The world's highest ever vote of 18.2 percent for a Green Party in Saturday's Tasmanian state election holds major implications for Australia's politics — and maybe even for green politicians elsewhere in the region.

Domestically, Australian Greens leader Sen. Bob Brown said, "I think we are seeing the breakdown of the two-party system, with the Greens being recognised by the electorate as giving them an option that the big parties don't.''

Brown believes the Greens' performance is part of a broader international trend, with the New Zealand Greens likely to double their representation in next Saturday's national election there.

Brown is flying to New Zealand this week to address the final public meeting of the New Zealand Greens campaign for the election there.

The Greens are likely to double the number of parliamentary seats they hold to 14. "This will be a morale boost not only for the New Zealand Greens, but there will be a spillover of the 'feelgood' factor into other regions,'' a spokesman for Brown added.

"As the Greens grow and gain more resources in Australia we are going to be a support, resourcing and network hub within the region,'' he said. "It is a part of inspiring and building stronger regional Greens parties in the Asia-Pacific.''

Brown said it was inspiring to see the involvement in the Tasmanian campaign of students, artists and young people who are concerned about both global and local issues of environmental and social justice.

The weekend election saw the incumbent Labor government in Tasmania, headed by Premier Jim Bacon, re-elected after winning 15 seats.

Real opposition

However, the Greens — widely described as the real opposition in the state — now have four seats in the 25-seat House of Assembly. The divided Liberal Party lost one seat to Labor and three to the Greens, leaving it with a rump of only six members.

While Tasmania with a proportional representation electoral system has long been the cradle of green politics in Australia, Brown points to a nationwide trend of increasing green representation.

"This resurgent Greens vote in Tasmania follows the record Greens vote in last year's Western Australia and federal elections,'' he said.

The Greens now hold five seats in the Western Australian parliament, buoyed by local controversy over logging of old growth forests. It comfortably won two seats in the Australian Senate in November last year, in the wake of Howard's hardline stand on refugee policy.

On top of holding seats in New South Wales and the Australian Capital Territory parliaments, the Greens now boast 40 local councillors around the country.

Underlying the surge in the green vote in the Tasmanian election — up from 10 percent in the 1998 election — was a groundswell of opposition to the increasing level of logging of old-growth forests. In the four years to 2000, the logging industry cleared over 60,000 hectares of native forest.

According to the campaign director for The Wilderness Society, Alec Marr, the level of logging has deeply antagonised the Tasmanian community.

"There was already a massive build up of pressure in the community to protect the forests before the election I don't think Bacon can take any comfort from the result at this stage of the game not on this issue,'' he said.

However, with both the major parties divided on their policy to forests, neither of them wanted forests to become an election issue.

Throughout the election campaign, the Tasmanian Community Alliance, a coalition of community groups and individuals, ran television advertisements promoting the protection of the old growth forests.

But as the major parties remained silent as the issue dominated the headlines, the powerful logging industry launched its own advertisements. Gunns Tasmania's largest forestry company, which accounts for 85 percent of the more than 5.5 million tonnes of woodchips exported from the state, lashed back at critics.

'Selfish minority'

The chief executive of Gunns, John Gay, attacked the Greens as a "selfish minority" out to "destroy Tasmanian jobs". Gunns also resorted to advertisements, including one that said 'Protect our jobs within forest industries, vote for majority government', tacitly endorsing the incumbent Labor government.

The controversy over forests grew to the extent that the liberal opposition leader, Bob Cheek, who may lose his own seat, canvassed with his colleagues the possibility of softening their policy on old growth forests.

However, Australian Prime Minister John Howard strongly backed upholding an agreement he negotiated with the State government and the timber industry. "You don't make good forest policy on the run,'' Howard said in Hobart Wednesday.

While the Greens are confident the groundswell against native forests logging will force the government to change its policy, Tasmanian Premier Jim Bacon is not conceding any ground.

"Clearly there is a significant percentage of people in the electorate who are concerned about that (old growth logging). We are going to try and turn the perception around,'' he told a media conference on Sunday.

Marr believes Bacon will be forced to moderate his policies by the ongoing campaign.

"What you are seeing is that - right across the country — politicians are really paying a heavy penalty when they don't do something about the protection of old growth forests,'' he pointed out. — IPS