Five reasons the Greens believe the next election could be their best

The May 2022 election was a breakthrough moment for the Australian Greens. For the first time in the party’s history it won a second Senate seat in every state of Australia, taking its representation in the red chamber to a record high of 12 seats (though they’ve since lost one after Lidia Thorpe defected to the crossbench).

But more significantly, after 12 long years as the party’s only MP in the lower house, party leader Adam Bandt was joined by three new colleagues in the green chamber as the Greens swept the Queensland seats of Griffith, Ryan and Brisbane.

Max Chandler-Mather with Greens party leader Adam Bandt.Credit: Alex Ellinghausen

In the lead-up to that election, a then-member of the Morrison cabinet confidently told me that if teal candidates were standing in the northern capital, the Liberals might have been in trouble – but because the alternative was either a Greens or Labor candidate, they would be OK. How wrong they were.

The next election could be even more consequential for the balance-of-power party. The Greens are targeting a long list of lower house seats (that’s nothing new) and their ambition should not be lightly dismissed.

Consider the 2022 results. The Greens targeted five Labor-held seats – Griffith in Queensland, Richmond in NSW, Canberra in the ACT, and Macnamara and Wills in Victoria. And they had four held by the Liberals – Queensland’s Brisbane and Ryan and Victoria’s Kooyong and Higgins – in their sights. Five of those nine seats fell, three to the Greens, one to the teals and one to Labor. A similar result is possible this time.

And there are five reasons why the party’s strategists believe this could be the Greens’ most successful election yet.

The first reason is that Labor is in government now. Before 2022, the Greens’ most successful election was 2010, when Bandt entered the lower house and the party claimed six Senate seats for the first time. This was the first time an incumbent Labor government had faced re-election while the Greens were a potent, organised political force – and they won over voters who were disappointed with the Rudd-Gillard government. This time, party insiders believe there is a similar opportunity to claim disaffected Labor voters.

The second reason is that the next election, whether it’s held at the end of 2024 or early in 2025, will be another climate change election. Peter Dutton’s decision to campaign for nuclear power and the fact that Labor has to name a 2035 emissions reduction target under the Paris agreement will guarantee that. And no matter what figure Labor names, it’s a certainty that the Greens will name a more ambitious one – and campaign on that basis.

Third, as the ABC’s psephologist Antony Green has noted, the notional Labor margin in the seat of Wills – once held by Bob Hawke and currently held by backbencher Peter Khalil – has been cut in draft boundary changes in Victoria. Wills has mostly been a safe Labor seat since its inception in 1949, but it has gone independent once, in the early 1990s, and demographic changes mean it could flip to the Greens this time.

The fourth reason is the war in Gaza, in which Labor has tried, unsuccessfully, to walk a fine line, the Liberals have been all in backing Israel, and the Greens have heavily backed the Palestinians’ right to statehood (while ducking awkward questions about Hamas).

And the fifth reason is housing. Greens housing spokesman Max Chandler-Mather – dismissively nicknamed “hyphen” by some in the ALP – has been unleashed by party leader Bandt and appears to be living rent-free in the heads of at least a few Labor MPs.

Chandler-Mather is one of the best on-the-ground political organisers in the country. On the first day of the last election campaign, after a press conference in the then Labor-held seat of Griffith, he regaled me with facts and figures about how many dozens of volunteers had door-knocked tens of thousands of houses in the seat – and how that could translate into Greens victories in inner Brisbane because of the tight housing market and concern about climate change.

A teal wasn’t needed to wrest those three seats from the major parties – just an alternative.

Since then, Chandler-Mather has been running housing policy for the Greens, running workshops in Victoria on doorknocking for Greens volunteers and running rings around Housing Minister Julie Collins, despite Labor spending billions upon billions on affordable housing.

Bandt has made a tactical decision not to oppose Labor’s climate policies in the parliament, even though they’re not ambitious enough for the Greens, because of the bitter lesson of voting with the Liberals against Rudd’s carbon pollution reduction scheme in 2009. But he has given Chandler-Mather his head to campaign on housing. And it is working. If you’re under 40 in Australia, have a HECS debt and kids, and you can’t access the bank of Mum and Dad, the chances are you feel like you’ll never own a house.

The Greens are tapping that sentiment with a series of policies, some of which may never be able to be implemented, to harvest Labor votes.

So what are the target seats for the Greens at the next election?

The list has not been officially signed off on, but the draft looks like this: Wills, Macnamara and Cooper in Victoria; Richmond in NSW; Moreton in Brisbane because of the halo effect of having three seats already in Brisbane and, on a good day, the inner-city seats of Sturt in South Australia and Perth in WA. (Anthony Albanese’s seat of Grayndler and Tanya Plibersek’s neighbouring seat of Sydney will be targets once they eventually retire.)

Watch this space.

James Massola is national affairs editor.