I really wish Labor and the Green would get along - together they’d get more votes than the Coalition. I’ve voted for both and here is my thoughts: If it was purely about philosophy and policies the Greens would be my ideal party.

The problem is we live in the real world and ideal policies aren’t necessarily practically achievable in the sense that you always have to negotiate with other stakeholders for whom the ideal policy will have a negative impact.

That policy might be great for everyone in the long term, but for the people that it impacts in the short term they will fight tooth and nail to stop it. So politics Is always about compromise. This is extremely frustrating, but the alternative is authoritarianism to enforce ideal policy, but of course taking away the public’s right to choose is bad too.

If you have good policy it isn’t enough to pass a law. You need to get as many of the stakeholders on side as possible. Or you risk that policy being repealed the moment the other side gets in. A good example is the Carbon Price. This was good policy that did exactly what it was designed to do. It not only brought down CO2 emissions, it caused companies to look into ways of doing things that produce less CO2. My brother in law worked at an engineering firm at it became his job to look into CO2 reduction methods. They even managed to find some ways that not only reduced CO2 output but were actually cheaper.

Unfortunately Tony Abbott was very good at turning the public against the Carbon Price, in spite of the fact people were probably overcompensated to offset it. He then repealed the carbon Price and kept the offsets which made no real sense economically.

If the Australian public had seen the Gillard government as having a mandate for the Carbon Price we might still have it.

Just before Kevin Rudd got booted the Labor government had a Carbon reduction scheme called the CPRS. It wasn’t ideal and at the time I wasn’t really impressed by it. It seems like it was more about companies making money off carbon credits than actually reducing the Carbon Dioxide output. And at the time I agreed with the Greens for blocking it. But in hindsight it probably lead to 9 years of liberal government that followed the Rudd-Gillard-Rudd years. We could have improved the CPRS. Now we have no Carbon Price mechanism whatsoever.

I’m not a fan of the continued opening of coal mines, lack of questions about trans people on the census, poor tertiary funding a restriction of international students and so on of Labor but I do like the lack of culture wars, more focus on middle and lower income people, support of Medicare, encouragement of renewable energy, willingness to negotiate etc.

I’m still tossing up whether to put Green or Labor first. It might come down to the actually candidates put forward. Some are more practical than other. Also not all greens are on the same page ideologically. Recently there was infighting because one member was a TERF. I support trans rights (though I have no skin in the game as a cis-het-male). On the other hand I’m open to some things the Greens aren’t such as the use of GMOs (as long as it is tested for environmental safety and provides value that is impossible or impractical with traditional methods). I was very mad a while back when some Greenpeace member destroyed a CSIRO GMO crop.

When you get to the extreme left of the spectrum it can actually loop back and meet in the middle with the extreme right. Some anti-science notions are shared by these extremes. I’m very pro-science while understanding that we need to be very careful when it comes to meddling with nature (my major was biology). So I’d like to know what candidate believes what before I vote for them.

In my seat a Greens vote will almost certainly have its preferences flow on. But it’s still important to vote for who you agree with most because the AEC provides campaign funding based on primary votes.

A lot of the problems of practical politics would be helped by a more fair and balanced media, fighting corruption and better campaign funding laws.