"I don’t know what the platform is," says one despondent activist of the Greens' campaign. "I don’t even know what the f---ing slogan is." Loading So far the rift in the Greens has already resulted in one NSW MP quitting the party and two others threatening to leave. Now a long-term parliamentary staffer, Jack Gough, is also resigning, telling the Herald that he believes those scientists who say the world has only a dozen or so years to act on climate change. In his view, a hard-left faction in the NSW Greens is determined instead to focus on a quixotic campaign to dismantle capitalism in the cause of revolutionary socialism. In a Facebook post announcing his departure to members last week he wrote: "While the global Green movement represents me and my political philosophy, the NSW Greens no longer do."

He voices full support for his boss, upper house MP Cate Faehrmann, who is associated with the environmental wing of the party; along with fellow MLC Justin Field; and the party’s candidate for the seat of Lismore, farmer and environmental lawyer Sue Higginson. The fissure To understand the rift, it helps to remember a bit about the party’s history. The Australian Greens, which is a confederation of state parties rather than a single entity, was born not only of Tasmanian environmental activism but also from the Western Australian nuclear disarmament movement and parts of the radical industrial left in NSW. NSW Greens MP Jenny Leong says reports of division in the Greens are exaggerated. Credit:Dominic Lorrimer Given that heritage, it is not surprising that tension has long simmered within the party. Some prominent figures, such as former leaders Bob Brown and Christine Milne and the party’s first NSW MP, Ian Cohen, were always identified as being driven by environmentalism. Others such as the former NSW MP and senator Lee Rhiannon, the serving MP David Shoebridge and the former MLC John Kaye, who died in office in 2016, were seen as proponents of the social and political reform. Rhiannon, whose parents were active in the Communist Party of Australia, edited the magazine Survey, a monthly digest of trends in the Soviet Union from 1988 until it closed in 1990.

Though no formal factional system exists in the Greens, most MPs can now be identified as belonging to either the industrial left of the party or the environmental activist faction or as the groups are sometimes known, the Watermelons and the Tree Tories. The dispute between the groups came to a head when the party sought to discipline the upper house member Jeremy Buckingham, who is broadly identified with the environmentalists. Jeremy Buckingham quit the Greens in December. Credit:Brook Mitchell Buckingham was first elected to Orange City Council in 2004, becoming the first Green to win such a vote west of the Great Dividing Range. When he made the jump to state politics he worked to win over regional voters who were traditionally suspicious of environmental activists, convening the Australian Country Greens. In November last year tensions came to a head when the member for Newtown, Jenny Leong, used parliamentary privilege to call on Buckingham to resign over historical allegations of sexual harassment of a staffer. In a statement at the time, she said, "The culture of sexism, sexual harassment, and unwanted sexual advances in society in general and in politics, in particular, must change. Survivors must be listened to and believed. No more excuses. No more delays."

She made her speech despite an internal Greens investigation that found in part that, "the Greens NSW resolve this matter with no adverse finding against you with respect to sexual harassment or inappropriate behaviour towards [the complainant]". In December, the party’s state delegates council voted narrowly to call on him to remove himself from the party’s ticket. Loading Buckingham quit in disgust, saying the party had lost its way. After his resignation, Faehrmann and Field also held talks with other MPs and with the party’s elder statesman, Bob Brown, about leaving to form a breakaway party more focussed on conservation and climate change. At a meeting entitled "How the Radical Left Wins", Rhiannon is shown in a recording to urge attendees to join the party so they can vote on the party's upper house ticket. In a recording of the event she voices her concern that if they do not the party might preselect candidates who support good policy, but are not wedded to "transformative change" of "the system". This is viewed by Gough and other critics of the left as evidence of deliberate efforts by the faction to take over the party.

Last year odd spikes in membership caused such concern among some party officers that Carole Medcalf, then the party’s executive officer, checked the Australian Electoral Commission’s roles. Under Australian electoral law a party must give the AEC the names and addresses of 500 members to register. Medcalf has given the Herald a list of names she says exist on both the register of the Socialist Alliance and the NSW Greens, in contravention of Greens rules. Medcalf left her position as executive officer after disputed allegations of misconduct, which she and others claim were politically motivated. She also believes a deliberate effort to takeover the party by the hard left has crippled it. Temperature records have regularly been broken across the country. Credit:Nick Moir Greens membership officer David Briggs says the members in question had been contacted and told to select one party alone. "The issue has been resolved." Rhiannon dismisses claims that there has been any effort by a radical left or that there has been any bullying by figures seen as sympathetic to the left's cause. "There is certainly a more critical evaluation of capitalism as the world grapples with the horrors of climate change and gross inequality," she says. "The Sanders/Corbyn/Ocasio Cortez experience is resonating here. Any radicalisation going on in the Greens NSW is part of a global trend." According to Rhiannon such allegations are part of a "McCarthyist style attack" by "Buckingham forces" designed to discredit those who challenged his bad behaviour. Rhiannon says she stands by her record as an activist on behalf of environmental causes.

Wherever the new members were coming from, Gough says their presence was immediately felt at branch meetings. He says the new members were aggressive and argumentative and their language appeared to have been refined in far-left campus organisations. Their focus, says Gough, was the overthrow of capitalism and they proved to be expert at using the party’s regulations and rules block any action that they opposed upon ideological grounds. "It is death by committee, death by meeting," one MP says of the party’s internal processes. Gough believes the groups targeted the party in order to harness its existing profile and platform to their own ends, and because its democratic processes left it vulnerable to infiltration. He notes that upon leaving federal parliament one of Rhiannon’s first acts was to move onto the governing committee of the Search Foundation, the successor organisation to the Communist Party of Australia. Last week the Herald reported that an internal party report showed that that party was shrinking as the fighting continued, with up to 485 party members quitting in the 12 months to November 2018 - a decline of almost 13 per cent.

'This has always been a progressive party' Sitting in a Newtown coffee shop this week Leong says reports of division in the Greens - and the impact on the current campaign - are exaggerated. She dismisses the suggestion that Buckingham was forced out for political reasons and says that in today’s current climate it would be untenable not to take firm action over his alleged behaviour. And she also dismisses Gough’s criticism that she and Jamie Parker, the Greens MP for the seat of Balmain, have focused too closely on local issues at the cost of accepting responsibility for portfolios and driving debate on key environmental issues. Leong notes that much of her time is spent working on behalf of public housing residents in need of immediate assistance in securing not only basic maintenance but also long-term mental health and drug and alcohol support. "You can’t tell someone you are not going to help them get their intercom fixed because climate change is the most pressing global issue," she says.

Parker agrees, adding that as lower house members they are in a position to work alongside with - and challenge - the premier and key ministers over broader environmental issues in a way they could not in the upper house. Leong says it was natural that there would be some upheaval in the party after the retirement of national figures such as former leaders Brown and Milne, and the departure of Rhiannon from the Senate. And she says that though the NSW Greens have no formal leader, John Kaye had served as a de facto head. She agrees that the language of Rhiannon and some members associated with her might be reminiscent of left-wing politics of an earlier day, but says the policies that they advocate for they are in line with the broader ideals of the Greens. "This has always been a progressive party," she says. For Gough though, the Greens are irredeemable as an engine of urgent environmental reform. He laments not only that the party has fractured internally but that as it grew the broader environmental movement appeared to abandon it, leaving it vulnerable to what he sees as a deliberate takeover.