Clean green sweep leaves traditionalists gnashing their teeth
Developers up and down the Northern NSW Coast have been wailing into their
beer this week after unprecedented votes for The Greens in Ballina, Byron
Bay and Tweed Heads.
Jeff Johnson is the first Greens candidate in Ballina and he led the pack
in the B Ward with a clear 25% of the election night votes, finally closing
190 votes behind mayoral contendor Sharon ‘Open the Committees’ Cadwallader
to be the first Green elected to Ballina Council.
The Byron Shire Council will have a Greens mayor, three other Greens councillors and two green independents facing three conservatives led by Ross ‘Climate Change is not real’ Tucker. This total annihilation of the pro-development forces has shocked many entrenched interests.
Members of the Mullumbimby Rotary Club speculated at the first meeting after the election that businesses would be better to shut up shop and move across the border where men were still head of the household and forests treated with the contempt that all wild things deserve.
The Board of Byron Bay’s misnamed chamber of commerce (Byron United) resorted to a kit bag of proxy votes to suppress a mutiny at their Annual General Meeting. Members angry at an expensive campaign that backfired in the final week and saw an extra five percent of undecided voters turn firmly Green shied away from sacking the board but insisted that no political campaigns would be run without the specific approval of a special general meeting. The board refused to release figures showing how much was spent in Byron United’s name during the council elections, at first on the grounds that they did not know, then on the grounds that it was not member’s money (though they were not at liberty to say just whose money it was), then finally on the grounds that it would appear in next financial year’s accounts.
A significant chunk of the membership will not be renewing their membership, leaving Ed Ahern and a small rump of the burghers of Byron pondering names for next year’s model. Ed’s Elves would work well for headlines involving the mutant Christmas Tree they will erect next month. Burgher’s Rump is evocative but a number of members at the AGM complained that they did not know what a Burgher is.
Property developers on the Tweed considered taking up the weed when anti-Marina campaigner Katie Milne scooped the pool with nineteen percent of the vote. Eventually, the pre-eminence of the white shoe brigade was assured when the Electoral Commission announced that four out of seven councillors would be conservative, despite a primary vote of 49 percent progressive plays 46 percent conservative with five percent informal. The drift in preferences was enough for the progressive candidates to call for a recount, but at the time of writing Tweed will have one Greens candidate, Katie Milne, long term activist Barry Longman and previous councillor Dot Holdom on the progressive side facing four pro-development councillors of various political flavours.
There are two delicious ironies in all of this. One is that the apparatchiks of the Labor and Liberal Parties criticised the Greens throughout the campaign for running as a party, making claims that local government is no place for party politics. The claim was followed through inconsistently with the Liberals standing in Tweed and getting elected and Labor standing in Byron and getting annihilated. They preferenced the conservatives there, hoping to pick up an extra seat on each other’s preferences but simply lost nearly all the traditional ALP vote, ending up with a measly four percent. As we have seen in Tasmanian state politics and the Federal seat of Melbourne, these twentieth century dinosaurs will do anything, including coalesce, rather than accept the Greens as the party of the future.
This is a particularly dangerous game for the ALP. Ear-wax Kev is only in the Lodge courtesy of Greens preferences and will be a one term wonder should the Greens get sick of being beaten around the head every time they put their shoulder to the ALP cause.
With the Labor Party in NSW and the conservatives nationally in pieces, anything could happen in the way of alliances by the next election cycle. We saw independent MP Tony Windsor with Greens and Nationals politicians standing side by side in Gunnedah last month calling for an end to the expansion of coal mining. That could well be a sign of the shape of things to come.
The other irony is the assumption by the political conservatives that farmers are on their side. Socially conservative though they may be, farmers are no longer happy to be taken for granted. While some farmers still worry about the Greens attitude to guns, poisons and animal welfare they are increasingly afraid of central governments selling off the farm, literally, to keep their big city bank accounts looking flush. Most farmers do not think that globalisation, free trade and foreign agribusiness is in their best interests. As a result, there is a lot more in common between the average farmer and the average Green than either of them have in common with the mates of international capital. As long as the Labor and Liberal parties keep presenting their pockets for the banks to piss in, more people will reject them.
The recent council election is simply the opening round in a bout between green versus greed that will shape politics for the coming century. The people of the Northern Rivers are following the lead of the people of Nimbin. There is no doubt which corner we stand in.
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