Updated ,first published
Greens leader Larissa Waters says her leadership is secure and the party is ready for a broader fight on climate policy, despite the spectacle of three Greens senators crossing the floor to vote with the Nationals on a key vote on Thursday night.
Long-serving South Australian Greens senator Sarah Hanson-Young also said that Waters’ position as leader was safe.
Waters told this masthead that no one in her party room or outside the party had raised concerns with her about her leadership, after the Greens took a position contrary to the urging of former leaders Bob Brown and Christine Milne.
Progressive think-tank the Australia Institute, which opposed the carbon credits, had described it as “the Greens’ first major climate test in the Senate under leader Larissa Waters”.
“I have a really respectful relationship with my colleagues, and that feeling’s mutual,” Waters said.
“This was Labor putting us in an impossible position by backtracking on a commitment to establish a national park and then demanding carbon credits for it. So we took a difficult decision, and it wasn’t an easy one to take.”
The Greens under Waters’ leadership voted with Labor to allow state governments to earn carbon credits from protecting forests, which the NSW government wants to use for the Great Koala National Park and can also be used by other states. The Greens were wedged because they despise carbon credits as allowing climate pollution to continue, but want to protect forests.
Waters said that the party engaged in “lots of discussions and lots of hugs”, ensuring disagreement was respectful and party unity survived. Waters was seen hugging Tasmanian senator Vanessa Bleyer immediately after the vote in the Senate.
Bleyer, who was sworn in only days earlier as a replacement for Peter Whish-Wilson, was one of the three who crossed the floor, along with fellow Tasmanian Nick McKim and Western Australia’s Jordon Steele-John. The trio put out a statement on Thursday night, saying they understood the position of their colleagues and hoped they would understand theirs, but they did not comment on Friday.
Brown struck a conciliatory tone to his former colleagues in a press statement and appearance on the ABC’s 7.30 after the party announced its decision on Thursday. “Minns’ Labor, welshing on its 2024 unconditional promise to create the park, and backed by Albanese, is the villain,” Brown said.
NSW Greens representative Sue Higginson, who was heavily involved in lobbying her federal colleagues to support the scheme, said that everyone involved in the debate remained on good terms, and she believed support for Waters’ leadership was “absolutely rock solid”.
At a time when One Nation is monstering the major parties in the polls and byelections, the Greens’ vote is holding steady on 12 per cent in this masthead’s Resolve Political Monitor.
Waters said the resurgence of the political right had occurred on an uneven playing field.
“Billionaires are paying Pauline Hanson to spread her lies,” she said. “It is not the fault of your neighbour, who might happen to be a migrant, that people’s lives are getting tougher, and she’s been helped out by billionaires and big corporations giving her wads of dough to fly around the country and spam billboards and pay for social media ads.”
Waters said the party would put this week’s vote behind it, and focus on the fight ahead to secure improvements to the Safeguard Mechanism, Labor’s flagship climate policy that is under statutory review, while trying to knock out 40 per cent of the carbon credit market.
The concessions that the Greens had secured were meaningful, she said, including decreasing the amount of logging that could occur outside the park boundaries and enshrining the commitment of NSW Labor not to sell the credits to fossil fuel companies in federal law.
“This is the first chink in the armour of coal and gas,” Waters said. “They’ve had a free ride for so long, and I’m really excited about the fact that now that we’ve been able to get Labor to admit for the first time that coal and gas should be treated differently, we’re going to say, ‘Well, that’s it, turn off the tap for the coal and gas industry.’”
Higginson raised concerns about the role the Australia Institute and its co-chief executive Richard Denniss played in the debate, including billing it as a test of Waters’ leadership and relentless campaigning that included paying to boost social media posts.
“I respect the Australia Institute … but on this one I do not think they were at their best,” Higginson said. “This was not the time to capitalise on the pain and difficult moments of our movement. This was not the time for aggressive politicking and shirtfronting leaders, especially the women who are fighting hardest for our climate and our forests.”
Waters rejected the notion that the vote was a leadership test, but said it was fine for the Australia Institute and Denniss to have a different view.
Denniss rejected any suggestion he was engaged in “aggressive politicking” or “shirtfronting”, but stood by it being a test of leadership because any issue of national importance was a test for the leader of any political party.
“When the Greens are afraid of a fight with the government over a key principle of climate policy, I think that tells us a lot about where the Greens’ policy and political strategy is heading,” Denniss said. “It would be pretty hard to describe the decisions that the Greens have just made without putting them in the context of Senator Larissa Waters, who’s their leader and got the climate portfolio.”
Denniss previously worked in politics for Brown as Greens leader and Australian Democrats senator Natasha Stott Despoja before that, but said his role now was independent of party politics.
Pragmatism v Purity: Once again, the environmental movement is cleaved in two, with giants such as Bob Brown and Tim Flannery on different sides.
Caitlin Fitzsimmons is the environment and climate reporter for The Sydney Morning Herald. She was previously the social affairs reporter and the Money editor.Connect via email.From our partners
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