The veteran political scientist Malcolm Mackerras, now based in the Public Policy Institute of the Australian Catholic University, recently accused the Greens of what he called moral vanity, predicting it would cause the demise of the party. This is quite different to the claim that the weakness of the Greens is their alleged extremism, an idea Mackerras rejects.
He doesn't define moral vanity, but I take it to mean self-righteousness leading to unwillingness to compromise. This opens up the important question of the balance between steadfastness and flexibility in political life.
If the Greens have peaked because of inflexibility, it makes a contrast with the demise of their predecessor minor party, the Australian Democrats, who did a deal with the Howard Government after the 1998 federal election over the introduction of the GST. They could have refused to support it like Independent Brian Harradine. Led by Meg Lees they tried to improve the tax reform to make it fairer and more environmentally friendly.
There was more to it than that, but it was the beginning of the end. The party's supporters were outraged and the general public believed that instead of keeping the bastards honest they had become one.
The allegation of moral vanity against the Greens relates to the party's general approach to parliamentary politics. A longstanding criticism, recently revived following the failure of federal Parliament to resolve the asylum seeker processing issue, has been that the Greens are inflexible and unwilling to compromise.
Often the contrast has been made with the Democrats, who, it was often said, were willing to negotiate with government to improve policy outcomes. But look where that got the Democrats in the end.
Mackerras' frustration with the Greens has boiled over because they failed to support the Oakeshott-Labor asylum seeker compromise bill. He also accuses the Coalition parties of hypocrisy on that issue. Much earlier the Greens crucially failed to support the final global warming compromise offered by the Rudd government.
But on other matters the federal Greens under Bob Brown have compromised, including on the Gillard mining tax which it thought was pitched far too low.
The question should be whether the Greens have compromised or not at the right moments and on the