Peter Garrett says ALP can reverse vote decline by prioritising environment

Extract from The Guardian 

Former environment minister says party needs to make commitment more explicit in order to win over progressive voters, who have drifted to the Greens

Peter Garrett: ‘I believe Labor now has a unique opportunity to cement its position as the true party of protecting our natural environment.’ Photograph: Jeremy Park/AAP

Katharine Murphy Political editor

@murpharoo

Sunday 30 October 2016 13.50 AEDT 

The former environment minister Peter Garrett has declared the Australian Labor party could arrest the decline in its primary vote by “unequivocally” putting the environment at the centre of its policy and political offering.
Garrett issued the challenge to his former parliamentary colleagues over the weekend during a lecture he delivered to the Ararat branch of the ALP.
The lecture is a prelude to a fundraising push Garrett will launch on Monday with the former Western Australia premier and federal minister Carmen Lawrence, and the former trade minister Craig Emerson, to strengthen Labor’s grassroots environmental campaign operation, the Labor Environment Action Network (Lean).
“In the midst of the current craziness of the alt right both here and abroad, I believe Labor now has a unique opportunity to cement its position as the true party of protecting our natural environment as shadow environment minister Mark Butler has put it,” Garrett said in the weekend lecture.
He said Labor had always been the party of environmental action, but the party needs to make its commitment to the environment more explicit in order to win over progressive voters, who have drifted away from Labor to the Greens.
“Today, with Labor again just a heartbeat away from government, I believe federal Labor’s increasingly low primary vote could be arrested if it unequivocally put environment at the centre of its policy and political focus,” Garrett told branch members in Victoria.

Lean is a relatively new grassroots lobby group within Labor. In the lead-up to the last ALP national conference in 2015 the group launched a successful rank and file campaign to persuade Bill Shorten to sign up to a 50% renewable energy target.
Lean works cross-factionally and it followed a strategy of pushing climate resolutions through many local ALP branches before bringing them on for debate on the national conference floor.

The activist group got the numbers to lock the federal leadership in behind an ambitious renewable energy policy by first activating the grassroots membership and then working with the key leftwing union, the CFMEU, which represents workers in the energy sector.
The activist group wants to bolt itself into the institutional architecture of the ALP through the fundraising effort, which is designed to give the group the resources to lobby the party and activate the Labor membership in time for the Turnbull government’s planned review of the Direct Action policy next year.
In an email that will go out to party members on Monday Garrett argues the ALP membership needs to hold the party’s feet to the fire when it comes to environmental action.
“Progress doesn’t just happen. We have to fight for it: in the public, and in the party,” he says.
“It starts from the grassroots. It takes long hours of policy research. Of travelling the country going branch to branch. Of deep collaboration and negotiation with the union movement.”