Greens at war over trans elbowing out women on committees
If you go into the park today, you’d better go in disguise. Henson Park, possibly. Maybe Gough Whitlam Park down on the banks of the Cook River. I’m talking Marrickville, folks. The spiritual home of the NSW Greens.Predictably, the NSW Greens are eating one another today with a great dollop of kale and pine nut pesto on the side after a naughty column in their internal newsletter angrily suggested trans folk were elbowing women out of any number of Greens committees that delusional people join in the expectation they will make a difference only to have their spirits crushed years later.
NSW MLA, Jenny Leong and Senator Mehreen Faruqi joined in the chorus of condemnation and general fussin’ and a-feudin’. It was media releases at twenty paces.
This is what it sounds like when black-throated finches cry, people.
The author, Marrickville branch member Margot Oliver, has not been seen or heard of since and might possibly be shivering in a North Korean re-education camp as we speak.
Who’d have thought Marrickville could be so intriguing? Not me. I’ve been living in and outside of Sydney for almost thirty years now and I barely know how to get there. Google mapping helps but my car can stubbornly refuse the series of awkward right-hand turns down one-way streets and takes me instead to Royal Randwick where, without wanting to be cruel, it is a lot nicer.
The reason this has caused such a stir is because the Greens have quotas for just about anything. There must be three of this, four of that and two of the other before a quorum exists and the Greens Marrickville branch sub-committee for vegetable rights and quality footwear can concentrate on world domination and what is to be done about the concrete cancer at the municipal baths.
Irrespective of quotas, committees of this type at branch level are invariably dominated by the loudest people in the room. The ones making the biggest din are rarely right about anything, but volume speaks well, volumes at shitkicker level in our political system.
It is a case of what I like to call the aeration principle, a process developed in the sewerage and drainage industry where air is pumped into sludge under such pressure that the turds float to the top. The only difference is at branch levels in the Greens, no one is scooping them off with a great big pool skimmer.
The way the NSW Greens are set up, a rat’s maze of delegations, committees and sub-committees means the loudest and only the loudest will be handed the hemp lanyard and the access-all-areas pass at their double secret state conferences.
In the NSW Greens, this means those who cut their teeth in urban activism in the 1970s. The sort of people who stuck posters on walls claiming Marrickville was a ‘Nuclear Free Zone’ and believe to this day they headed off a nuclear holocaust and forced the nuclear superpowers to disarmament talks by the sheer force of their poster glue.
The NSW state conferences actually aren’t secret in that we know where they are held and when but the media and any curious interlopers are not welcome and will be given the flick at the door. God only knows what goes on there. Blood rituals, cat juggling – your guess is as good as mine but at the end of it, policy is determined and candidates chosen e.g. the exercise of real power. The rank and file don’t get a look in.
It might be just as well because the Greens branch sub-committees are hardly representative even of their own tortured party because normal people have better things to do than go out on chilly Tuesday evenings to hang out with a bunch of disgruntled schoolteachers who think economic policy means writing cheques off the national budget for any interest group that comes along with a tear in its eye.
What this spat proves beyond a shadow of doubt is the Australian Greens are not a party of environmentalism. It might have been years ago in its manifestations outside New South Wales but in the here and now, it’s a motley collection of urban activists, considered too weird even for the Labor Party.
We could flip through the Pantone colour chart and find something more apt. Maybe a purple. Ok, that one might be reserved by the AEC and Gladys Liu. So, another colour. Hot pink? Maybe scarlet with some lovely stars in the corner? But, certainly not green.
The left of politics is a killing field of ideas, philosophies and ideologies. Every where you turn there are issues that bob up which challenge the lofty principles of diversity and inclusion. It used to be so much simpler in the days when Arthur Caldwell just stuck a sign in the Gulf of Carpentaria that read ‘No Asians’.
Now, in a complex multicultural society, inclusion is a tougher prospect. The only way forward through the mire is to observe the simple idea that participation in the political process should be determined by the content of one’s character rather than the size, shape and function of their genitalia.
It’s a mad idea, I know. And just quietly, I don’t think it has much chance of getting up at the Marrickville branch of the NSW Greens.
Forum
Pages: 1
Greens - laughing stock (Read 6239 times)
