The Greens should hang tough to prosper at democracy crunch-time

Meanwhile, misleading news reports (and some Drum opinion pieces) relayed inaccurate claims that the BDS policy would have cost local ratepayers millions of dollars. Far less frequently reported was the Council's general manager saying any such estimates are "speculative", and – more importantly – that the Greens repeatedly made clear the BDS process was never intended to be retrospective (therefore already purchased cars, computers etc. would not have to be gotten rid of).

Even more revealing and selective, perhaps, is the endlessly repeated mantra from Rudd on down that local councils have no business entering into 'foreign policy debates'. Yet the now approved-of sanctions campaign against Apartheid South Africa first started at a grassroots and local politics level, the proponents of which were routinely vilified until finally the issue became mainstream. There was also the case in the 1980s and '90s of many Sydney council areas being declared 'nuclear free zones'. In both instances, action at the local level concerning 'international' issues was not only entirely legitimate as the most obvious first port of call for grass-roots democratic expression, but it also clearly 'works'.

Perhaps the most telling and rightfully-obvious point, however, when it comes to the put-down criticism that genuine democracy at the local council level is overridden by the core business of garbage collection, is the fact that Marrickville Council has had sanctions against Burma in place for 13 years yet has received little or no public censure for this. It wasn't until attention was finally turned to Israel that everything changed.

Boldness and survival: the opposite of easy

The NSW Greens and Marrickville Council are due some respect for first having the guts to adopt a targeted policy that at least in Australia (more than in many other countries) was always going to not only lose some votes but inflame even further the daily bashing by sections of the media and the Liberal and Labor parties. It is certainly not easy to be a minor progressive political party entering the main game of Australian politics once the full gamut of opposition forces has been made violently clear.

The kind of argument offered by Faehrmann that the Greens need to change course towards less controversial and 'divisive' policy waters is deeply flawed in my view. In fact, I believe it points to the opposite of what she presumably intends: her own party's destruction. If the Greens head right, they might pick up a few more middle-ground votes but will definitely loose far more of the finite progressive base. On electoral grounds the result would be reduced overall support. But more substantively, when it comes the richness of Australian democracy, for Greens members and voters – the people it is supposed to represent – the party's very existence would become essentially pointless. One of its biggest advantages would be lost. Both friend and foe alike tend to agree that the Greens unambiguously stand for a clear set of convictions or 'values' –whatever you might think of them – in an era where the major parties, particularly Labor, are regarded as mainly offering competing brands of managerialism, with founding ideological raison d'être now at best a dim (and usually disavowed) ghostly presence.

Far from retreating into a more allegedly 'acceptable' policy framework as demanded by an ideologically narrow political and media discourse, the gutsy Greens at the 2011 NSW state election needed to be a bit more bold overall in arguing for one of the party's apparently more contentious positions. Rather than dangerous radicals who need to 'get real' and give in to forces that will never give them the tick no matter how much they offer to compromise, the Greens on this occasion looked more like an idealistic yet serious and pragmatic party who didn't quite follow through enough with the full courage of its notable convictions.