Let’s just put this diplomatically and say there are a lot of unhappy campers in and around the Greens at the present time.



The party has just chalked up an absolutely horrendous month. It could have closed a deal with the Turnbull government on the Gonski 2.0 funding package, but didn’t, because of internal divisions.

In a blaze of frustration after that deeply unfulfilling experience in the final parliamentary sitting weeks before the winter recess, the New South Wales senator, Lee Rhiannon, was made the scapegoat.

Rhiannon was opposed to doing a deal on Gonski, but she wasn’t the only member of the party room with reservations.

While she wasn’t the only burr under the collective saddle, she was subsequently marked out in singular fashion for public punishment in a fresh bout of proxy warring between a national organisation that wants to be in control and a state organisation that has always doggedly resisted that ambition.

Perhaps the Greens leader, Richard Di Natale, is currently, quietly, executing a brilliantly cunning plan to win a subterranean backroom war that has festered unresolved since Bob Brown created the national organisation in 1992 – anything is possible.

But in Greens circles, a different story is being told. The open conversation at the moment is about the foolishness of Di Natale picking a fight with Rhiannon and NSW that he can’t win, and the practical consequences of that folly.

The brawling is seen by many people as a strategic error that has only strengthened Rhiannon’s level of support in NSW, when before the public eruption, she’d been under pressure from a new breed of activists.

A NSW insider says Di Natale, in a burst of Canberra bubble-itis, has actually managed to create a “mini movement” around Rhiannon – a parliamentarian who was previously thought to be in the departure lounge. He’s given Rhiannon an opening to make a virtue of her uncompromising activism, and her bottom-up politics.

Politics is a pack animal business, and leadership of a party requires dominance, even in a soft-power, consensual, enterprise like the Greens.

There’s an immutable law in professional politics, no matter what your stripe. It doesn’t matter about the intrinsic merits or rights and wrongs of an issue, if you are the leader of a political party and you happen to pick a fight you can’t win, you damage your internal authority.

The pups start barking.

With that unfulfilling fracas bubbling away unresolved in the background, the party then rolled into the loss of two of its most able senators, Scott Ludlam and Larissa Waters, who had to resign because they weren’t ever eligible to stand.

It really is hard to comprehend how that could have happened, given Ludlam and Waters are both able, highly intelligent politicians, and birthers are not exactly backwards in coming forwards, either on social media or as regular correspondents with political offices.

There’s also a question mark over whether Waters’ mooted Queensland replacement, Andrew Bartlett, can take up his Senate position, because he had a university appointment when he nominated.

Whatever this is: carelessness, a lack of organisation, a lack of resources, a lack of basic professionalism – it builds on the public perception that this political party, now a major player in Australian politics, not some tin-pot operation, does not have its collective act together.

That’s unhelpful, to put it mildly.

But sitting behind all this clutter, the series of unfortunate events, are some bigger questions and more profound challenges for the Greens.

The party’s performance in the last federal election was underwhelming – there were gains but not breakthroughs in the lower house in Victoria, and they went backwards in the Senate.

Bob Brown was quick post election to point the finger at NSW for the underperformance, with some justification, given NSW underperformed. But there are also broader issues in play than fresh iterations of a two-decades-old fight between venerable stagers in a political movement.

Any objective, clear-eyed assessment of the party’s current performance would conclude the Greens are not gaining ground in an atmosphere that should benefit them – an atmosphere of disenchantment with the major parties and with politics as usual.

Di Natale conceptualises the Greens as a potential party of government.

He chafes against his “inner urban pragmatist” type-casting, but it is nonetheless true – Di Natale wants to do deals when there is merit in doing deals, rather than style the Greens as a centre of permanent protest.

The Greens in happier times: Larissa Waters, Richard Di Natale and Scott Ludlam. Photograph: Mick Tsikas/AAP

Di Natale is a medical doctor, and most doctors I know are possessed by the need to make things better in practical ways. Doctors aren’t professional symbolists. They want to heal and improve quality of life.

Obviously, this instinct is a considerable distance short of a thought crime.

But Di Natale has come to the party leadership at a time when public antipathy towards establishment political systems is high, and there is an appetite on both the left and the right for radicalism.

Voters are responding to politicians who can differentiate themselves from the systems they operate inside. They want a bit of movement-building and a bit of fire in the belly.

Labor, too, has made life more difficult for the Greens in a product differentiation sense by moving more assertively into redistributive territory on economic policy, and by grabbing the global inequality debate, somewhat anaemically during the federal election campaign in 2016, but more assertively in recent times.

With the old Catholic right now largely the in-house problem of the Liberal party, and with Labor’s pro-market rightwingers influenced by post-global financial crisis thinking, the current Labor caucus is the most progressive it has been since the Whitlam period.

Call that evolution a bit of centre-left crowding out.

The combination of these events can work to create an impression that the Greens are stuck in a rut; and perversely managed to pick a leader of the sensible centre just at the time when radicalism was coming back heavily into vogue.

Certainly that’s a negative narrative about Di Natale that plays around the Greens – nice bloke, Richard, sure, but wrong man for the times.

So where does all that lead? Right now, that’s hard to predict.

Di Natale has lost two supporters with the departure of Waters and Ludlam, which alters the party room dynamic.

The Greens have sensibly resisted the coup culture, the cancer that has infected Canberra over the past decade. Intelligent people know that changing the figurehead doesn’t alter underlying contested dynamics – in fact, it can make things worse.

That said, politics being politics, I’d have my eye on two things going forwards as useful barometric readings.

I’d watch the performance of the party in the opinion polls and I’d watch out for targeted leaks.