The expulsion of Greens founder Drew Hutton has exposed deep ideological rifts tearing through the party’s core, writes Dr John Jiggens.
ON 20 JULY, the founder of both the Queensland Greens and the Australian Greens, Drew Hutton, had his prediction come true. His appeal against his expulsion from the party he founded for questioning gender theory was rejected by a State Council meeting with a vote of 75 to 23.
Drew Hutton is highly intelligent and well-respected. What he is alleging about the Greens is extraordinary: that around Australia, trans-zealots have taken over the key committees in the Greens, including, most importantly, the disciplinary committees and weaponised them so that anybody who says something they disagree with, a complaint goes in immediately.
The complaint committees are controlled by trans-activists, as in his case; Hutton alleges that the members of the committee that expelled him were transactivists, part of a Facebook site, which was called Turf TERFs from the Greens. (TERF stands for trans-exclusionary radical feminist; they are critics of gender ideology.)
Hutton said:
They were all activists on this issue, and they came up with the idea that I would be suspended. That turned into a permanent suspension that lasted over two years. I complained about the fact that it had turned into a permanent suspension, so they turned it into an expulsion. It is not a fair process.
I walked into that room the other day and the State Council meeting there wasn't a friendly face in the room. The whole room was full, with a with a few minor exceptions, with people who were active on this issue. They had their minds made up before.
The ramifications of expelling a former leader and founder were, not surprisingly, an enormous public relations disaster.
While Greens Leader Larissa Waters declared the Greens was a safe party for trans people, the counter-fact gleefully highlighted by the Murdoch media was that the Greens was not a safe party for feminists. They ran a series of articles on the expulsion of prominent feminists from the party, proving Hutton’s claim that it was women who were feminists who had been targeted for expulsion in the Greens.
Anna Kerr, a human rights lawyer who was the principal solicitor of Sydney’s Feminist Legal Clinic, was one feminist accused of transphobia and expelled. Among her “crimes” was to criticise Greens MP Abigail Boyd, who wanted to replace the word “woman” with “pregnant person”, in legislation before the NSW Parliament.
Kerr told The Australian that being expelled from the party even topped the disconcerting experience of having a transgender man appointed the co-convenor of the Women’s Working Group of the NSW Greens, which caused most of the female members to quit.
Said Kerr:
“It was an intimidating environment, the pushback was nothing short of bullying.”
Such was the opinion of a human rights lawyer on how badly the NSW Greens mishandled the gender debate.
The interview with Larissa Waters about Hutton’s expulsion on ABC's 7:30 was a train wreck. For several minutes, host Sarah Ferguson tried unsuccessfully to get an answer for why Drew Hutton was expelled from the Greens as Waters dodged and ducked.
Since Hutton’s alleged crime was not taking down a few Facebook posts, his expulsion as a life member and founder seemed excessively punitive, but Senator Waters argued that Hutton was expelled according to the party's rules and procedures. This was Greens democracy working.
In an editorial, The Sydney Morning Herald described Senator Waters’ performance in this interview as ludicrous. The ludicrous exists at the outer fringes of the ridiculous, at a level of ridiculousness that often provokes gales of scornful laughter.
Senator Waters' evasiveness about the reason for Drew Hutton’s expulsion certainly sounded ridiculous. She is the leader of the Australian Greens, she employs several staff and her office is the centre for all the Greens in Brisbane. She is at the centre of the Greens' web. How can she not know why Drew Hutton was expelled?
For me, the moment when Senator Waters' performance went beyond the ridiculous and became truly ludicrous came when Sarah Ferguson asked her, “Will you speak to Drew Hutton about what's happened?”
Senator Waters declined:
“I think I'll send a message to him, perhaps through this programme, that we really respect the contribution that he's made to environmental advocacy in the past.”
That she wasn’t going to ring Drew Hutton and thank him for his decades of input into the Greens but would instead send him a message via 7:30 was both bizarre and revealing. Why won’t she ring Drew Hutton? They might even be able to work out a compromise if they talk.
Drew Hutton says he did ring Senator Waters' office to ask her to intervene in his expulsion process, but she never responded to his calls. The Senator’s comment declining to ring Hutton seems to reinforce his claim that she is deliberately avoiding speaking to him.
Senator Waters has refused my request for an interview.
However, there is one question I will throw out into the aether: Senator Waters, you are the leader of the Australian Greens. Why are you refusing to speak to Drew Hutton?
Dr John Jiggens is a writer and journalist currently working in the community newsroom at Bay-FM in Byron Bay.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Australia License
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