Bandt defiant as Greens lose lower house ground

Greens leader Adam Bandt declared confidence he will keep his party’s leadership and his seat of Melbourne as he defended the Greens’ election campaign even though they look set to be stripped of several seats.

The Greens have already lost two seats in Brisbane, with a third hanging in the balance, and are battling to seize the seat of Wills, which includes part of inner Melbourne, from Labor.

Greens leader Adam Bandt with Senator Steph Hodgins-May in Melbourne’s Treasury Gardens on Monday.Credit: Penny Stephens

The party’s primary vote in the House of Representatives around Australia dropped 0.45 per cent even as the nation swung against conservative MPs, prompting some conflict within the Greens over the conduct of the campaign.

Bandt predicted the party would win one to four lower house seats. He pushed back on Monday when asked whether the Greens had focused too much on Australia’s response to the Israel-Gaza war rather than core issues like climate change.

“We were the only ones talking about real action on climate change and calling on the government to stop opening new coal and gas mines,” he said, while on Gaza, “we wanted to see an end to the invasion and ... an end to the bombs being dropped on children”.

Bandt said he intended to stay on as leader.

“Obviously, that’s up to my colleagues. Under my leadership over two elections now, we’ve delivered a record high House [of Representatives] vote for the last election and a record high Senate vote at this election,” he said.

With 64 per cent of the first-preference vote counted in the seat of Melbourne, Bandt was in a tight contest with Labor’s Sarah Witty, according to Australian Electoral Commission seat tallies at 5pm on Monday.

With little counting done on Monday, Bandt said the numbers would fluctuate, but he remained confident of retaining Melbourne – even with postal votes traditionally favouring Labor.

The Greens’ openly targeted the seat of Wills, but Labor remained in front, with sitting Labor MP Peter Khalil holding a 1.6 per cent lead over the Greens’ Samantha Ratnam with three-quarters of the vote counted.

The AEC paused counting in Wills on Monday to manage administrative tasks ahead of resuming counting in earnest on Tuesday.

Asked about preference deals in Wills, where only one candidate urged a vote for Ratnam, Bandt said the Liberal and Labor parties had joined forces.

The Greens needed “to win these seats in our own right”, he said, and had to expect “a variety of people [working] together against us”.

He said right-wing groups that campaigned against the Greens had helped his party. “[People said] ‘I’ve just received this from this group that doesn’t really say who they are, and they’re attacking you. I’m sick of this kind of negative politics.’”

In Queensland, the Greens lost both Brisbane and Griffith, which it won in 2022. The party’s high-profile housing spokesman Max Chandler-Mather lost Griffith to the ALP.

Chandler-Mather declined to be interviewed but used a social media post to urge more ambitious action.

“The political establishment relies on setting low expectations,” he wrote. “Our job is to give people hope that we don’t just have to accept tinkering around the edges and the status quo. Certainly not in a country as wealthy as Australia.”

A Greens source, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said Chandler-Mather lost the seat because “traditional Liberal voters [moved] their vote to Labor”.

The new Labor MP for Griffith, Renee Coffey, said the Greens’ position on a key housing bill had been unpopular.

“The electorate saw a really important housing bill, with a lot of really important reforms, be held up for almost 18 months,” she said. “I don’t think they appreciated the grandstanding, to be frank. I spoke from the very beginning about progress, not just protest outcomes, not just outrage.”

The Greens remained ahead in a third Brisbane seat, Ryan, where the party’s Elizabeth Watson-Brown had about 60 per cent of the vote with almost 80 per cent of ballots counted.

Bandt said the Greens had “achieved a record Senate vote. We’re nudging 14 per cent – that’s a reflection of the true Greens level of support in Australia. All of our senators have been re-elected,”

The party is likely to win enough Senate seats to allow the government to pass legislation with either its support or the Coalition potentially dealing crossbenchers out of negotiations.

Bandt, leader since 2020, said the Greens lost votes to Labor supporters aiming to prevent Peter Dutton becoming prime minister, or to voters casting their ballots strategically for independents in winnable contests.

“When there is a big shift from Liberal to Labor, it has flow-through consequences,” he said.

He said regardless of the outcome for his party, the weekend’s election was “a really significant moment for the country”.

“There was a real threat of hard-right, Trump-style politics coming to Australia,” Bandt said.

“For people who have campaigned against the Dutton style of politics for years – including when he came to Melbourne and said we were scared to go out because of African gangs, and his attacks on refugees … it is a really significant moment.”

With Nick Dent

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• Live results: Track every seat in the country
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