Australian Politics

It’s a shame that Adam Bandt looks likely to cling to his seat after a 3%+ swing against the Greens leader in Melbourne. His removal would — as with the ousting of Peter Dutton — solve a major problem for his party: what to do with a discredited leader.

After successive elections since 2010 expanded the Greens’ Senate representation and then began making serious inroads into Labor’s urban heartland in the lower house, 2025 marks the first major reverse for the Greens in a political generation, with two seats, and possibly all four, lost in the House of Representatives.

Greens supporters are clinging on to the party’s Senate representation and a relatively stable primary vote (down just 0.39% across the country) as evidence that it’s only a flesh wound. Failed MPs like Max Chandler-Mather are bravely declaring that losing his seat is just another step in the long march to victory.

In fact, this is only the latest setback under Bandt’s leadership. He rapidly lost Victorian Senator Lydia Thorpe from his ranks. The Greens copped a flogging in Brisbane in the Queensland state election last year after talking up their chances of seizing Labor seats (and they ended up going backwards by 1.39% on the weekend). The Queensland election forced Bandt to end the 2024 parliamentary year with a humiliating reversal of his long-term obstructionism in the Senate, allowing Labor to claim total victory for its legislative agenda.

Bandt went into the federal election proclaiming that the Greens were the party of renters and that his aim was to stop Peter Dutton. But the targeting of Dutton was cosplay — the Greens’ focus was, as always, taking seats off Labor, which is exactly what the party is best placed to achieve. Instead, Labor took seats off him, despite a housing crisis that should have made the Greens’ anti-landlord, anti-investor pro-renter pitch unusually appealing.

As leader of the Greens, Bandt — a former industrial relations lawyer — has aimed to reshape the Greens as a party of the hard left economically and socially, with its traditional environmental focus a secondary issue to heavily redistributionist taxation policies, reflexive support for the corrupt CFMEU (which may well have cost Chandler-Mathers his seat) and massive welfare spending. This was coupled with relentless criticism of Labor over its failure to speak out more on the Palestinian genocide — another issue that failed to shift votes the party’s way.

In doing so, Bandt was abandoning the Greens’ traditional constituency of old, white, affluent voters with the time and income to worry about environmental issues, for a younger, poorer, more economically marginal demographic worried about whether they can ever afford a home. It also meant switching from being an issue-based party to a Nationals-style sectional interest party. If you were a landlord, or planned to buy an investment property as part of your income strategy in coming years, “the party of renters” was clearly not for you, even if you were a dedicated environmentalist.

The other problem with such a strategy is that while Labor — a party that feigns commitment to climate action while enabling ever more fossil fuel exports, and which has little interest in genuinely effective environmental regulation — will always be vulnerable on environmental issues, economic issues, especially for working class people, are its forté. Bandt could talk about rent freezes (anathema to traditional Greens voters who might own rental properties) and more housing, but Labor could deliver wage rises for caring sector workers, tax cuts for the low-paid and an end to mortgage insurance for first home buyers.

And Bandt’s obstructionist tactics through most of the most recent parliamentary term seemed to signal to voters that the Greens were more interested in virtue-signalling than in getting results — allowing Labor to hold the Greens up as the impediments to progressive outcomes, not the enablers. It was telling that it was veteran Senator Sarah Hanson-Young to whom Bandt turned to break the impasse in late 2024 with Labor in the Senate.

And looking back, what message would voters have taken from the Greens’ strategy over Labor’s first term? That giving the crossbenches power in Parliament delivers better outcomes, or simply results in politicians making it all about themselves? For many voters who pay little attention to politics, the Greens would have simply seemed like blockers rather than a party genuinely committed to using its power to deliver for them.

It’s likely coincidence that we’re now further away from minority government than at any time since the 2013 election. But if voters had been thinking about the virtues of ending the tyranny of the major parties, the last three years wouldn’t have been a good advertisement.