Theloss of Adam Bandt’s seatof Melbourne is a disaster for the Greens, but not for the reasons you might think.
In his 15 years in parliament, Bandt showed how the Greens could break into the House of Representatives, and that achievement in itself distinguished the party from forerunners the Democrats.
Bandt built on that achievement as leader of the parliamentary party over the last five years, overseeing the historic 2022 result in which the Greens had 12 senators and four MPs.
It was always something of an aberration for the Greens to suddenly jag three seats in inner Brisbane in 2022. Historically, Queensland has been the toughest of all states for the Greens. So it was always possible or even likely that there would be some form of correction at the federal level in 2025. The loss of the state seat of South Brisbane in October’s poll signalled a swing against the party was on the cards.
At a national level, it was easy to imagine that there might be a backlash against the Greens this election. Under Bandt’s leadership, and through the last parliamentary term, the party has veered left and played hardball with Labor on a string of controversial policy positions.
Courting controversy is unsurprising for a protest party, and very often the Greens’ positions (if not their tactics) were principled and defensible. What is unarguable is that this year the Greens have been the focus ofa determined and effective campaignfrom Advance Australia and otherthird-party lobby groupsin part on their views on Gaza.
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So it was easy to see how the Greens vote might soften, nationally, and how they mightlose ground in Brisbane. I saw no suggestion, anywhere in the lead-up to the campaign, that Bandt’s own seat was vulnerable.
True, an adverse redistribution last year made Melbourne harder for Bandt to win, shaving his margin bymore than 3%. If not for the redistribution, Bandt may well have won.
But that’s no excuse: with his personal standing and knowledge of the electorate, Bandt should have been able to win Melbourne a sixth time. Big picture, my understanding is that the Greens felt Labor was on the nose in Victoria. As it happens, as Bandt said in his concession speech on Thursday, Melbourne voters swung overwhelmingly to Labor, determined to “keep Dutton out”.
Bandt’s loss in Melbourne has ushered in a rush of commentary that the 2025 election shows his leadership has been a disaster for the party, and the Greens should go back to being a party of the environment focused on winning the balance of power in the Senate. That’s a gross misread.
In my 2019 book Inside the Greens, I tried to show how the Greens represented the coming together of different activist strands – the environment movement in Tasmania, the nuclear disarmament movement in WA, the socialist left in New South Wales – around a policy platform based on the four pillars established by Germany’s Die Gruenen in the early 1980s: ecological sustainability, social justice, peace and disarmament, and grassroots democracy.
The party’s foundational and spiritual leader, Bob Brown, kicked off his political career as a No Dams campaigner for the Wilderness Society but doubled the Greens vote in 2001 by taking a principled stand on the Tampa affair, and fought tirelessly against the Iraq war, and for gay rights. The party may have been environment-first, but it has never been environment-only.
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Brown was effectively leader of the Greens for 20 years, until he retired in 2012. But he was aware that in winning the balance of power in the Senate, the Greens were only replicating the strategy of the Democrats, whose mantra was to “keep the bastards honest”.
Brown believed the Greens were not just there to keep the bastards honest, “we’re there to replace the bastards”. That hasn’t happened, and it may never happen, but given the party’s track record and level of representation at the local, state and territory, and federal level – making it the most successful third party in Australian political history (if you count the Coalition as one) – it is unlikely that the Greens are going to give up.
Winning 10% of the vote to gain 10% of the seats under proportional representation is fine for politicians content to shout at the government in the Senate. It takes a different type of politics to win lower house seats, and the Greens now have a taste of it. Up against both major parties, winning lower house seats means aiming to win more than 50% of voters in your own right and that’s a lot harder.
When I interviewed Bandt in 2016 for Inside the Greens, he explained why winning lower house seats meant embracing a different approach to politics, and how he had pioneered it in Melbourne. If you want action on climate change, Bandt said, rather than lecturing voters on climate, Greens politicians should do more listening, and take on board their concerns about unaffordable housing, the high cost of university degrees, and insecure work.
“It’s time to take those issues and treat them with the respect that they deserve … And then you work out a way of linking those various campaigns, to the point where people are more willing to hear your message about climate change because they know that you’re fighting for affordable housing. We’ve done a micro version of that in Melbourne over the last six years, to the point where people who never would have thought about voting for the Greens now see us as the people that are there campaigning with them and so they’re more prepared to trust us or work with us come election time.”
Bandt succeeded for many years, but has lost out now. That’s a disaster if the party genuinely aspires to be a party of government, alongside Labor, as it has become a junior partner in coalitions with social democratic parties in other countries like New Zealand and Germany, and here in the ACT and Tasmania.
There is more at stake for the Greens, in Bandt’s defeat, than just one seat, and in time – after a well-earned break – perhaps the best way for Bandt to prove his point is to try to win Melbourne back.
Paddy Manning is an independent journalist and author of Inside the Greens: The Origins and Future of the Party, the People and the Politics (Black Inc, 2019)