2018-07-20
What kind of impact are the Greens making outside of Australia? Former senator Scott Ludlam shares his insights from abroad, where he’s been working with the Global Greens to train emerging Green parties in far-flung nations.
By Scott Ludlam
Over the course of the past few months, I’ve had the good fortune to meet with Greens campaigners from all over the world. In case you were wondering whether our Global Greens tithing and other support for parties around the world is worth it, I can confirm: it is worth every cent.
It’s so easy to overlook the significance of the Global Greens given the seriousness and urgency of the challenges we confront at home. Australian Greens MPs and candidates have their hands more than full with local and national campaigns, and making time for our colleagues many timezones away sometimes gets pushed down the list.
Behind the scenes though, the Global Greens, Asia Pacific Greens Federation, and the Australian Greens International Development Committee (IDC) are quietly building support networks for a more resilient organisation across the world. It has been eye-opening for me to be able to visit some of our colleagues on their home ground – to conduct a couple of training sessions organised with the IDC and to learn and share experiences.
Sharing wisdom
In Australia we’re used to being up against it – vastly outspent, attacked in the media and surrounded by hostile incumbents opposed to our very existence. Nonetheless, we are an accepted part of Australia’s political landscape now, with decades of collective experience and expertise behind us. Emerging Green parties in places like Lebanon, Bangladesh, India and Mongolia face an extraordinary array of obstacles on their diverse roads from civil society movements to organised political parties.
Conducting training in these environments has been a sharp process of un-learning – working out what experiences and tools from an Australian context are valuable in Ulaanbaatar or Beirut, and which are counterproductive or unworkable. Weighing up the relative merits of field campaigning, paid and unpaid media, digital campaigning and other interventions takes on a different emphasis when you find yourself dropped into the middle of a place with vastly different histories and political cultures.
In the end, each of the trainings took on a much more two-way character. I was able to speak a little of the Australian experience of research, campaign strategy and structure, and of the party’s two decade history of growth and evolution. Then it became a process of mapping such information as seemed relevant onto the local context, and it was here that the deep experience and commitment of local campaigners and candidates came into focus.
A global battle
In Lebanon, our colleagues work amidst a sectarian and geopolitical jigsaw puzzle in which a fifth of the population is a refugee from the Syrian catastrophe or from occupied Palestine. Elections have been postponed multiple times by the ruling parties, and are essentially processes for deciding which individuals will take seats pre-allocated according to sect. Building a secular, feminist political movement in this environment takes courage and perseverance, and fortunately our Lebanese colleagues have both in abundance.
In Mongolia, the situation is different again – the Mongolian Green party has a long history, and has had MPs in the Mongolian Parliament in the past. This former Soviet satellite state is a young democracy, with fragile institutions and a tumultuous past. It lies at the crossroads of Russia and China, with foreign mining and petroleum companies accruing an ever-larger undertow of political influence. We’re working within a complex alliance of three other parties to contest the elections of 2020, and as it stands could win a number of seats in an incoming coalition government.
In India, the present task is more institutional: building the organisation to a sufficient scale that it can be formally registered as a national party amidst the bewildering ferment of other local and regional parties. And in Bangladesh, local organisers are more focused on building a grassroots environmental campaign to a position where it can take on a more direct electoral role.
Strength in adversity
Australia’s politics have been well and truly poisoned by a handful of massive resource companies, and we’re used to working in an unpleasant media environment, but everywhere I’ve travelled has opened my eyes to the degrees of adversity faced by our kindred parties. In addition to all of the familiar challenges of building an emerging party, they confront everything from structural corruption to occasional violence and electoral fraud – and yet, somehow, they are building movements.
You don’t need to be a political historian to realise that these things take time – even considering our own experience in the Australian Greens, which can trace its lineage back into the 1970s. Two things stand out: first, we’re among people who are determined to change the world no matter how great the challenges. And second, we’re stronger together.
I’ve just had the opportunity to see up close the role the Global Greens plays in exchanging experience and expertise, and I’m convinced that there is huge potential to step this up. While the Greens are just one among many important global and regional networks dedicated to building another world, our electoral focus makes us unique. We can learn a lot from the different contexts and challenges faced by people working in very different countries, but just as importantly, striking similarities cut through the cultural differences.
Collectively, our planet is under tremendous assault from globalised corporations protected by a legal system governing a highly parasitic form of ‘development’ at all costs. Front line communities from Jharkhand to the Solomon Islands are confronting ruination as fragile democratic institutions are hollowed out and repurposed to serve the unyielding demands of foreign capital.
The names, landscapes, histories and languages may be a kaleidoscope of difference, but many of the threats are very familiar. It is something of a relief to discover that we’re in such brave and accomplished company even as we figure out how to better engage with these challenges at home and abroad.
Scott Ludlam is a former Greens senator for Western Australia.