Eleven in a Room, 884 at the Door
The Greens' brawl is less about who leads than who gets to choose, and the new leader has already turned the answer into a recruitment pitch.
The Greens' brawl is less about who leads than who gets to choose, and the new leader has already turned the answer into a recruitment pitch.
The biggest argument the Greens have had in years was settled in a room in Sydney on a Wednesday, by eleven people.
That is not a dig. It is the rulebook. Only sitting federal MPs vote for Greens leader, and on 30 September the party room of ten senators and one MP held what the ABC called an unprecedented ballot for a party that has usually picked leaders by consensus. Larissa Waters had announced two days earlier she was stepping down to deal with chronic kidney disease. David Shoebridge took six first preferences, Mehreen Faruqi three, Sarah Hanson-Young two. After preferences it was seven to four, according to the results released by party whip Nick McKim.
In a room of eleven, six is a majority. You do not need a movement.
That is the real fight, and it is older than this week. Faruqi lost and went at the process. "Without a member vote, we cannot call ourselves a grassroots party," she said, calling for "one member, one vote." Former MP Max Chandler-Mather had written to MPs the day before making the same case, and told ABC radio the party won nearly two million votes while the choice was "being left to 11 people." I said much the same that week. Members get the slogans, the party room gets the vote.
But be fair to the room. The members had their own go. A 2020 plebiscite found 62 per cent of Greens members backed a party-wide vote for leader, short of the two-thirds required, as the Guardian and the Herald both report. Shoebridge won on the rules as they stood.
The week was also more human than a process seminar. Hanson-Young said "God, politics can be brutal," and later that she was "not going to be salty." Greens sources told Guardian Australia the Shoebridge and Faruqi working relationship was seriously strained. On the record, Shoebridge said he had "huge respect for Mehreen" and offered her "my 100% support."
Then he did the interesting thing. He committed to a member vote at the next contest, due straight after the next federal election, and put the promise to work. The Herald reported this week that 884 people joined in the week after he took over, and that one of his Instagram videos encouraged supporters to sign up on the promise of a say in future leaders. Standard membership in the bigger states runs $90 to $140 a year.
That changes the mechanism. A promise made at a press conference can drift. A promise people paid to join on is a receipt. Every one of those 884 now has a reason to check the rule change actually lands, and it still has to clear the party's own machinery, the same machinery that set a two-thirds bar in 2020.
It changes the job, too. A leader picked by members answers to members, but still sits with ten colleagues every sitting week. Shoebridge says the Greens are here to "replace" Labor. Hanson-Young pointed her fire at Pauline Hanson instead. If the members ever pick someone the room would not have, the Greens will learn the gap between the branch and the bench the hard way.
The Greens used to settle the leadership before anyone voted. Now the promise of a vote is in the recruitment video, and 884 people joined in a week at up to $140 a year.
That is not a slogan anymore. That is a receipt.
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