The Australians Greens are an international outlier in how the party selects its leader: a vote of just the ten elected federal members of parliament. However, the party is currently running a members’ plebiscite to determine whether this model should be changed. The options include the status quo parliamentarian vote; a one member, one vote model; or a 50/50 model where the federal members of parliament are given 50% of the vote and members the other 50%.
With this leadership election plebiscite, the Australian Greens face a historic choice and potential turning point: lay the foundations for a democratic, mass membership party with real roots in civil society, or continue down the path to a permanently small parliamentary party whose main aspiration is the occasional balance of power deal or clever negotiation in the Senate.
Beyond the convincing technical democratic arguments in favour of one member, one vote (OMOV) a far more fundamental question must be asked: How do Greens members believe we will transform Australian politics, society and the economy in a way that puts wealth and power in the hands of ordinary working people and prevents climate catastrophe?
There is a prevailing view, especially within the parliamentary wing of the Australian Greens, that the path to this sort of transformation lies via an alliance with the Australian Labor Party. Proponents of this view envision the Greens successfully forcing Labor to abandon the party’s forty-year commitment to neoliberalism, either via advocacy or using a handful of Greens MPs to win the occasional vote in parliament.
However, this path is a mirage, invoked by the Greens political class as the primary path to change. In fact, it’s clear that the Labor Party as an institution represents an active barrier to this transformation.
There are several important reasons for this. Firstly, Australian Labor has experienced the sort of hollowing out described by Peter Mair in Ruling the Void. In the 1980s, 50% of the Australian workforce were members of trade unions, and this mass union movement gave Labor real representational weight in civil society. However, since then trade union membership has declined to just 14%, and only 7% in the private sector. This in turn has disconnected Labor from its working class base. This process was accelerated in the 1980s and 90s while successive federal Labor governments ushered in Australia’s version of neoliberalism via a willing partnership with the trade union leadership, called the Accord.
The remaining hollowed-out husk of the Australian Labor Party has been so captured by the interests of big corporations, without any countervailing force in the labour movement, that the party is now actively hostile to even a basic social democratic program that would threaten these corporate interests.
A Labor-Greens alliance to transform Australian politics, economy, and society is therefore an impossible prospect. To overcome the forces of Australian capitalism and their representatives in the Labor and Liberal Party, the Australian Greens need to become a political and social force capable of wielding real power in its own right.
The path toward this sort of power is long and difficult, but will be impossible without a mass membership empowered with the ability to choose the political direction of the party. The leader of the Australian Greens represents the clearest and most direct way of affecting the political direction of the party.
For a mass membership party to be viable in this political age, members must have a real stake in the politics of the party. The contests and debates over the political direction of the party must be real; members have to know it’s possible for their perspective and material interests to win out. There is no point joining a party when the leadership is effectively chosen by a handful of professional parliamentarians each paid around $200,000 a year.
Jeremy Corbyn’s successful UK Labour leadership victory in 2015 proved that leadership contests can become catalysts for broader political organisation around a socialist politics that engage hundreds of thousands of people previously disengaged from the political process. Similarly Bernie Sanders’ tilt at the Democratic Presidential Primary has helped create the foundations for a mass political movement that will hopefully exist well beyond Sanders himself. (This is not to endorse the deeply flawed Democratic Primary process. Indeed the restrictions placed on voting in that primary almost certainly contributed to Sanders’ inability to draw even more people into the process.)
Of course in both instances the political projects themselves failed, and there are important lessons to learn from both. However, if anything, both movements failed by not creating deeper roots into civil society and in turn building the sort of mass membership, democratic socialist movement needed to win. This is hardly an indictment of one member, one vote - rather a demonstration that it's only the first step.
Importantly, for both Sanders’ and Corbyn’s campaigns, the internal structure of the party - rather than the state - was the terrain of mass political contestation. For the UK Labour Party in particular, this crucially positioned the Party as an important political institution to engage with in its own right. Every Greens campaigner has experienced the phenomenon of hundreds of volunteers appearing during election time and disappearing a week later. If we want to build real power, then the party must be a living, breathing organism in and of itself.
This is only really possible in a democratic process where each member is given an equal vote. By drawing new sections of civil society into the party on the basis of a genuine, high stakes political contest, UK Labour overnight became the largest social democratic party in Europe.
In the Australian political environment, the Greens have a unique opportunity to create this terrain within their party structure. Australian Labor, having opted for a 50/50 model where the vote is weighted 50% to Labor MPs and 50% to the membership, has effectively locked out members from wielding any real power. The first real Labor leadership contest in 2013 under these rules saw Bill Shorten elected over Anthony Albanese, despite over 60% of the membership voting for Albanese. Albanese’s victory six years later in 2019 was followed by a rebuke of Shorten for his anti-business rhetoric, instead declaring a bridge must be built with “the top end of town”. (This confirmed the rumours prior to the election that Albenese had only secured the leadership by courting the right-dominated caucus of federal parliamentarians.)
A genuine democratic contest, where the leadership of the third-largest political party in Australia is up for grabs, could be the catalyst that finally sees Australia have its long-awaited “Corbyn” or “Sanders” moment. It could be the first step to transform the Australian Greens from a small parliamentary party to a mass political movement.
Long term, the Greens should aspire to become a genuine mass membership party with well over 500,000 members, where its support and organisation reaches into the working class communities long abandoned by the Labor Party. Direct election of the leader will certainly not achieve this by itself. However it’s worth remembering that UK Labor went from 200,000 members to over 550,000 members in under a year. A similar proportional surge in the Australian Greens would see the membership grow from roughly 12,000 to 24,000 members.
A party with half a million members would have substantial political and social power; the sort of power that couldn’t be defeated by vicious Labor and Liberal smear campaigns funded by millions of dollars in corporate donations. More importantly, the party would have the resources and capability to establish social institutions within the party itself - from political education programs to soccer clubs - in the tradition of the German social democrats.
In the most recent Federal election, the Queensland Greens made significant, unexpected gains in working class areas like Inala and Oxley. This came off the back of a deliberate strategy of community organising and policies that spoke to people’s direct material interests, including universal dental care and free childcare. However, while crucial in re-electing Senator Larissa Waters, these votes in and of themselves mean very little in terms of wielding power in politics or society.
The Greens must aim to become a permanent fixture in those communities, where membership entails real power and real opportunities for political education and engagement. If, at the end of the election, these new voters were encouraged to join the Greens on the basis that membership would allow them to determine the political direction of the party they just voted for, then the Greens would be laying the foundations for a powerful movement.
Further, a genuine contest for the leadership of the Greens would provide the basis for mass political education, where members were drawn into political and strategic debates with real stakes. This political education would go both ways, as the leadership of the Greens would be forced to make political and strategic arguments that appeal to these working class communities. In this way, the leadership contests would help to further politicise people’s existing material conditions, but also empower them to think and organise strategically to change those conditions.
This membership plebiscite isn’t just a question of democratic principles, it’s a question of strategy. The best ideas, policies and vision in the world matter for nothing when the party or movement demanding them lacks any real power.
Like much of the developed world, Australia has been affected by the growing and deep alienation, isolation and powerlessness produced by mass consumption-based capitalist society. Increasing rates of depression, record low levels of faith in democratic institutions and a broad popular belief that politics no longer has any meaningful effect on the economy, combined with the disintegration of civil society organisations, has left Australian civil society disorganised, depressed and alienated. In other words, people have no collective institutions through which to impose their material interests on the economy or politics, and so they disengage.These are ideal conditions for a mass political party with real weight in civil society.
OMOV in and of itself will not create a mass membership party overnight. But without it, the path toward building a just society and saving the environment is even harder.
Max Chandler-Mather is a political organiser based in Brisbane. He's worked for trade unions and for the Greens. He was the Greens candidate for the Federal seat of Griffith.