On The Road With Richard Di Natale Before The First “Climate Election”

Richard Di Natale is fiddling with the black strap of his watch. Sitting in the back of a rented Toyota, driving out towards Queensland’s Gold Coast, he is looking ahead and pausing on a thought.

“Sometimes people confuse the notion of wanting to get good outcomes in parliament with a change of direction,” he says. “Wanting to be constructive and actually improve legislation – obviously stopping bad laws – sometimes that cuts across your overarching ambition to have what is a transformative agenda.”

He turns and he looks at me and raises his chin and looks over my shoulder and out the back window. “I think Lucy just missed the turnoff,” he says.

Di Natale is talking about his wife. We are driving up the east coast of Queensland, along grass-stripped highways and winding roads towards the state’s capital. Lucy Di Natale trails behind us in a bright red Tesla Model X, their two young sons Luca and Ben sitting in the back seat. The boys have spent the trip in awe; not of the car’s electrical engineering and sweeping, glass windowed roof, but the onboard “fart mode”, a feature that plays fart sounds whenever the horn is pressed.

For some of the trip I am wedged next to them in the backseat, family suitcases crammed in the boot, pestering Richard with questions. His sons take photos of me on a digital camera and ask me what it means when I say “on background.” They want to know why I am asking their dad questions and they want to know why I am recording the conversation on my phone. They bounce in the back seat, begging their mother to try out new functions in the car: Santa mode, rainbow road, fart mode (again). They ask me where I live, leading to an explanation from Di Natale on studio apartments. “Why won’t you just live with your mum?” they ask. I tell them they will understand when they’re older.

It is the end of a long drive for the Di Natales and the end of a long day for me. The Greens leader dropped in on his family who have journeyed from Melbourne, joining with the Stop Adani Convoy, a protest movement created in part by Greens founder Bob Brown. Dozens of cars have trickled in and out of the rally since it first departed Hobart on April 17, skipping over the Tasman before making its way through Melbourne and Sydney and Coffs Harbour and Brisbane and, eventually, Airlie Beach.

The convoy is roundly criticised by News Corp, leading Brown to accuse the media giant of working against the ethics of journalism. A regional community mayor is given space in The Courier Mail to label the convoy an affront to the “proud resource communities” of Queensland, and the paper also reports that entire towns have promised not to serve any of the group.

Protesting the controversial Adani Carmichael coal mine is an easy win for The Greens’ base, who strongly believe this is ultimately an election about climate.

On the day I meet up with the convoy it is coming through Mullumbimby, a quiet community on the border of New South Wales and Queensland. Here, in a muddy park showground underneath a blazing hot sun, the convoy will be greeted by its largest crowd yet. Bob Brown, arriving in a royal blue Tesla (licence plate EMIT•0), will tell locals that Adani will be stopped regardless of whether those in power do anything to help out.

It is also where I first meet Di Natale, following him through a crowd of sunscreen and bare shoulders and Birkenstocks and rainbow flags, a sea of black shirts with red blocks on them, the words STOP ADANI printed at the centre.

He is stopped by people who recognise him. He is stopped, generally, because everyone is stopping each other.

We are all here standing around, some dancing with long silk ribbons, others dressed up as the Grim Reaper. There is music and speeches and a huge truck that runs on vegetable oil. There is no pro-Adani counterprotest – just a swarm of people looking straight ahead, circling around Bob Brown when he arrives and leaning on his every word when he speaks.

People wear face paint and sandals and hold elaborate signs. One man stands with a watermelon on his head the entire time I am there. A woman, all long brown hair and barefoot, moves through the bodies with a huge tub of sunscreen, insisting people slap it on.

Mullumbimby is an old timber town in the Byron Shire that sits at the foot of Mount Chinocogan, one of a few volcanic plugs that makes up a sweeping shield volcano millions of years old. You can see it from the showground. There have been protests here before, and there will be protests here again.

Later, in the back of a car cruising through open fields and straight roads, Di Natale asks me what I want to know. I tell him what I told my boss, a question that has plagued the party for years: well, who are the Greens?

Are they still the party of protest? Or are they a mainstream progressive party  – a true left-wing alternative to the Labor Party’s timid centrism? The party does face, as writer Shaun Crowe points out, an ongoing progressive civil war with Labor. The Greens as a party must show it differs from the mainstream, left-leaning, culture that is building around policies no longer isolated to just them.  

Both major forces in the country have little interest in working constructively with the Greens. This election campaign alone has involved the usually measured Penny Wong accusing the party of virtue signalling, while Bill Shorten has made a habit of dismissing any howls from Greens MPs as attention seeking rabble-rousing.

And how, if at all, has Richard Di Natale’s much-heralded ‘‘normality’ helped bring the party to the attention of the general population?

“We’re a party that exists to charter new vision for the country,” says Di Natale. “With a different policy agenda.” Later, he tries again: “I think the Greens are a genuine alternative to the two major parties.”

The Australian Greens want to move the country to 100% renewables, ban many categories of political donation, overhaul the government by changing political pensions and rules about lobbying, and want to drastically change the way the health system deals with drug addiction. The Labor Party, doing its best to actually pull this election off, don’t want to even be seen flirting with the Greens. The Coalition has decided its future lies more with carefully cozying up to far-right parties like One Nation and millionaire indulgences like Clive Palmer’s United Australia Party.

Di Natale, despite saying his party was pivotal in ensuring the banking and disability royal commission, in introducing voluntary assisted dying legislation, and in making some positive steps towards a coherent renewable energy policy, is facing stagnant polling and a rising independent and far-right opposition. There are constant arguments that the Greens have reached their peak in terms of raw voter support, and the upcoming election represents, as journalist Paddy Manning points out, a reckoning for the party.

“Unless it pulls off an upset in one of a few prospective electorates, the best the party can hope for is to hang on, and there is a real prospect of going backwards,” Manning writes.

Even on climate, Di Natale faces criticism from progressive Australia. In April, discussing a potential Labor election victory, he told The Guardian he would be prepared to vote against a climate policy it regarded as insufficiently ambitious. This immediately brought back memories of 2009, when the Greens blocked Kevin Rudd’s Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme (CPRS) and voted with Tony Abbott.  

Labor has long used that voting decision as a cudgel against the Greens, accusing them of playing purity politics at the expense of the nation. When Di Natale announced his party would once again be prepared to block “weak” climate policy, the Greens were again accused of refusing to compromise in the face of a dying planet. The solution, says Di Natale, is accuracy.

“We stopped a bad piece of legislation from passing and we actually worked with Julia Gillard, who was prepared to negotiate, and got a really good piece of legislation up and running,” he said.

“It wasn’t everything we wanted but it was a step forward. I think the reality is we stopped a bad law and we got a good one up.”

Di Natale wants to negotiate and work with Labor to construct climate policy. “But we aren’t going to give the Labor Party a blank check, because we’re not the Labor Party. We’re the Greens,” he said, indicating the 1.5 million people who voted for the party at the last election.

“We’ve actually got a mandate to deliver for those people.”

The Labor Party has certainly offered the more progressive climate policy of the two major parties, but has famously refused to clearly denounce Adani’s Carmichael coal mine. On the other side of the fence, Scott Morrison will forever be remembered for bringing a lump of coal into parliament.

“It’s true that Labor is better than the Coalition on climate change,” says Di Natale. “But they aren’t doing anywhere near enough to take decisive action in the ten years we’ve got.”

Ten years: that’s the figure the Greens lean on, referring to a report from the U.N’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The report found the world’s government’s were hugely off target if it wanted to avoid a potentially catastrophic future.

Certainly, the election is about climate change. The major parties largely have spent the election campaign sparring over the potential costs of a climate policy. You could argue that cost shouldn’t matter, as scientists line up to beg people in power to do something before it is too late, and that is exactly what Di Natale has done.

“It is, quite literally, an existential threat to humanity,” he told The Sydney Morning Herald.

And while the climate and the environment has always been bread-and-butter Greens policy, this election is also very much about coal. Allowing the Carmichael coal mine to go ahead is nonsensical to the Greens, as is not having a plan to transition away from coal-fired power generation completely

“If you haven’t got a plan to phase out coal exports and a plan to replace them with renewable energy and hydrogen exports then you haven’t got a plan,” he says. “And no other party is talking about the single biggest cause of climate change and that’s coal.”

Adani’s Carmichael coal mine will remain a battleground once the election is done and dusted too. Just before the election was called the Coalition gave the green-light to the controversial site’s water management plan, forcing Labor to present as either environmentally-focused, or concerned with jobs.

It did so under a pall of controversy, as meeting notes were leaked to the ABC directly contradicting Environment Minister Melissa Price’s word that Adani had fully accepted changes sought by government scientists. Price insisted that the timing of the announcement had nothing to do with reports of political pressure from Coalition MPs concerned that she was not signing off on the plan. In the days following, the CFMMEU made things tougher for Labor when it issued an ultimatum to Labor candidates in Queensland, asking they pledge their support for coal industry jobs. It was, in short, a mess.

Not confident that the Labor Party will block the mine, Di Natale is preparing to mobilise the community to stop it instead. “I think the problem is that Labor, like the Liberal Party and the National Party, get millions of dollars in donations from coal, oil, and gas interests,” he said. “I think it’s clear that there are people within the Labor Party with big vested interests who want to see Adani built.”

Di Natale has been the Greens leader since 2015. Taking over from the resigning Christine Milne, much was made of the Victorian senator who had emerged seemingly out of nowhere to take control of the party, rather than more obvious choices like Melbourne MP Adam Bandt.

He was presented as “reasonable and relatable”, a child of immigrants and former doctor who played football, a sports fanatic who had no history of chaining himself to trees, and a man that many saw as a conscious and very gradual change in course for The Greens. The protest days were over: this was a man who could take the party mainstream, or so the thinking went.

Di Natale was a Labor voter before becoming disenfranchised by Paul Keating’s “economic rationalist agenda.” He counts Keating’s management of the economy and the Labor Party’s treatment of the environment as the triggers that sent him away from the party.

“I had a family who were migrants – machinists working in the textile industry – and a lot of people lost their jobs as a result of those changes,” he said. “So I saw what impact that had on working class people.”

And yet it was his time as a doctor in the Northern Territory working with an Aboriginal community that Di Natale cites as the source of his “radicalisation”.

“I was a doctor at the time and I thought I would be a doctor forever,” he said.

“I realised I could keep doing this but a lot of the problems are structural problems. People can’t get access to decent housing, they are on a waiting list for ten years to get access to a public house, employment was shocking, a lot of the Aboriginal kids – they might have had English as their second or third language and there was nothing to cater for them – and for me it became clear if you want to improve Aboriginal health, if you want to improve the lives of people in general, you’ve gotta address those other things.”

Di Natale’s history as a doctor has translated well in one of the key areas the party has attempted to stake a claim on: drug policy. The Greens favour an evidence-based, harm minimisation policy, championing things like safe injection rooms and pill testing. He counts recent movement in Victoria that legalised assisted dying as a win for the Greens, despite it being a Labor government that announced the change, but laments the ways in which he thinks Australia has given up on its role as a pioneer.

“It’s one of those areas where we actually used to lead the world,” he says. “If you go back to the ‘80s, we were one of the first countries to introduce needle exchanges and supervised injecting rooms. Australia had a really proud record.”

He blames John Howard’s tough on drugs approach and the Labor Party’s “lack of courage” to take the issue on as a reason for the decline. “It’s a position and campaign we’re running that comes from a very strong belief in basic human rights of people who use drugs and – not to mention the huge economic costs of what we’re doing – spending a lot of money on something that just doesn’t work.”

“There’s a reality here that people are going to continue to use drugs so our job as policy makers is how do we get policies in place that actually reduce harm rather than increasing it.”

Di Natale’s four-year ride as leader has coincided with huge changes in politics, both at home and abroad. Donald Trump was elected in 2016 and Pauline Hanson made her way back into politics that same year. The toxic confluence of social media and far-right politics has stirred a rise in populism. Australia has seen Clive Palmer appear, disappear, fill a hotel golf course with life-size dinosaur sculptures, and appear again. The Prime Minister has changed from Tony Abbott to Malcolm Turnbull to Scott Morrison. All in four years.

“There’s been a rise in Islamophobia,” he says. “A rise in racism. And that’s in part because we have politicians like Pauline Hanson who give licence to those voices.”

Di Natale accuses the Liberal Party of being run by “climate dividers” who play race politics regardless of who is in charge, and sees the opposition of One Nation in the Senate as a handbrake on climate change action. “I think they will ultimately implode,” he says, “One Nation’s agenda legitimises those hateful voices in the community and that has a real impact on people.”

He does not accept the ‘far left’ accusation often leveraged against him by opponents. Given the success of resolutely left-wing politicians internationally, like Bernie Sanders in the US and Jeremy Corbyn in the UK, it is curious why Di Natale chooses not to identify similarly. “A lot of that stuff is for a specific insider audience,” he says.

As we pull up to the shoreline of a Gold Coast beach to stretch our legs I ask Di Natale about money and about politics. Why does everyone in Canberra get paid so much? Why should anyone young and angry even attempt to get through the political system? He suggests having politicians’ wages tied to average Australian wage increases, but admits people are legitimately pissed off when they see politicians milking the system.

“It’s important to change the structure of the parties,” he says. “I say to young people who are interested in politics: get some skills and training and expertise in another area and bring something to the Parliament. Bring skills and experience that is gonna add something.”

“While the parties keep pre-selecting some of these seat warmers, while they get pre-selected to safe seats, while safe seats exist, people are going to still do it.”  

The Greens are obstructionist by design and still have strong ties to the protest movements of yesterday. Witnessing the feverish support Bob Brown rallied just with his presence along the Stop Adani convoy demonstrates the value in that.

But standing on that beach with the wind going and the weather cutting cold, there is a sense that Di Natale, and his party, are working towards a movement more open to compromise. Di Natale and the rest of the Big Names in the party would love more attention, more recognition, and more power, but they face an increasingly crowded political space and uncomfortable new modes of politics in the digital era.

As a party, they are ignored or attacked by the two major forces, accused of virtue signalling and refusing to compromise, and rife with well-publicised factionalism and internal problems. But what party isn’t? The last six years of Coalition government has brought some of the most chaotic leadership issues seen in Australian history. Meanwhile, Labor Party conferences routinely indicate strong areas of divide within the party when it comes to issues like boat turnbacks and environmental policy. Bill Shorten’s leadership has come at a time of rebuild after Labor also went through multiple leaders and factional disputes. 

The Greens’ end goal of becoming a major influence is not total fantasy, but it faces many of the same challenges it did years ago It goes without saying that the results of this election, and how it manages them, will either drive the party forward or send it back down. The middle is no longer enough.

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