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Green lessons from labor's past.

Article Excerpt
Over their political career the Australian Greens have suffered hostility not just from right-wing commentators but from what counts as the left wing of the commentariat. After the 2004 federal election Shaun Carney complained that Bob Brown had not been suitably saddened by Mark Latham's defeat. Transfixed by nostalgia for Whitlam or the glory days of Keating's late 1980s press conferences the Labor-voting media have been preoccupied by Labor's post-1996 woes and largely indifferent to the rise of the Greens. This is despite the fact that the Greens have overturned what seemed an iron law of Australian politics: Labor's electoral hegemony on the Left. Radical liberalism, agrarian populism and communism all posed significant electoral challenges to overseas social democracy but here labourism was unchallenged.

The 2006 Victorian election was a major political breakthrough for the Greens with over ten per cent of the state-wide vote and three seats in the Legislative Council. The Greens became a major Victorian political force at the 2001 federal election in the aftermath of the Tampa-inspired revolt of left-wing voters against Labor....

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