Leader-centrism has contained but not ameliorated deep-seated divisions in the Greens. The disputes are between the left and progressive liberals over anti-capitalism, post-materialism, or reform; the party as one of protest or of policy; a change agent provoking parties of government to improve or itself a contender for government – and how ecological responsibility figures in all of this. That battles over fundamental purpose have never been resolved begs a bigger question: what has been gained and what has been lost by translating an effective protest organisation and a burgeoning social movement into a conventional political party?

Manning has given us the means to address this question in a readable narrative of extraordinary detail. Sympathetic to the Greens’ cause and convinced of its parliamentary mission, he makes a persuasive case for the party’s achievements. Yet he is not blind to its failure to achieve the cleaner politics it preaches, citing hit-and-miss preselection procedures, dispute resolution fiascos, toxic feuds, and resistance to grass-roots engagement in referenda or the selection of the party leader. His tacit agenda is to teach us, and to remind the party, of what is to be valued in, and what needs to be improved by, the Greens.

Most of this – the bulk of the book – is achieved through a lengthy and fair-minded history: among the best we have of a political party. Antecedents – parliamentary engagement alongside public protest – are traced back to the early 1970s and 1980s. Some threads go back to ‘Green bans’ and to precursor ‘third force’ parties – the Democrats and the Australia Party – but more fundamental were activist groups such as the United Tasmania Group, the Nuclear Disarmament Party (in Western Australia) and its landmark campaigns to save Lake Pedder and the Franklin River, and against logging, pulp mills, and nuclear weapons. Here is where early stars – Bob Brown, Jo Vallentine, Christine Milne – gained public profile and eventually electoral success in state and federal parliaments. At the same time, the Greens incursion into local government began.

Senator Bob Brown and Richard Di Natale in Melbourne, Australia during the 2010 Australian Federal election campaign (photograph by Peter Campbell/Wikimedia Commons)

In 1992, the party proper was inaugurated. By now Saint Bob was uncontested as the national face of the Greens. He would remain its personification until his retirement in 2012. In the half century since the 1970s, as Manning details, the Greens have had a significant presence in local, state, and federal government, influenced a raft of policy changes, stopped some of the more egregious instances of environmental destruction, and vigorously advanced the progressive cause in debates on wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, marriage equality, banking chicanery, and asylum seekers, among others. Above all, the party has survived longer than any of its precursor third-force parties.

Yet it was survival against the odds – against the Coalition–Labor ‘cartel’, the well-documented ‘Greenhouse mafia’, the hyper-partisan warfare of the Murdoch media, and not least its own unwieldy structure of loosely unified and disputatious state parties, and the increasingly fractious factions within them. In managing this, Brown and subsequent leaders circumvented the party’s professed commitment to bottom-up, grass-roots engagement by secretive confrontation with troublesome dissidents, closed-door decision-making, and deals that were unveiled as a fait accompli (especially when it came to leadership succession).

Manning shows us all of this, but then, in the most thought-provoking section of the book, he turns from history to what needs to be done now. In four final chapters, he addresses the future, recapitulating what matters, what has gone right and wrong, and how to realise the four pillars of the party’s platform commitment to confronting the climate emergency, tackling inequality, pursuing peace, and cleaning up democracy. It is a compelling demonstration of how sensible policy elaboration might ripple out from a party with protest in its genes and climate sensibility at its core.

I would like to believe it, but here is the rub. Reputable research, by the CSIRO among others, has shown for some years that the climate crisis is a serious concern for a majority of voters. Between sixty and seventy per cent of voters consistently acknowledge their anxiety over climate change, but the Greens vote remains stubbornly stuck around ten per cent. The punters are worried, but the Greens are not widely seen as the solution. Political parties, including the Greens, have failed voters on this front. The Coalition record is the most egregious, but Labor, too, has failed to carry through, and the Greens have had a part in it.

The Greens cavilling over the Rudd government’s admittedly compromised Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme sank it and contributed to the downfall of Kevin Rudd. Its subsequent support for Julia Gillard’s Clean Energy Future package was too late: there was no time for this ‘better’ scheme to bed down and win community support and acceptance against the rampant opposition of Tony Abbott and the Coalition. Manning makes the best of this, accepting the Greens’ arguments that the CPRS was too dreadful to contemplate. Yet rereading the late Philip Chubb’s critical case study of climate policy under Labor (Power Failure, 2014) and his analysis there of why the CEF was better than the CPRS, though the Green’s failure to support the former was still a catastrophic own goal, it is hard to be convinced.

It is here that what has been lost by the Greens’ entry into parliamentary politics and policy negotiation becomes pertinent. Allowing climate change to compete in the policy domain with every other problem leaves voters, no matter how concerned, open to arguments that it needs to be ‘balanced’ against other threats, to security and viable economies, for example. And this in the face of economists and the security services warning that economies and security will collapse if global heating remains unchecked.

One need not agree entirely with Naomi Klein’s defenestration of capitalism to accept her proposition that climate heating ‘changes everything’ (This Changes Everything, 2014). In short, climate change is not merely one policy problem among many, it governs everything else. Manning makes a clear case for how the ecological pillar can inform other elements of Greens policy determination. But is the problem that the parliamentarist route has eroded the Greens social movement imperative: to make clear that the challenge is universal and paramount?

This is a fine book, but it does not go far enough. Read it and see if you agree.