Many political pundits have focused on the surprisingly high first preference vote for One Nation in the recent South Australian elections (March 2026).
Few have highlighted that in the middle of a climate emergency, the Greens Party achieved a share of the first preference vote of only around 10% – half that of the right-wing protest party, One Nation.
To understand this epic failure, we need to analyse something ostensibly unrelated:
Why does the Mormon Church send young adherents on a Door-knocking mission?
One might assume that the purpose of The Mission is to win converts – to spread the word of the Mormon Church.
That is not it.
The purpose of The Mission is to optimise something else entirely: internal cohesion and in-group identify.
Participation is highly visible. The work is repetitive, socially awkward, and often yields little success in terms of gaining converts. But properly understood, each door slammed in the face of a missionary is not a point of failure.
It is the point.
The Mission forces young adherents to go out into the world through a ritualized framework that ensures they will encounter resistance – both personal and philosophical. The purpose is to ensure that they experience first-hand the confirmation of what they have been taught to fear – the world outside the church is hostile and rude. The only safe harbour is the church community.
From the perspective of gaining followers, the practice of sending Missionaries appears inefficient or poorly designed. One could imagine more effective ways to spread the faith. But outreach is not the true function. The real purpose is identity formation.
The mission selects for commitment, strengthen bonds among participants, and generates loyalty precisely because it is unsuccessful in conventional terms. Members who endure the process emerge more invested, more convinced of the group’s moral clarity, and more closely tied to one another. The organisation becomes more cohesive. Not expansive, but that was never the point.
This dynamic is well understood in sociology and behavioural economics. Costly signalling is not about changing the world; it is about demonstrating who belongs.
From Cults to Green Politics
The same logic appears, perhaps counter‑intuitively, in contemporary environmental politics. The Greens ostensibly stand for policy with a strong moral foundation, but they gravitate toward policies and practices that prioritise visible participation rather than actual achievement of environmental outcomes.
Just like a religious cult imposing high-cost rituals on its members to build in-group vs out-group identity, the Greens chose a policy mix that is about promoting behaviours as markers of belonging. Compliance is public, ritualised, and repeatable. The adherents promote internal signals of commitment and belonging whilst outsiders see their behaviour as symbolic, ritualistic, and disconnected from achievement of any meaning environmental benefits.
Success is not measured primarily by outcomes. It is measured by visibility, purity, and the density of shared symbols. Like the Mormon Church, the movement is excellent at producing insiders, but not effective at recruiting broad political support, or achieving policy outcomes.
A Case Study in Symbolic Environmental Policy
In any objective sense, the case is clear for urgent environmental policy action, yet the Green’s political support seems stalled at around 10%, even in a ‘left-wing’ State like South Australia.
To understand this, let’s take one highly visible Greens policy as an example:
Banning single use plastic bags
This policy is highly visible, as it targets consumer‑facing behaviour: the use of single-use lightweight shopping bags at retail outlets. The policy is simple, legible, and immediately experienced by the public. It creates a small but recurring inconvenience that signals participation every time someone shops.
Yet the selectivity is striking. While consumers are required to alter behaviour at the checkout, nearly everything they purchase – from food to household goods – remains packaged in single‑use materials produced upstream, outside the consumer’s control.
From a systems perspective, this produces an insignificant intervention with minimal impact on use of plastics in the economy.
From a signalling perspective, where the goal is promoting belonging, it is ideal.
The policy:
- Is easy to enforce and explain
- Shifts responsibility from producers to individuals
- Creates frequent opportunities for visible compliance
- Delivers negligible environmental benefits relative to attention received
This is not an accident. Policies of this type are chosen precisely because they are felt more than they are effective. They make participation tangible. They turn abstract concern into daily ritual, and true commitment requires and signals belief.
The fact that the policy is ineffective at achieving the ostensible goal is actually what makes it effective at signalling and building group identity.
A policy that actually shifts behaviour of manufacturers without inconveniencing the public would be ineffective for building in-group identity, and ineffective at promoting the ties that bind ‘Green supporters’ together.
Policy that scales easily and achieves environmental goals would be counterproductive for the goal of creating an in-group – an ‘us vs them’ identity.
How Signalling Policies Shape Public Perception
The deeper problem is not the limited effectiveness of any single policy. It is the cumulative effect these policies have on how environmental action itself is understood.
Over time, a pattern emerges. For most people, “environmental action” comes to mean personal inconvenience imposed from above, often for reasons that seem disconnected from the scale of the problem, and from meaningful change.
Environmental damage remains largely unaffected, but the individual is asked to adapt their behaviour.
This creates a powerful association:
Environmental progress equals lifestyle restriction.
A minority of people find this framing appealing. For them, the inconvenience is not a cost but a feature – a way of expressing values and signalling belonging. But for the majority, it is alienating. They are not opposed to environmental goals per se; they are opposed to being conscripted into what feels like a symbolic exercise.
As a result, support stabilises at a predictable minority level – around 10%.
The Greens party is ideologically cohesive, morally confident, and permanently stuck; and lacking the political support to enact meaningful environmental policy.
Two Competing Policy Archetypes
This tension can be understood as a choice between two fundamentally different approaches to environmental action.
The first is behaviour‑centric compliance.
It focuses on visible individual sacrifices, requires frequent participation, and produces moral clarity. Its objective effects are negligible, and its appeal is strongest among those already aligned.
Policies aimed at encouraging consumers to minimise their use of electricity are a prime example. Don’t use the dishwasher or the clothes dryer. This has minimal potential impact, but maximum inconvenience. It is designed to promote a feeling of belonging for an in-group, but is counterproductive if the goal is reducing carbon emissions because it achieves little and discourages widespread voter support.
The second is system‑centric transformation.
It targets infrastructure, markets, and production systems. It operates largely out of sight. It does not require continuous behavioural performance from the public. When it works, daily life becomes easier, cleaner, and more reliable without demanding constant attention.
Government action to ensure that all power is generated through renewable energy sources would be the equivalent. This requires no action from individual members of the public, has maximum impact, is not inconvenient or expensive.
As a result, it does not provide an opportunity for reinforcing belonging to an exclusive, ‘morally superior’ in-group. This type of policy would achieve tangible environmental outcomes far more effectively than consumer behaviour-change, but does not reinforce ‘in-group’ signalling.
The paradox is that the second approach is vastly more scalable and effective at reducing carbon emissions, but far less emotionally satisfying for identity‑based adherents.
Why System‑Level Policies Threaten Identity‑Based Coalitions
System‑level solutions succeed quietly.
Once implemented, they fade into the background of ordinary life. There is no ritual of compliance, no visible badge of virtue, no recurring opportunity to distinguish insiders from outsiders. For movements that derive cohesion from shared sacrifice, this is destabilising.
If progress can occur without visible struggle, struggle loses its symbolic value. If outcomes can be achieved without lifestyle performance, lifestyle performance ceases to confer status.
In this way, system‑level policies threaten not just particular tactics, but the internal economy of recognition and belonging that sustains high‑commitment protest movements such as The Greens.
The most effective solutions are often the least rewarding to advocate for – which creates a perverse incentive to favour policies that feel like action over those that actually scale.
Trapped by Its Own Incentives
None of this implies insincerity. The people drawn to signalling‑heavy approaches are often deeply committed and morally serious. But commitment does not immunise a movement against incentive traps. Sincerity does not confer effectiveness.
When urgency is high, the temptation to demonstrate seriousness through sacrifice is strong.
Yet the result is a self‑reinforcing loop: symbolic policies narrow appeal in the broader electorate, narrow appeal rewards purity, and purity further entrenches symbolic policy choices.
The outcome is a politics of permanent minority protest – highly visible, internally coherent, and structurally incapable of expanding beyond a committed small in-group. Until environmental action is decoupled from performative inconvenience and re‑anchored in systemic competence, its support will remain capped not by public apathy, but by the movement’s own policy choices.