Burning Words

This morning, Deb Foskey, the sole Greens MLA in the ACT Legislative Assembly, went public with the surprise announcement that she would retire from politics at the October election after only one term.

I didn’t see this one coming at all. Foskey was always a bit of a strange choice to be preselected to replace the retiring Kerrie Tucker, the Greens’ long-running, popular and high-profile ACT leader in 2004: Foskey being a bit of a dry academic who was notoriously terrible at public speaking. She’s always worked pretty hard as an MLA, and she’s been involved in several important campaigns over the last four years - one that she cited today was the successful campaign to stop the closure of the Narrabundah Long-Stay Caravan Park, which would have seen a few hundred people already on the absolute margins thrown out of their homes, and gave the government such a political beating that they seem to be refraining from closing any more public housing. She’s also, I think, started to come into her own as a politician in the last few months - I was pretty impressed with her handling both of the Stanhope government’s anti-independent electoral changes and her response to the battered mess of the Civil Partnerships Bill.

At the same time, it does provide a bit of an opportunity for the Greens. It wasn’t for no reason that she always had a bit of an awful public image: she was a rotten speaker, both at rallies and in parliament, even if her heart was usually in the right place, and she never could handle the media particularly well. This did pose a bit of a problem for the Greens this year: with an unpopular government and an unpopular opposition, and coming off a federal election result in which more than one in five Canberrans voted for Kerrie Tucker in her Senate bid, they’ve never had a better chance to get multiple people elected to the Assembly. It’s pretty likely in the circumstances that her seat will stay with the Greens - they’re polling very well, Molonglo is strong Green territory, and the existence of dickhead renegade Liberal independent Richard Mulcahy means that she isn’t sitting in the death seat this time around. So I’ve got mixed feelings about her leaving politics: while she’s been a dedicated and hard-working MLA, I also suspect that the Greens will probably be better off with newer blood.

I’ve also got similar feelings about one of the other retiring MLAs at this election, Labor’s Wayne Berry. Berry’s the longest-serving member of the current parliament, and one of it’s most left-wing MLAs apart from Foskey. He was Opposition Leader for a while in the late 1990s, and in more times has occasionally been a bit of an outspoken voice on the backbenches, perhaps most notably over school closures. I met him a couple of times when I was flirting with joining the Labor Party a few years ago, and was pretty impressed with him personally. Yet in the last couple of years, I haven’t been particularly impressed by his performance in parliament: as Speaker, he’s kept a pretty low profile, and has tended to avoid public comment on a lot of issues: I wasn’t happy that we couldn’t get any comment out of him during the civil unions campaign, his comments in the eventual debate (which were pretty good) notwithstanding. I’ve kind of had the impression that he had vibe of someone who’s had it with politics for a while.

It’ll be interesting to see who replaces Berry, now that Labor only has two recontesting MLAs in Ginninderra. If Labor does manage to hold the seat, it’ll probably mean electing someone to Berry’s right. However, Labor only won three seats for the first time in 2004: before that, it was a Democrat seat, before that it was an independent, before that a second Green, and before that some of the weird minor party people we had in the early days of self-governance. The press really hasn’t said much about it so far, but I think the Greens should be in with a pretty good chance, and there’s also a possibility of an independent with a high enough profile getting up. If either of those happen, I think that - as good a representative as he’s been - that we’ll be better off than we would be with Berry.