Elections in NSW.

Today is election day in New South Wales. As citizens, we are asked to choose among alternatives often hard to distinguish.

In NSW the main socialist party is the Socialist Alliance. These are their policies. They publish the Green Left Weekly. I sympathise with them, without fully embracing that option. In electoral terms their chances are reduced. I’d give them the highest preference, not because I’d expect them to win, but to send a message: if my higher preference is not elected, the vote “flows” to the lower preferences.

My second preference could involve the Greens.

The NSW Greens started out as a radical Left movement. Unfortunately, soon enough they gravitated towards a New Left stance at the time still fashionable, represented by B_o_b___B_r_o_w_n’s Tasmanian, culturally liberal, economically conservative petty bourgeois tree-hugging hippies.  After confederation, the latter (the “Tree Tories”) managed to wrestle most of the power from the former (the “Watermelons”). It wasn’t so much a merger, but a hostile takeover which reached its climax a few years back, with Lee Rhiannon’s expulsion at the hands of the Di Natale Tree Tory gang.

To their credit, some Greenies, like David Shoebridge, attempt to navigate a more Left-wing path (kind of like the American Democratic Socialism: PDF). Personally, I’d support and vote for them: they may not be real socialists, but they are the best one can realistically expect from the Greens. The problem is that, in NSW, for every Lefty like Shoebridge the Di Natale clique managed to push people like Justin Field and Cate Faehrmann. But is at a federal level where Tree Tories like Julian Burnside (the new star candidate the Greens are fielding against Josh Frydenberg) completely manage to discredit the Brown-Di Natale wimpy “New Leftism” revealing it as the laughing stock it always was:

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If one plans to vote for a party list (“above the line” in the big ballot), why should one prefer a “Labor Party” -- which is all the Greens really are -- in all but name to the real deal? Because of the “Green” brand label? Labor ain’t no ecosocialist party; then again, neither are the Greens. Even if one believes the whole Nature Conservation Council of NSW scorecard, the difference between the Greens and Labor is at best quantitative, not qualitative.

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On the other hand, if one votes “below the line” one can be more discriminating. One could place a more lefty Greenie (like Shoebridge, for example) high in the preference order; after that one shift one’s preferences to members of other party lists. Me, I’d give Shoebridge a higher preference and after him I prefer Labor pollies.

Unless, of course, one intends to vote for the Liberal/National COALition, the first choice of water-stealing irrigators, coal miners and coal-fueled electricity generators, builders of that unnecessary stadium, enemies of trade unions. In which case (even if one were foolish enough to believe Scott Morrison’s fake anti-Islamophobia, as fake as his Climate Solutions Fund), in the likely resulting hung parliament, reactionary, demagogic, or even krypto- (and not so krypto-) Nazi/Fascist parties like One Nation, the Australian Conservatives, the Liberal Democrats or the Fred Nile religious fana/lunatics may hold the “balance of power”.

Then we’ll be really fucked.