Bob Brown and partner Paul
Eric Abetz: Bob Brown's sound of silence
March 09, 2005
The Australian
THERE has been a peculiar quietness in the media since the Western Australian state election. And it is not coming from the WA Liberal Party, which is openly dealing with the election wash-up. Rather, it is the sound of silence which is the lack of Senator Bob Brown crowing about the Greens' state election result.
Brown's lack of crowing is for good reason. In the upper house election in Western Australia, the Greens vote went backwards from 8 per cent in the 2001 state election to 7.44 per cent on February 26. In the lower house, the Greens only marginally increased their vote from 7.27 per cent in 2001 to 7.38 per cent in 2005.
By keeping quiet, it seems Brown has learned from the farcical situation on October 9 when he jubilantly introduced "senator-elect" Christine Milne to the media - despite the fact that Milne had less than 0.9 of a quota on primary votes at the time and was ultimately the final senator elected for Tasmania. Had she gathered just 500 fewer first preference votes, Milne would likely still be working for Brown, rather than with him.
Remember when before the federal election Brown famously claimed the Greens would poll 1 million votes in the House of Representatives? Well, they ended up with just 841,734, or 7.19 per cent of the vote. In the Senate they did marginally better, polling 7.567 per cent. However, given the collapse of the Democrats vote by more than 5 per cent in the Senate, Brown would have been forgiven for wondering where all his party's votes were.
Remember also in the lead-up to the recent ACT election when Brown boasted of the Greens holding the balance of power in the ACT? As it turned out they retained only their one meagre seat.
Sensibly, Brown didn't make any similarly ridiculous boasts in the lead-up to the WA election, and despite a last-minute mercy dash to Western Australia during the last week of the election campaign, he is clearly underwhelmed by his party's result. And he has good reason to be. The environment was clearly one of the most important factors at play during the election campaign, given Colin Barnett's vision for a canal from the Kimberley to Perth. Yet the Greens were unable to make any electoral headway.
Perhaps people are beginning to see the Greens for what they are: a party of the far Left draped in the guise of a party for the environment, whose radical policies on issues such as drugs and tax rightly concern many voters.
And when it comes to the environment, the Greens are only interested in stunts, not results - witness Brown preferring to create a media stunt in Japan over the Kyoto Protocol, missing the Senate's environment estimates for the third time in a row. After all, without an environmental battle to create the Greens would be irrelevant and exposed as the far-Left, hypocritical and self-serving party they are.
The fact is, despite Brown's hyperbole, the Howard Government is the best friend the Australian environment has ever had. That is one of the reasons why in Tasmania at the 2004 federal election, the Liberals' sensible and balanced forest policy saw a swing to the Liberals in every lower house seat and a massive 7.34 per cent swing in the Senate, while the votes of the Greens, ALP and the Democrats all went backwards.
The Tasmanian state election, due by June 2006, will be the next big electoral test of the Greens. Unless they radically change course and become interested in achieving real environmental results rather than divisive propaganda, I expect the Greens' downward trend to continue. While you can fool some of the people some of the time, in Brown's case the evidence indicates that pool of people is rapidly shrinking.
Eric Abetz is the Special Minister of State and a Liberal senator for Tasmania
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