Greens leave: After 15 years, how Bandt and his party won, and lost, in Melbourne

At the Greens’ election night party in a bar in Melbourne’s Docklands, only the journalists and a few diehard volunteers were bothering to watch the big TVs.

The activists who’d poured their hearts into doorknocking and handing out fliers and how-to-vote cards were mingling and dancing, blissfully unaware of the disaster unfolding before them.

Fifteen years after he stormed to victory over Labor, winning his party’s first ever lower house seat at a general election, the Greens’ national leader, Adam Bandt, lost the seat of Melbourne.Credit: Matt Willis

The shindig, in Adam Bandt’s stronghold of Melbourne, was to celebrate his apparently inevitable victory in an electorate he’d dominated for five elections over 15 years. So confident were party strategists that they’d barely door-knocked in the seat – and so unlikely did Labor view the possibility of victory that its candidate, Sarah Witty, remained a complete unknown.

The Greens were focused elsewhere. Bandt had prophesied victory in nine lower house seats across the country. The party would retain its four seats (Melbourne plus three in Brisbane), and win five more: Wills and Macnamara in metropolitan Melbourne, Richmond on the NSW north coast, Perth and the Adelaide seat of Sturt.

Very quickly, though, to those who were watching, it became clear this was a fantasy. By night’s end, two of the three Brisbane seats were gone and the seats of Melbourne and Wills – the latter the Greens’ biggest genuine hope of a gain – were on a knife edge.

Not that you’d have known it from the mood of the crowd, which was a distinctive Greens mix of enthusiasm, optimism and naivete.

Bandt speaks to party faithful on election night. Credit: Paul Jeffers

‘Within reach’

In his two speeches that night, Bandt was upbeat. “One thing is clear,” Bandt told the crowd about 9.10pm. “We have kept Dutton out!” The cheer was deafening. As for the Greens? “Our vote has held up and gone up.” Another huge cheer.

At a second appearance at 11pm, the observant might have noticed the colour of Bandt’s face. It was grey. His message, however, remained upbeat.

“We may not come out of tonight with all three of our Brisbane seats, but we are within reach of other seats right across the country, including here!” Hooray! the crowd cheered. Plus, the Greens would have the balance of power in the Senate.

Adam Bandt on Thursday in a final press conference after 15 years as the MP for Melbourne.Credit: Wayne Taylor

A week later, the Greens have one lower house seat left – Ryan, in Queensland – the last remaining from the “Greenslide” of 2022. They suffered a swing against them in the Senate vote nationally, and in Victoria.

And on Thursday, Bandt finally conceded his seat of Melbourne.

Fifteen years after he stormed to victory over Labor, winning his party’s first ever lower house seat at a general election, the Greens’ national leader fell 4000 votes short on a two-party-preferred count.

Party elder Bob Brown blamed a “relentless and despicable” negative campaign by the main parties.

Bandt referenced a Labor-Liberal preference swap, describing electorates where this had happened as “purple” seats (a mix of red and blue). Perhaps he had forgotten that his first victory, too, had come on the back of Liberal preferences.

“Live by the sword, die by the sword,” gloated one Labor hardhead, who did not want to be quoted because he has left the political fray.

Picking and sticking

After Bandt’s victory in 2010, the commentary was all about the Greens’ ascendancy. Sure, Melbourne was the most progressive electorate in the most progressive state, but the Greens could win Grayndler, in Sydney, next – Anthony Albanese’s seat.

Tanya Plibersek’s seat of Sydney would be the next to fall. Then might come Victorian Liberal seats such as Kooyong, Goldstein and their equivalents in Sydney.

Bandt in 2010, when he was first elected to parliament.Credit: Erin Jonasson

Driving it, said the party’s strategists in 2010, would be the young.

“Getting people in their 40s and 50s to vote for us the first time is much harder than getting 18-year-olds,” the party’s electoral analyst, Stephen Luntz, told The Australian at the time.

“But once we pick up the 18-year-olds, it is much easier to keep them.”

Following Saturday’s election, the Greens’ national primary vote will end at somewhere around 11.74 per cent, just shy of the 11.76 per cent of 2010.

It’s been up and down over the years, but as the two main parties’ votes have continued to fracture, and other independents and third parties have risen around them, the Greens are apparently in stasis.

Redbridge Consulting’s Kos Samaras said it’s those 18-year-olds of 2010 – now Millennials in their 30s – who have drifted away.

“There are still healthy levels of support [for the Greens] in Gen Z, but Millennials are becoming Labor voters,” Samaras said.

His tracking poll of key seats (not specifically Greens seats) suggests people now in their 30s have become pragmatic and centrist and that the perpetually over-optimistic Greens “over-egged it” last term.

Kos Samaras from Redbridge Consulting, a political consultancy firm.Credit: Wayne Taylor

They pushed too hard on Gaza, on the CFMEU and by holding up Labor’s housing policies in the Senate.

“There was a perception the Greens built that they were in the business of opposing Labor and of helping [then opposition leader Peter] Dutton,” Samaras said. “Green voters aren’t green activists,” he added.

A perfect storm

Psephologist Kevin Bonham says that in Melbourne, Bandt confronted several problems in 2025.

A redistribution took some of the Greens’ safest booths and deposited them to the north, in the neighbouring seat of Wills. The redistribution also brought other booths from what had been Higgins – a formerly safe Liberal seat that Labor flipped when the Morrison government was defeated in 2022. (Higgins was abolished as a seat before the election.)

The Brunswick South booth, for example, voted 63.3 per cent for the Greens at the 2022 election but is now part of Wills. It was replaced in the south by Hawksburn, on Toorak Road, with a 30 per cent Greens primary.

In addition, said Bonham, Liberal preferences in Melbourne at this election flowed even more strongly than they had in the past to Labor. About 80 per cent of conservative voters preferenced Albanese’s party over the Greens, compared with 70 per cent in 2022.

Not since Bandt’s 2010 win has the Liberal Party recommended to its voters that they preference the Greens above Labor.

But, until this election, Bandt has won sufficient votes on his own and collected enough preferences from other small parties to get over the line, even before the main party votes were counted.

Samantha Ratnam, the Greens’ candidate for Wills, campaigning during the election.Credit: Gus McCubbing

But this time, said Bonham, an almost 5 per cent swing against Bandt on primary votes meant this was not enough.

“It was a perfect storm. A redistribution, the swing in primary votes and bad preference flow all went wrong for the Greens,” Bonham said.

‘Purple’ seats

In Wills, the beneficiary of those pro-Greens southern booths, another quite remarkable thing happened.

This is an electorate where young, left-leaning educated types vie for housing and cafe space with an old working-class left and a large cohort of migrants.

Young Greens supporters cheer at campaign HQ in Melbourne on election night. Their joy was short-lived.Credit: Paul Jeffers

It’s long been divided by Bell Street – variously labelled the “Quinoa Curtain”, the “Latte Line” and the “Hipster-Proof Fence”. North of this line votes Labor, and to the south, Greens.

This election, though, the Greens did better than usual in the north. Labor MP Peter Khalil lost a fifth of his primary vote at one of his strongest booths, at John Fawkner College, and it went straight to the Greens’ Samantha Ratnam. It was not the only one.

The Greens’ campaign on Gaza might have swayed the large Muslim populations in the north to abandon Labor. These were places where pro-Palestinian group Muslim Votes Matter campaigned hardest.

“We had an impact on the day,” said Ghaith Krayem, the group’s national spokesman.

In the south, conversely, in the old Greens areas, young, educated Greens voters turned more strongly to Labor.

How voters cast their ballots at Princes Hill Primary School tells the story. In 2022, when this booth sat in the seat of Melbourne, the Greens won 55 per cent of primary votes to Labor’s 24 per cent. Three years later, and now part of Wills, the booth returned 43 per cent for the Greens – a swing of 12 percentage points against the minor party. Labor’s figure climbed to 37 per cent – a shift mirrored across the south as affluent voters came back to Labor.

Overall, in Wills, the Greens vote lifted by 2 per cent on primaries, but it was not enough to win Ratnam the seat. (She predicted on election night it would be 10 per cent.)

Carlo Carli, the former Labor MP for the state seat of Brunswick, said that while the Greens and Ratnam worked extraordinarily hard, Khalil had “turned this into a poll on the importance of having a local member that could oppose Dutton”.

In the other seat in metropolitan Melbourne targeted by the Greens – bayside Macnamara – they fell hopelessly short. The swing against them was 3 per cent, and their candidate, Sonya Semmens, came third to Liberal and Labor.

Nobody spoken to for this article thinks this result marks the terminal decline of the Greens.

“Of course they can come back,” Samaras said. “This election tells us that the ‘other’ vote is now very strategic. Four-something million votes are strategic and tactical. If the Greens are smart, they’ll find a way to win them back.”

Bandt saved his final words as MP for Melbourne for ABC Radio.

He would take a rest, he said. His party would elect a new leader and wield the balance of power in the Senate. Not conceding any fault with his party’s approach in the last term, Bandt said the government would be forced to listen to them.

“I hope [the government] ... understands it would be a lot better to listen to what the Greens put forward,” he maintained.

“And if we don’t address climate change, those purple seats will go Green.”

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