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By Jan Bowman<\/a>\u00a0 @GriffithElects<\/a><\/p>\n 3 December 2013<\/p>\n Less than a month after the September Federal election, Geoff Ebbs, former Greens Candidate for Griffith, posted a Facebook message which said: \u201cI’m about to go into financial recovery mode, post-election, and take a job selling photocopiers unless anyone has a better way to earn some decent dollars for twelve months.”<\/p>\n This was a prompt for me to approach Ebbs and other candidates in Griffith for their \u2018life after the election\u2019 stories.<\/p>\n Ebbs was the only candidate who agreed to an interview. Apart from admitting to degrees of exhaustion, most of the other candidates I approached did not want to talk in detail about the campaign experience, and were undecided about whether they would stand again in any by-election. Because of this I did not use the Ebbs interview and abandoned the story idea.<\/p>\n However, on Friday, November 29, Geoff Ebbs announced to his supporters that he would not be contesting the Griffith by-election for the Greens. This came as a surprise for many, myself included. Geoff had indicated in our October interview that he wanted to stand again. I returned to this earlier interview material for clues.<\/p>\n In 2013 the Greens polled 10.18 percent of the vote in Griffith, a 5.21 percent swing against it on 2010 results. The negative swing was not unique to Griffith. Nationally there was a swing against the Greens <\/b>of 3.11 percent, in QLD as high as 4.7 percent.<\/p>\n I asked Ebbs what is was like, as a minor party candidate, not to have won, and in his case, not to have achieved an increase for the Greens.<\/p>\n \u201cPeople invest trust in you; you promise to represent them, expectations are built up, and it is a huge disappointment when you don\u2019t succeed,\u201d he said, then likened the experience to the post-adrenaline slump at the end of the run of a stage play.<\/p>\n \u201cI was walking with one of my daughters after the election and came around a corner and saw a poster of myself, it was like a jolt to the back of the brain.\u201d<\/p>\n Why did he put himself through it, when he knew he would not win the seat?<\/p>\n “You decide to run because you believe in the cause, but the only way to build the energy to actually campaign is to willingly delude yourself. It’s a form of \u2018candidate’s disease\u2019,” he said. “To inspire your followers, you have to believe you will win.\u201d<\/p>\n Ebbs said the protest vote against the two old parties in September was the vote that many Greens had been waiting decades for, but it went to the minor conservative parties, and added this has been a huge topic of discussion within the party.<\/p>\n He believed the analysis falls into three camps: those who think the Greens were too conservative; those who think it was too extreme and \u201cdidn\u2019t try hard enough to become a normal political party\u201d; and those who think it was just a \u201cbloody minded rabble\u201d.<\/p>\n Also, criticisms of Christine Milne had been the same as criticisms of the party.<\/p>\n \u201cShe is either too extreme or not extreme enough. Some people just don\u2019t like a female leader,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n \u201cIf you are engaged with the electorate, you will know exactly where you stand, and the electorate will know exactly where you stand as a party, and I don\u2019t think that clarity exists. It\u2019s not any individual\u2019s fault \u2026 but it\u2019s about the whole movement. It\u2019s about the Greens as a party, it\u2019s about the Left, it\u2019s about the environmental movement.<\/p>\n \u201cBoth major parties put in a huge effort to isolate and run down the Greens. We expected that: first they ignore you, then they attack you, then they get angry with you, then you win. Well we are well into the stage of making them angry.”<\/p>\n Asked if he would stand again, Ebbs said: \u201cShould KRudd resign and there is a by-election, I would certainly stand again.”<\/p>\n Ebbs said there had been a personal Rudd factor in this electorate. \u201cIt didn\u2019t swing to the conservatives as much as the rest of the nation, but the results of a by-election will depend on whether Bill (Glasson) decides to run. If there are two new candidates, probably the ALP would prevail.\u201d<\/p>\n Ebbs gave up work during the election. \u201cYou can approach campaigning with whatever level of intensity you like, but there is always financial drain. The Greens is not a wealthy party. Palmer paid his candidates a wage.\u201d<\/p>\n He is now working selling photocopiers, and, at only 55, considers he is over the hill as far as employment goes.<\/p>\n His energies are now on building the Greens into a broader movement, and said: \u201cWe need to be in more or less continuous campaign mode\u201d.<\/p>\n \u201cWhat we need to do now is articulate what a Green future will look like. For the mythical \u2018ordinary voter\u2019, a lot of whom, if they were disappointed and voted for Palmer in this election, did so because they didn\u2019t have that clear vision of a Green future.<\/p>\n \u201cIf you look at a group like the Stable Population Party, which is, on the whole, ex-Greens, they are disappointed that the Greens didn\u2019t articulate a population policy. But population policies are a political nightmare and it\u2019s very difficult for a party the size of the Greens (with the broad range of elements that make it up), to reach an agreeable population policy \u2026 so you end up with a single issue party that stands outside the Greens.<\/p>\n \u201cTo succeed we have to build a broad enough church that you can include all of those views, you can\u2019t keep splintering off the core believers because you can\u2019t address their most passionate cause.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s a mistake of the Left to assume that, \u2018oh well our turn will come\u2019. There is no reason for that to be the case. The whole of society could keep moving to the Right and this could be the distant dream of somebody\u2019s grandfather. You only have to look to the USA to see how effectively the Left can be crushed.\u201d<\/p>\n Ebbs added that as a society we face an energy descent problem.<\/p>\n \u201cLast century we consumed more energy than is ever going to be available to society in the future, so life is going to get harder. As a party that recognises that as the fundamental fact driving every economic decision and every policy setting, essentially what you are trying to sell to the electorate is like an austerity measure. For our long term good, us as a society and a species, we need to calm down and stop consuming so much, and slow down our breeding program. It\u2019s not a very palatable story, so we tend to avoid it.\u201d<\/p>\n Grassroots campaigning is definitely the way of the future, Ebbs said.<\/p>\n \u201cThe internet has unleashed an understanding of how powerful distributed ideas are. The notion of open sourced software has led to open content programs, and the collapse of the exclusive nature of publishing companies both in print and film, has meant that new models are emerging for creative people to connect with their audiences, and the same thing is happening politically.\u201d<\/p>\n Towards the end of the interview Ebbs told me he had put himself forward as a candidate for convener of the Greens in Queensland. The two candidates were to be Ebbs and the incumbent Andrew Bartlett.<\/p>\n Ebbs said his \u2018elevator pitch\u2019 to the membership would be that, \u201cas a society we are at the crossroads, we either maintain the status quo and hit the wall very hard, or we manage society into a form that is sustainable in the full sense of the word.\u201d<\/p>\n Ebbs did not offer any direct criticism of Andrew Bartlett, but said he considered that he (Ebbs) would be better at getting the Greens story across.<\/p>\n As it turned out, Bartlett won the ballot held on October 26, and retained his role as convener. Ebbs was appointed to the state management committee.<\/p>\n Ebbs\u2019 recent decision not to contest the preselection as the Greens candidate for the by-election indicates a degree of disharmony within the Greens that Ebbs only alluded to when he spoke with me.<\/p>\n I understand that Andrew Bartlett will be the only Greens candidate for preselection. He advised me that he is not in a position to make any comment until after party endorsement of the candidate on Thursday, December 5, but he is happy to talk after that.<\/p>\n Now that Clive Palmer has announced that his party will not stand a candidate, the preselection processes for this by-election for both the ALP and the Greens may well prove to be as interesting as the election itself.<\/p>\n In the meantime, Bill Glasson has already hit the campaign trail and was seen out and about with the Prime Minister on the weekend.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Read more Griffith Seat Reports<\/a><\/p>\n![\"Ebbs\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/nofibs.com.au\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/12\/Ebbs-e1386023768661.jpg?resize=334%2C468\")
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