In late 2009, people from all over the country converged on the University of Melbourne for the Green Institute’s Green New Deal Conference. Brad Lacey was there to document the experience.
A major motif persisted through the course of the recent Green New Deal Conference, held amongst the leafy surrounds of the University of Melbourne’s Parkville campus. If last month’s Copenhagen negotiations on climate change and emissions policies were anything to go by, it is a motif that will be occupying the minds of political leaders, diplomats, and scientists for some time to come. Co-operation was that motif—or, perhaps better put, the complete lack of, and seeming incapacity for, co-operation.
Evidently, the best litmus test for co-operative politics is the one staring us in the face—climate change—and so it is no surprise that the mood of green activists has been dampened by the myriad failings that blighted Copenhagen—failures endured, perhaps even resigned to, by Australia’s federal government.
Back in Melbourne however, a little over a month before Copenhagen, things were looking considerably chirpier. The Green New Deal Conference—stated aim: to shape greener Australian policies by “taking deliberate, long-sighted, and transformative steps [towards] tackling multiple converging global crises”—did, well, exactly that.
Essentially set up as a pure platform for the exchange of green ideas, the Conference, despite being punctuated by lectures and panels held in the main theatre and filled to the brim, shone its spotlight on the smaller, themed workshops, sessions intended to facilitate non-threatening discussion.
Attended by two or three hundred political enthusiasts and professionals (in the audience I recognised members of parliament, journalists, women and men, students from the University, career politicians and youthful activists), the Conference was predictably vibrant and its participants vociferous. Indeed, disagreement was widespread and at times even heated, but perhaps most importantly, encouraged.
“Too often the greatest minds of our generation are making expensive golf clubs or luxury cars.”
These are the words that echoed through the second day of the Conference. They are the words of Georgia Miller, a writer and activist, and they ask a question that, at a conference like this, filled as it was with intensely passionate people, was the single biggest, ignored, elephant in the room: How do we make politics more attractive for those who can’t stomach it? If that question had been unanswered before she’d uttered it, we at least didn’t leave the Conference feeling like the Australian Greens lacked an answer to it.
One panellist, South Australian student activist Jake Wishart, answered the question in his own way, speaking of the Greens’ need to re-engage with sections of the community that feel most neglected by a party, fairly or unfairly, often painted as one composed simply of ‘inner-city elites’. Wishart’s words were not hollow; citing the “false dichotomy of Greens and workers” as a “corporate lie”, Wishart set to redress things himself, last year travelling to the Hazelwood Power Station (which is, hardly incidentally, the least carbon efficient power station in the whole world)—not just to protest against Australia’s continuing reliance on such fossil fuels, but rather to meet and engage in a dialogue with its workers; to hear their concerns; and to discuss the ways in which green solutions needn’t ignore the day-to-day realities of workers’ lives.
Of course, it was not just the youth that spoke up. At the Friday night public lecture that preceded the Conference, Bob Brown lambasted the Australian media for not paying sufficient attention to the Government’s inaction on climate change and other environmental issues, and later, Lin Hatfield Dodds, National Director of UnitingCare Australia, noted that although the present tendency for green innovators to focus on technological and infrastructure developments is hardly misguided, it does miss a burgeoning opportunity—that of the care industry. Citing the world’s growing population (we can expect the present figure, 6.8 billion, to have reached 9-11 billion by 2050), and advances in medicine resulting in longer lives for both the able and those who require permanent care, Hatfield Dodds underscored the ways in which jobs can be ‘green’ without necessarily being ‘environmental’ or traditional in the other ways that we have come to view them.
Voices from business were not lacking at the Conference either. Pragmatic concerns underpinned many arguments, and the Australian Alliance to Save Energy’s Mark Lister in particular stridently advocated for prudent, realistic suggestions, and “cross-sectoral alliances” that transcend ideological divides.
Two key lessons suggest themselves from the Green New Deal Conference, and, more broadly, the events of the past few months. First is the recognition that diplomacy has its limits; that despite best intentions—and surely Copenhagen had plenty of them—sometimes progress is stymied no matter what. Second is the realisation that this doesn’t have to matter. At the grass roots level, at the level of the voters, the people, progress is working its magic even as we frown. This Conference may not have provided us with solutions to the world’s every problem, but its focus on enthusiasm, innovation, democracy, and debate is yet another deliberate, long-sighted, and transformative step, with many more to come, along the right path.