In the Victorian state elections of December 1908, the Victorian Socialist Party (VSP) – then the largest radical party in Australia – threw down the electoral gauntlet to the Australian Labor Party by running candidates in two inner-city Melbourne seats.

Celebrating its twenty-fifth anniversary, the Greens seem a confident and coherent political alternative. This is certainly the message that the party leadership is sending. Speaking at the recent national conference, leader Senator Richard di Natale outlined an ambitious plan to capture twenty-five House of Representatives seats over the next twenty-five years, transforming the party into the third-force of Australian politics.

A vote in favour would endorse the government’s attempt to conscript Australian men to fight on the battlefields of Europe; a vote against would repudiate the war plans. The fact that the vote took place at all was of great significance: nowhere else was such a crucial measure determined by an act of mass democracy. More extraordinary still, Australians voted no.

This is what the dispute between Brown and Rhiannon is about: should the party moderate and modernise to be the most effective progressive electoral force, or should it retain the characteristics of an activist party that unites parliamentary action with protest politics on the streets? In other words, what kind of party are the Greens, and what is their ultimate purpose?

The blunt reality is this: we have a generation, or more precisely, several generations, who can only imagine life getting more difficult. Job security is lower, competition for employment is greater, education is getting ever more expensive.

Solidarity, that most fundamental principle of progressive movements, seems in short supply these days. Even as the aftershocks of the economic crisis – or perhaps the signs of the earthquake to come – reverberate, it is the exploitation of division that defines political discourses across the globe.

Since Federal Labor’s crushing defeat on election night 2013, one lesson seems to have been learned from the experience of the Rudd/Gillard/Rudd governments – party disunity disrupted Labor’s ability to govern.