Hostile environment: The changing climate within the Australian Greens
The Greens and leader Adam Bandt have had a polarising year.Credit:
The year 2024 wasn’t supposed to be this way for the Greens.
It was meant to be the year the party laid the groundwork for a successful 2025 election, in which the party would claim seats including Wills and Cooper in Melbourne, Moreton in Brisbane and Richmond on the NSW North Coast.
This year the Greens have taken a hardline stance backing Palestinians in the war with Israel, winning some new supporters but alienating others, while Labor accuses them of enabling – if not abetting – the repeated vandalism of government electorate offices by war activists.
They’ve also owned the issue of affordable housing, with housing spokesman Max Chandler-Mather’s call for rent caps and freezes cutting through in the fight against Labor so effectively that a new housing minister, Clare O’Neil, was appointed.
But a party with vaulting ambitions for grabbing hold of the balance of power with a big-picture agenda has discovered the script has been hijacked by the quotidian crises of realpolitik – a flurry of bullying complaints and branch-level disquiet that has forced federal leader Adam Bandt and other leaders into a defensive mode.
Chiefly, the party has been on its heels over the last month after this masthead revealed that WA senator and First Nations spokeswoman Dorinda Cox had lost at least 20 staff from her office over about three years. Fifteen of those former staff have alleged bullying and bad behaviour by the senator, with complaints made to Bandt’s office and the Parliamentary Workplace Support Service.
Cox has apologised for her conduct but also said in a statement last month that there was “disappointingly significant missing context” in reporting about her office.
Meanwhile, the Greens are also having trouble at the box office.
The party has lost seats at recent elections in Queensland and the ACT, while the most recent Resolve Political Monitor poll conducted for this masthead showed support for the party has slipped and that Bandt was now the third most-disliked politician in Australia after Lidia Thorpe and Pauline Hanson. In short, the shine has started to come off the crossbench party.
The Greens do not need to win over a majority of voters across Australia to achieve success – they’re not looking to form government. To gain seats, the party is focusing on the suburbs and demographics most receptive to their pitch: inner-city electorates with big concentrations of tertiary students, young renters and older, environmentally minded progressives disenchanted by Labor’s centrist path.
Since the turn of the century, the Greens have increased their primary vote at every federal election except one, in 2013. Whether they will do so in 2025 remains an open question.
Last weekend, as Greens MPs and party members descended on the RACV hotel in Hobart for the party’s national conference, the mood on the ground among party faithful was more paranoid than triumphant, unlike anything in recent memory.
The Greens, unlike Labor, the Liberals and the Nationals, don’t allow media to observe party conferences.
It’s a members-only event, with sessions covering everything from the party’s federal election communications strategy to “a history of queer lived experience” to “how to have difficult conversations”, according to a copy of the event program leaked to this masthead.
However, the allegations against Cox hung over the entire weekend.
Just after 9am last Saturday, a member of the Australian Greens First Nations Network – commonly known as the Blak Greens and which has about 50 members – stood up to deliver a pointed message to Bandt and the party’s senior leadership.
After weeks of damaging leaks about alleged bullying by Cox – who did not attend the conference in person but was supposed to Zoom in – the Blak Greens had had enough.
The group said it supported a censure of Cox that the WA branch of the party wanted, but which had been delayed after a legal threat from the senator. And it went further.
“The allegations against Senator Cox that are on the public record are very serious and range from inappropriate comments to staff to some whose mental health seriously deteriorated due to the senator’s conduct,” its motion said.
“We call on the party to take the following actions: 1. Strip Dorinda Cox of all her portfolios pending an inquiry into her actions. 2. Support the inquiry the Greens WA will run into Dorinda Cox. 3. That the Greens WA and the federal party room consider expelling Dorinda Cox for her alleged conduct.”
Greens leader Adam Bandt’s popularity has plummeted in recent polling, and he faced disgruntled members at the party’s recent national conference.Credit: Alex Ellinghausen
Bandt, according to conference attendees in the room, was visibly annoyed. Though the Greens leader declined to comment on the record for this story, his office disputed the claim that the party leader had been annoyed.
The Blak Greens statement, according to one attendee who asked to speak anonymously so they could detail confidential conference discussions, divided the room.
“It was basically met with two responses. The general membership was happy with it, but it was viewed as inappropriate by most MPs and party officeholders,” the source said.
Later on Saturday, during a general question-and-answer session in which party members could ask MPs questions, a person in the room said that Bandt was asked why the party room was supporting someone who had been accused of bullying.
“And Adam just said ‘no we are not’, and that was that,” they said.
The Greens leader’s office disputed that had been the question asked but confirmed that Bandt had outlined the actions undertaken to ensure Greens staff were safe in their workplace.
By Monday, the party’s National Council met and passed a motion that called for “a legally robust and procedurally fair process” to resolve the complaints against Cox, while the Council also noted it did not support the Blak Greens statement and questioned whether this statement was the official position of the group.
‘It was basically met with two responses. The general membership was happy with it, but it was viewed as inappropriate by most MPs and party officeholders.’
The response to the Blak Greens statement at the party’s national conference.
But this response was an exercise in damage control.
The party can’t say it wasn’t warned about Cox.
A former police officer and a Yamatji-Noongar woman, Cox entered the senate on a casual vacancy in 2021 as a replacement for veteran Greens senator Rachel Siewert, who has been notably silent since the allegations first surfaced.
But as far back as September 2020, before she even entered parliament, an Indigenous human rights expert and associate professor Hannah McGlade – who had once worked with Cox – wrote to Giz Watson to raise concerns about her possible entry into parliament.
Watson, a former WA state MP and veteran office holder in the party, was told by McGlade, a senior Noongar woman, that “I have serious reservations about Dorinda Cox, who is seeking senate pre-selection”.
“I do not make complaints lightly, especially against an Aboriginal woman, but am pressed to advise why I do not think she has the professionalism necessary for such an important position.”
Watson, now one of the party officials charged with looking into the allegations, was contacted for comment.
A former staffer, who asked not to be named, linked the party’s inaction on the allegations against Cox to “anxiety about losing a second First Nation’s senator”, after Lidia Thorpe quit the party last year. Bandt’s office disputed the claim and said he and his office had followed the principles of independent process that underpinned the outcomes of the Jenkins Review.
“I’m stunned by their disinterest in it and the assumption that the actions they’ve taken so far are appropriate. I don’t get why they are tip-toeing around it,” that person said.
It has long been accepted wisdom within the Greens party room that the party’s best election is always the one after a Labor government is elected, as disappointed ALP supporters who think the government hasn’t done enough on a particular issue shift to the Greens.
Certainly, that’s what happened at the 2010 election after the Greens joined with the Coalition to block Kevin Rudd’s Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme.
But as the 2025 election approaches, the Greens face tough questions about how they’ve handled the Cox allegations.
Several current and former Greens staffers, who asked not to be named so they could speak freely, said Bandt disliked confrontation and had largely deputised his chief of staff, Damien Lawson and deputy chief of staff Jess McColl to handle the allegations against Cox – though the leader’s office disputed this claim.
“Adam doesn’t like confrontation. He is so focused on the goal, which is climate and housing policy, he doesn’t want to get knocked off target,” they said.
“But this is a real problem for them, and they have to deal with it.”
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