of 25, one each in Clark (most of Hobart) and Franklin (East Hobart and its south-west hinterland), the latter a mix of happy-clappies and hippies in equal number. The polls suggest they may get one in Bass, which has Launceston, but that Braddon might see four or even five Liberals returned, or a Lambie candidate.

Why the Greens got locked out of places like Braddon is hashed out whenever Greens people gather in the long winter evenings, for Tasmanian whiskey and a Clannad album or two. Gaining five seats, the Greens looked like they had become a full-spectrum party, capable of drawing people from every social group, who could agree on some basic things: that actually existing Tasmanian forestry was low-rent vandalism with no economic case; that the state’s social services were backward; that the political system was a clubby fix in need of reform. The 2010 Greens member for Bass was Kim Booth, a sawmiller. The Braddon member was a farmer’s son from the northwest.

The idea of an all-comers party has not played for a while now. People on the streets of Burnie and Devonport talk of greenies, and see them as the enemy. But was this a product of the perceived (fair or otherwise) “disaster” of the Giddings Labor-Greens government? Or of the shift to culture-first politics, which made a universal reach impossible? Or strategic errors by the Greens leadership in where it put its focus? 

Such questions have gone round and round, but they were interrupted in 2022 by the stonking federal Greens victory, taking three seats in central Brisbane after monumental grassroots campaigning. That suggested it was possible to break through the Greens’ Pareto-ish impasse, that most of their votes come from the 30% or so of the knowledge and professional classes. The Brisbane trifecta was one sign that this could be busted out of. 

Braddon would be another. Indeed, that understates what it would be. If the Greens can regain a seat in Braddon, then really anything is possible. Ulverstone and the companion town of Penguin — a place that when passed through on the bus, its gelato store and haberdashers rear from the beach sands as if from a dream before disappearing again — are very much the exception. Of the seat’s 80,000 voters, 60,000 are concentrated in and around the industrial port of Devonport and the factory town of Burnie, from which once flowed machines, timbers and ores in huge volume.

They still do, but much reduced, and both cities have coastlines of half-used metal equipment piled high, cranes, chutes and stacks, railyards and shunts, and things that have no name, welded together decades ago, brass plates on them, bearing the name of long-defunct companies. Federally, the seat has previously swung between the majors, but in 2022, it went against the trend, returning beefy, ex-military Liberal Gavin Pearce, with an increased majority.

These are two of the last cities in Australia, which are pretty wholly working class, where the government hasn’t shoved in a media production school or a collectibles mall to keep things going. They’ve lost a lot of jobs, and they don’t want to lose any more, and so there, the Greens are trying something different. 

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“We’re trying to work out whether the dog’s in that yard or this one,” says Erin, as I met Devonport Doorknocking Team 2, in one of the flat mini-suburbs with no name. Devonport rolls across very low hills, its houses bare yellow brick or weatherboard, and almost all single-storey.

There’s a shock of recognition. No McMansions! No white cubes! This is what Australian cities looked like 50 years ago. At this one place, the dog, a full German black-brown bastard type, is hanging over the fence, paws over the top. It’s a low fence, and so the dog looks six foot. Is it the owner? Are dogs buying houses now?

“Come on, let’s try this one,” says Michael, the team leader, a wiry young man, a teacher, in a “Tax Billionaires” t-shirt — no green to be seen. There are two front gates at the side, both bearing “beware of the dog” signs. Which one is it?

Throughout the afternoon, Devonport Greens Doorknocking Team 2 has been working its way up and down this patch of streets, in several groups of two. Some have needed a bit of propping up — the crew is so young that the later debrief simply can’t be held at the pub — but Michael is not one of them. A former CPSU organiser, he’s willing to dive in, in any scenario.

The barely attached door of a barely standing weatherboard swings open, and Steve, in trackies, a rollie between his fingers, a bawling daughter round his knees, comes out, eyeing us suspiciously.

“Can I talk to you about a couple of things?” says Michael.

“Sure,” says Steve, with the air of a man who doesn’t want to go back inside.

Steve, like most people, hasn’t taken any interest in politics, doesn’t think anything will change, is from further inland, moved here for dockwork, but then did 10 years in the paddocks of Tasmania’s once thriving vegetable industry before his back cracked entirely, has a special needs daughter the local school is not really helping, and is in pain from dental problems he can’t afford to fix, and I know all this because Michael spoke to him for about 25 minutes before coming back to the election, or really mentioning the Greens at all, before returning to policies on dental care and education — “No extra costs at school, none, that’s an immediate commitment” — and a mini-tutorial on the Hare-Clark system.

It’s retail politics, Greens as a left, class party; not a word about the forests, simply the conditions of people around here. But it’s also aimed at making a connection, establishing a relationship where none has existed. Certainly not to the Greens, but not, for some time, to any politics at all.

“Well, you know something’s got to change,” Steve says.

“Well, it does, and we need your help to do it, and the best way to help us is with your vote,” Michael says, and puts the how-to-vote leaflet in his hand. “Will you help us, Steve?” Jesus.

“Well,” says Steve, “you’re the only ones who’ve turned up.”

“I’m amazed at how little doorknocking the other parties are doing,” Michael says as we move on. “We’re working our arses off.”

It’s a strong class politics sell, on healthcare, on child support — “They’re not all mine!” one young mother says as six kids on toy trikes fly out of an opened door — but with an individual focus, about how life could be made a little better, a little earlier than anyone else is offering. It needs versatility, because Devonport has public and private housing mixed together, and you can’t always tell from the outside who’s what.

“Can I interest you in any of our excellent sparkling policies?” Michael says as a door opens on a white shagpile and booming home theatre Real Housewives of Devonport scenario.  

“Public housing here used to be for everyone round here — engineers, doctors lived in it,” someone had told me in Molly Malones, Devonport’s dockside Irish pub, which thankfully just looks like a ’70s Aussie pub with a couple of leprechaun signs on, faded darkwood panels and frosted glass doors, a stage in the corner and worn-through patches on the fraying carpet where the cigarette machine used to stand. Traipsing through the Devonport streets, it seemed there was something that had been worth preserving and still is.

“The eyes of Devonport are upon us,” I said. Literally. The town seems to specialise in front-garden figure dioramas. I know a lot of places do, but this is next level, and freestyle. In gardens of white pebbles, lines of painted gnomes smoking Meerschaum pipes make pilgrimages beneath fern fronds, in another a cowboy with a watering can for a Stetson stands guard over cacti, and in a third a full-size Ishka Buddha is attended by Toad, Ratty and Eeyore in an adoring semi-circle.

Eventually, “I… I don’t know what that is,” Michael said at one house as we stepped over a display of two stone meerkats lying on small banana lounges, with parasols and, for some reason, Johnnie Walker whisky-style tophats. Michael looked at the canvas printout and back to the house. A Regency meerkat shrine stunned where “beware of the dog” hadn’t stopped him.

He made genuine connections I would have thought close to impossible. Later at the debriefing, in a front yard with cake — “We can’t do this at the pub, half of you are underage” — one volunteer raises the dilemma of being asked about federal issues, and the injunction not to make false promises.

“That’s right,” Michael says. “But the best response is, ‘I can’t help you with that, but what can I help you with?'” Connection made, collective built, against the forces that scatter us all. Politics makes the real, returns us to life, which is why one comes back to it.

“My guy wanted the stadium and nuclear power.”

“Yeah, well, then you get out fast…”

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Back in Ulverstone, a few days later, Darren has found a somewhat different line in, from a Hail Mary pass on the first doorstop.

“Like one thing the Greens want to do is ban supermarkets from putting lollies at the checkout. They’ve done it in the UK and —” he choked out.

“Oh, I think that’s a great idea, very important,” said the drover’s wife, the first animated response. “I’ve got grandkids and —”

That flew well at two more houses. Go figure.

“I really didn’t think that would work,” I said.

“It really went better than I expected today,” said Darren grinning, yet to fully master the “off the record” button, as we do a quick review outside the Jade Willow Chinese restaurant, Ulverstone’s fine dining option (together with “Pedro’s By The River”). For an introvert, vet-become-GP, a man, like many who come here, and in whom I recognise myself, drawn to wilderness and solitude, he done good.

Braddon is an experiment for the Greens. More even than inner Brisbane, this is a test to see whether the class/group ghetto that dictates their steady 12% result can be broken out of, all over. That would be a question as to whether there is a constituency at the other end — those who have fallen so far out of the system that they are not even bound up in the culture wars that shape political attitudes, and whose only way to express resistance to date has been through an assertively cynical anti-politics.

Braddon is an acid test for this, and defeat here would not necessarily discredit it. This is Lambie country, after all. But the Jacqui Lambie Network campaign is a shambles, and its refusal to commit to any policies at all may be pissing people off. If so, there may be a way through for the Greens.

There’s really no point in not trying, in not doorknocking yourself to exhaustion. Falling short after giving it a red-hot go is possibly not the best feeling in the world. But the opposite is undoubtedly the worst, and in Braddon, the Greens are going to leave it all on the field.