Hearts & Minds: It's not easy being Green (except in Fremantle)

Did you hear the one about the Socialist, the Green, the community independent and the Labor member who walked into a bowling club?

It’s a great setup but, unfortunately, there’s no punchline. That’s because no actual punches were thrown, nobody yelled or screamed, tossed hotdogs or flung beers. It was all kisses, hugs and high fives.

It was Friday night at the North Fremantle Bowlo and four out of the five contenders for the Federal seat of Fremantle rolled up for a meet and greet in the plushest corner of the mind-bogglingly diverse electorate (a candidate could be door-knocking riverside mansions in the morning and in the afternoon be shaking hands with voters at Cockburn Shopping Centre).

Australian Citizens Party’s candidate John Bird stayed away from the sunset sausage sizzle (or was home working on his poetry) and the Liberals have yet to push forward a candidate for the election year ritual slaughter.

However, even a quartet who will be trading darts from now until election day on May 3 were very comfortable in each other’s company because they’re all grazing in the same green paddock, which is the only way you will get elected in one of the most progressive electorates in Australia.

The Socialist Alliance’s Josh Last, the Greens’ Amy Warne, Labor’s Josh Wilson and community independent Kate Hulett are divided on many major issues — I can’t wait to see arch rivals Wilson and Hulett face off at the upcoming Notre Dame candidates debate over the issue of groupthink and voting according to your conscience — but in general they’re all draped in robes of various shades of green (Wilson is closer to this group on AUKUS than he is to his party).

“Fremantle is different,” Greens MLA and former Freo mayor Brad Pettit told me in between sharing a beer and a joke with his one-time deputy Wilson. “When Fremantle voted to change the date of its Australia Day celebrations nobody objected. The pushback came from everywhere else, especially Queensland.”

That pushback against Freo and its green-tinted politics seems to be getting more intense, if the media (mainstream and social) is any guide. Check out the opinion pages in The West Australian or look over the comments in their Facebook pages and you’ll be stunned by the vitriol of readers who believe the Greens or their independent allies such as Hulett and Kate Chaney are out to destroy their comfortable lifestyles (Ben Harvey’s recent attack on the Curtin teal was breathtaking in its stridency and irritating in its lack of logic).

Of course, Friday’s face-to-face took place a couple of kilometres from the Fremantle CBD, ground zero for the Hulett campaign that went within a whisker of turfing out the very popular Labor sitting member Simone McGurk, so the drinking and dialoguing was not so surprising.

But how will the climate change message play in the outer reaches of the Fremantle electorate, where many voters are umbilically tied to the resources industry and more concerned with the cost of living than the cost of fossil fuels to the environment?

Warne, who is running for the first time for the Greens, does not believe there is the great divide between electors who live within strolling distance from the Cappuccino Strip and those who live in the working-class suburbs on the outer rim of the electorate.

“A lot of people can’t afford to live in Fremantle but still identify with the city and the values associated with it,” Warne tells me a couple of days later after she finished work at the North Fremantle Social Farm, which she manages while not knocking on doors and handing out flyers.

“People who live in places like Bibra Lake and Spearwood and Yangebup and Auburn Grove still love to be associated with the port city and align themselves with progressive ideas this place embodies. Would anyone really call Cockburn Central their spiritual home?” argues Warne.

In other words, Warne is convinced that the message that resonates in the heartland will be just as well-received in the suburbs to the east and south of the Fremantle CBD, despite being generally blue collar and clinging to the bread-and-butter Labor issues, such as cost of living crisis, housing affordability, protecting Medicare and access to childcare.

“Greens policies are being embraced outside of the Fremantle CBD because they are good policies,” says Warne, reminding me of the significant gains made by her party during the recent State election.

“Who doesn’t want to live on a healthy planet with a safe climate future? And everyone wants to be able to send their kids to a good school and to be able to get their teeth fixed and be able to buy groceries at a reasonable price,” argues Warne, who lives in one of those suburbs away from the centre, Hamilton Hill, and calls herself “a suburban mum.”

The challenge for the Greens is not the message, continues Warne, but the ability to get that message out.

“We are a grassroots organisation that doesn’t take money from big business. And we don’t have the money being injected by Climate 200 into the independent campaigns. And, as you say, the mainstream media is hostile towards us because of vested interests. So we have to be innovative and work with what we have, which is a lot of amazing people.”

Warne traces her passion for social justice to the time she spent a year on a student exchange with a Jewish family in a small town in Ohio where her peers were deprived of the things that were free in Australia, such as a university education and healthcare.

“I was shocked because I had never seen homelessness before. But we are heading in that same direction. It has been a death by a thousand cuts. It is a human right to have a house and decent healthcare,” says Warne.

That American experience has made Warne hyper-aware of the Trump-driven turbulence that is threatening not only the United States but the entire world.

“If there’s a silver lining to the international hellscape that is unfolding is that Australians are now pushing back against Dutton, who is styling himself on Trump. Australians will reject that,” says Warne.

While Warne spends most of her time tending a community vegetable patch the whole operation is so social it has prepared her for the demands of campaigning.

“Gardens are definitely a refuge for me. But actually, the Social Farm is very much a social farm. It’s not just about the veggies. It’s about the people who I deal with every day. It has prepared me for all the events and forums and commitments of running as a Green. It’s a little more than I expected. It’s also a more high-profile election because Kate [Hulett] is running after her success in the State elections. It has made it interesting.”

* By Mark Naglazas