Brisbane

With election day for Brisbane City Council less than a week away now, I wanted to reflect on how both the major political parties have – in one forum or another – expended a lot of energy trying to paint me as ‘divisive’ in order to scare people away from voting Greens.

They’ve come after me personally, hoping that this will dampen support for other Greens candidates.

I think it’s important to unpack this attack, because if we take it on board as legitimate and allow it to disproportionately influence our strategic decision-making, it could undermine the effectiveness of future Greens elected representatives in Queensland.

I feel I should start by pointing out that in practice, working with people on the ground, I’m usually pretty damn patient and collaborative. As a councillor in an LNP-dominated council, I HAD to be especially diplomatic and conciliatory to get much done, because I didn’t have the votes on the floor/the structural power to just give orders and insist that they be followed.

I’m a strong believer in mediation and negotiation as opposed to adversarial forms of dispute resolution. I always look for common ground and try to understand where people are coming from and what their underlying motivations are, rather than judging them based on superficialities.

I should also note that despite how personal the LNP mayor’s attacks on me have been this election campaign, I have resisted the very strong temptation to return fire. There’s a lot of mean (and true) stuff I could say about him, but I have deliberately chosen to avoid adversarial ad hominem attacks against my political rivals, even while they spend a lot of their time and energy throwing mud at me.

Working as an elected representative, and now as an unpaid community organiser, I use a wide range of tactics in advocating for change, but of course that’s not necessarily reflected in mainstream media narratives about me.

Apart from spreading straight-up lies about me, the Liberals mostly just point to the fact that I sometimes support protests/direct action as proof that I’m ‘divisive.’

But I’ve also seen Labor campaigners working very hard to spread this narrative in online spaces, and I assume they do the same thing in other campaign contexts. Their evidence base for this is also partly my participation in protest (ironic considering that the Labor party once supported protest movements, but these days spends more effort trying to criminalise and lock up peaceful protesters), but also the claims that I use ‘inflammatory’ or ‘polarising’ rhetoric.

Interestingly, some of my ideas that are allegedly ‘divisive’ – such as calling for caps on rent increases so that landlords can’t price-gouge tenants – are also advocated by other Anglo-Australian Greens spokespeople, but they DON’T seem to get called ‘divisive’ when they say almost exactly the same things that I’ve been saying.

This is partly explained by covert racism. People of colour who challenge the status quo are often seen as making trouble or being unreasonably assertive, in a context where people who fit more neatly within dominant Anglo-Aussie cultural norms/appearances are given more leeway.

(I think this subtle, perhaps subconscious racial element has also been present in some of the coded language that we’ve seen from the Labor campaign against Greens councillor for the Gabba Ward Trina Massey. On her Instagram bio, Labor candidate Rebecca McIntosh describes herself as a ‘disrupter’ yet one of her main slogans in her campaign against Trina is “action not agitation, unity not division.” Make of that what you will...)

There’s been a lot of misreporting of my public statements and actions over the years that feeds into inaccurate narratives about me. But when you really drill down into it, most of the supposedly ‘divisive’ stuff I say usually involves pointing out divisions and systemic injustices that already exist in our world…

I’m not the one who created an economic system where older Australians were encouraged to fund their retirements via investment property rental revenue from younger, poorer tenants – a housing framework that actively divides people into haves and have-nots and ensures that their financial interests are directly opposed (i.e. tenants want rent to be as low as possible while landlords want rental profits to be as high as possible)...

I’m not the one who drew a bunch of arbitrary borders and dividing lines on maps and established international immigration systems that allow wealthier countries to use violence to keep out people who are forced to move due to drought or war, while reaping the benefits of centuries of colonialism and extractive globalised capitalism...

I’m not the one who designed so many buildings to be actively exclusionary of people with impaired mobilities, or who made it illegal to sleep in your car, or who locks most of our city’s public toilets at night so that no-one with a bladder can use public spaces in the evenings for more than a couple hours.

There is a very important difference between BEING divisive, and highlighting/challenging division.

But people and institutions with a strong interest in maintaining the status quo often deliberately conflate one with the other. In fact, often it’s the people who create and establish divisions and power imbalances who are most likely to accuse others of being divisive simply for pointing out the resulting injustices.

As the Greens win more seats at all levels, it will be important that our elected representatives don’t allow the fear of being labelled ‘divisive’ to prevent us from speaking out against injustice and oppression. That would be a pathway towards complicity and tacitly endorsing the status quo. If you hold a position of power and influence, but don’t challenge sexism or racism or ableism or any other form of oppression for fear of being called ‘divisive,’ you’re allowing it to persist and spread.

Having said all that though, I do have to acknowledge that unlike a lot of politicians, I don’t water down my language when discussing important issues. I’m very honest about my worldview. I call things as I see them, and sometimes people find that directness confronting or jarring.

A while back, when I told journalists that I didn’t judge people who are in extreme poverty for shoplifting, and that I could understand why in current economic conditions people might be forced to do that, I knew perfectly well that plenty of conservative commentators and my political opponents would seize upon that statement, take it out of context and use it to attack me.

But I also knew that being frank and direct in my choice of wards would mean that my message reached a lot more people than if I’d just said “people are living below the poverty line and can’t afford groceries.”

Throughout my 7 years as a city councillor, I’ve been very intentional and strategic about using language in a way that defenders of the status quo will find provocative, because I understand how media (both social media and mainstream media) works, and that provoking a bit of outrage is an effective way to highlight issues that would otherwise go ignored, and to increase my political influence in a context where I wielded no structural power.

When you think about it, it’s actually kinda remarkable that a single Greens councillor in a council where 19 out of 26 wards are held by the Liberal National Party has managed to have such a big impact on public discourse about the future of our city, and build the popularity of so many Greens policies and ideas that the major parties end up taking on as their own.

I saw one commentator on Reddit say something along the lines of “The Greens are good but they would win more people over if Jonno wasn’t so provocative,” which I reckon is probably a fairly common sentiment in some circles. The “he’s too divisive” criticism gets a bit of traction with certain demographics, particularly among some middle-class, middle-aged voters who see themselves as progressive but are actively hostile to conversations about systemic change.

But here’s the thing: If, over the past 8 years in Queensland, Greens reps like me didn’t occasionally say or do things that put a few noses out of joint, no-one would give a toss what we thought about anything, and we wouldn’t have been able to recruit more volunteers and swing more votes and translate that into winning more seats.

There’s a certain naive misremembering among segments of Brisbane’s progressive milieu that forgets how politically irrelevant the Greens were in Queensland up until 2015/2016 when we made an intentional strategic pivot that included speaking more directly (and provocatively) about how unjust and unsustainable the system is… I don’t think there’s an alternative timeline where the Greens could have built the amount of community power and political influence we now without ever saying anything that offended a bunch of conservatives.

I’m emphasising all this, because in a week’s time, I’m predicting that we will have won 5, 6 maybe even 7 council wards here in Brisbane. And I’m hoping that our newly-elected Greens representatives will feel confident speaking truth to power, supporting protest actions, and openly highlighting the injustices of the status quo, without worrying that they’ll be called divisive.

In fact, new Greens councillors will HAVE to be willing to say things that might get twisted out of context or offend a few power-holders if they are to do their jobs effectively. Of course they'll be labelled 'extreme' and 'divisive.' That’s what happens when you challenge the status quo.