Right in the middle of the town of Cygnet, the mid-week market hums with life, the farmers and old church ladies and hippies have come to town. With the green hills beyond, and the Victorian-era buildings looking down — the old bank now a B&B, the old grocer’s now the ultra-hip Red Velvet Lounge — the place is having its first big days out after COVID.
Farmers, actual farmers, with trays of produce! Feral kids, actual feral kids, without shoes! They’re lolling around a stall that could be called something like “wooden shit”, with bowls and condiment shakers and such. There’s a second-hand book stall run out of a van, a no-fish-farming stall and a sausage sizzle run from a black tent, by the black-T-shirted “Knights of the Pissoir”, denizens of the local smash palace, hog boys all, resolutely against all this hippie shit, which blew into town about a half-century ago.
Middle of it all, Leanne Minshull, a shortish woman fizzing with energy, blondish-greyish mop of hair, and in a light-blue pullover, is trying to get a couple interested in the Local Party and citizen juries.
“The idea is to stop politicians being elected and then just ignoring people. So twice a year, with their constituent funds, a member would have to hold a citizen jury on the issues…”
The couple, a salt-and-pepper-bearded chap and his somewhat younger girlfriend, both with hemp shopping bags in hand, she nestling a couple of tiny cacti from the nursery stall in the crook of her arm, like she might suddenly start breastfeeding them, are nodding along, polite, even interested, but non-committal. They go, with leaflet in hand, the Local Party’s cutesy logo, a red heart amid fat white ’70s lettering looking out from marine blue. Nearby, the party’s stall buzzes with volunteers and candidates, and Minshull has already moved onto the next passerby. “Can I talk to you a bit about reviving real democracy…?”
Should the Local Party have any booth-smashing successes, it’s going to be in a few areas of Hobart and around here, in the towns and hinterland south, where people started coming decades ago, attracted to towns little changed for decades, an exodus that began in force sometime before it started on the mainland.
Quite possibly, if you sat in the Cygnet market long enough, the body of your enemy from the veggie co-op would drift by. But it’s still a toughish sell, in an area that has a degree of loyalty and pride in the Greens with spiritual father Bob Brown living in the hills just behind.
“What many people are feeling is a frustration with the whole party system,” Minshull tells me during a lull, still with leaflets in hand, facing outwards. “That includes the Greens. The prospect is, if you want to make change, you’ve got to join the party, spend 20 years in factions and internal wars and so on. The Local Party is a way of supporting independents who agree on a basic set of issues, to be genuine local members.
How to make change?
Founded 18 months ago by Minshull, a former advisor to Bob Brown, Greenpeace gunslinger, Australia Institute alumnus and currently publican of the Fern Tree tavern, a boho hangout in the hills southwest of Hobart, and Anna Bateman, also ex-Australia Institute and most recently advisor to Jacqui Lambie, the Local Party has attracted a number of fighting independents to sail under its banner.
Minshull’s running for the Senate, Bateman for Franklin and famed theatre-maker and activist Scott Rankin for Braddon. In Tasmania’s wacky upper house — which, like imperial Hungary’s Council of Margraves, is having an election smack in the middle of the federal election, on May 7 — veteran anti-pokies campaigner Pat Caplice is running for Huon, the seat which covers this area. There’s also been a start-up branch in South Australia.
But even on this grey morning there’s no trouble getting interest and engagement here, and there are one or two retired types Minshull has to quietly ease away after a convo about the utter state of the country has gone on a bit. Bateman goes over to try and canvass the Knights of the Pissoir. She may have batted an eyelid or two. Brunette and curvy, she looks like a woman who knows how to talk to bikies.
What’s lacking is sudden, leaping commitment, the conversion moment you get when you’re doing a simple party pitch. That is a by-product of the design feature, to a degree. The Local Party has three core principles: a commitment to addressing climate change through the science, the idea of mandatory citizen juries for elected members, and support for the Uluru Statement from the Heart. Beyond that, an independent standing under the banner would formulate policies responding to local priorities and demands.
“What’s to stop, if this thing takes off, a libertarian group running under the banner and proposing, say, open slather on close-shore cage-salmon farming?” I ask Bateman later. “Well, that comes under the climate change provision, because the entire system on which that’s based is killing a sustainable industry based on local fishing practices…”
There’s a bit more to it than that, but it’s a workable enough answer. It does, however, put a lot of weight on the climate change provision to be a master-policy principle. It draws back the party to what its founders would want it to be — something with a left-progressive position — but by that process rules out a full localism. A full localism might, especially in the state’s north, produce something that progressives would find hair-raising: a combination of radical demands on health and housing, a commitment to climate change and a conservative or even reactionary take on social issues and refugees. What then?
That difficult middle position might be one reason why the conversion rate may be tough going — though the party has gained some enthusiasm from those who are tired of old party games, and the endorsement of now-immovable Clark member Andrew Wilkie.
Catching up to a couple who’ve just had a chatty positive convo with Minshull — he’s a retired software developer in his 30s (“Ha, you prick,” I say, jocularly. “Retired for health reasons,” he adds) — I do a ScoMo and ask about their past voting behaviour. “Oh, Green,” they say, almost in unison. And would you do a 1 Local, 2 Green? “Oh no,” he says, looking a little surprised at the question. “The thing is to develop the Greens everywhere.”
Voices from the hills
Activists can overestimate the degree to which everyone else actually wants to be involved in politics. Politics is about a sense of being fully represented, as much as about participating, and for many, the Greens represent the hard-won achievement of a sustaining party that wholly represents their values, and manifests them, without too much concern about how the vegan sausage is made.
But this is Green central, of course, and the Local Party may be able to take Liberal and Labor votes that would go, elsewhere, to teal independents. They’ve raised a quarter of a million — a goodish sum, for Tasmania — from small donors, unions and community groups. Anything can happen in the Senate sixth spot in UnAustralia, this strange Ruritanian island, radically democratic in spirit and company town all at once. Indeed, it may be that Pat Caplice — also here, quietly chatting to fellow greybeards, listening to “Dirty Old Town” played by the one-man country folk band outside the parish hall — may triumph in the upper house and suddenly rocket the party to contention.
I wrap it up, browse the book van and see — huge-headed, white-bearded and enormous, bearing all before him — First Dog on the Moon, Andrew Marlton, down from his nearby country estate for the morning, a little nervous at being in the big smoke, Trigorin in a faded T-shirt. We bro-hug, two middle-aged men now so full-bellied we can barely reach each other’s shoulders. It’s a two-second sumo match.
“I’m writing a play,” he tells me.
“Plays are tough. You may need a dramaturg.”
“It’s due today.”
“Is that why you’re a little edgy?”
“No, one of the sheep got bit by a snake and drowned in the dam.” He looks upset. It had a name I’ve forgotten. Mr Fuzzypants or something. “I noticed she was acting funny last night.” Extend care to the world, St Francis said, and so he does daily, to our great good fortune.
“You voting in the election?” I ask the second- (third-?) gen hippie kids, all Peruvian-weave Ishka tops and dirty brown feet.
“Ha, there’s an election?” one says. He might have been playing up to me.
“There are two!”
They all laugh at that. It is the funniest thing ever. And suddenly seems it. When the market is over, they will get in their battered van and disappear, yet deeper into the deep hills, beyond all reach.
