How the war between ‘watermelons’ and ‘tree-Tories’ brought down the Greens

Drew Hutton played a crucial role in the formation of the Greens – first in Queensland, then as a co-founder of the national party alongside Bob Brown.

After watching the party lose three of its four House of Representatives seats – including the stunning defeat of leader Adam Bandt, who conceded his seat of Melbourne on Thursday afternoon – Hutton says the party needs to fundamentally rethink the way it communicates with Australian voters.

“The Greens have experimented with what I would call a hyper-militant approach during the last three years,” says Hutton, who was suspended from the Queensland branch in 2023 over a debate over trans rights and free speech.

“I’m a bit of a hyper-militant myself, in many ways, but you need to know when to hold them and when to fold them.

“What will broaden their base is if they lose this terrible way they have of expressing their moral superiority over everyone else and their refusal to talk meaningfully with ordinary Australians.”

Speaking with a candour not available to Greens MPs, who can face misconduct charges for bringing the party into disrepute, Hutton says the Greens suffered from appearing obstructionist by blocking key Labor policies on housing affordability. The Greens’ leadership eventually recognised this at the end of last year by waving through Labor’s shared equity and built-to-rent policies, despite failing to win any concessions from the government.

Greens leader Adam Bandt conceding defeat in his seat of Melbourne on Thursday.Credit: Wayne Taylor

“They also overplayed their hand on Gaza and needed to make it a bit clearer they were totally opposed to the politics of Hamas,” Hutton says.

When Hutton, who led the anti-mining Lock the Gate environmental group, officially retired from activism in 2017, Brown hailed him as “a towering figure in Australian environmental and social politics for the last four decades”.

However, the long-time Greens leader has a diametrically different view of the election results, underlining the challenge the party faces as it ponders its identity in a post-Bandt era.

Asked if the party has been too hardline in recent years, Brown tells this masthead: “I don’t think they were hardline enough.”

Brown attributed the party’s struggles to the “targeted, negative and false campaigning against the Greens … and the Greens are going to have to, in the future, work out how to respond to that”.

Others within the party, however, are calling for some more introspection.

Ian Cohen, the first Greens member elected to the NSW parliament, says: “We’ve got to be careful not to lose sight of our environmental roots. The environment must be a priority.”

The leader of a national environment group, who asked to speak anonymously to be candid about their views, said it was a constant frustration of the green movement that the Greens party did not campaign on a platform with specific nature policies beyond broad demands like “no new coal or gas”.

“They became a party of militant youth and lost their status as a party of the environment,” the environmental leader says.

Long-time Greens leader Bob Brown argues the party’s positions weren’t “hardline enough”.Credit: Andrew Meares

Bandt’s loss has devastated the party, with South Australian senator Sarah Hanson-Young saying on Thursday: “Greens all over the country are in shock. We are grieving for what feels like the most unfair of outcomes.”

While praising Bandt as “full of enthusiasm”, Cohen describes him as very much an “inner-city representative” who prioritised policies relevant to urban voters. He thinks it was ultimately a mistake for the party to choose a lower house member, rather than the Senate, as its leader.

“We were better served by having a leader in the Senate looking across the whole nation, someone who can represent a broader voter base,” he says.

The Greens.Credit: Matt Golding

Foreign Minister Penny Wong has seized upon the election result as a rejection of the Greens’ hardline stance against Israel, as well as the Coalition’s unshakeable support for the Jewish state.

“A clear lesson from the election is that Australians don’t want political leaders to amplify overseas conflict for their own purposes as the Greens and Liberals did,” Wong told this masthead.

“Both parties spread false information to exploit legitimate concerns.”

Jeremy Buckingham, who served as a Greens MP in the NSW upper house from 2011 to 2018, says his biggest criticism of the party is the “vitriol” of their rhetoric, which he sums up as “calling the Albanese government complicit in genocide and expecting people to negotiate with them”.

Buckingham quit the Greens after a factional brawl in which he was accused of sexual harassment, a claim he categorically denies, and returned to the NSW parliament as a member of the Legalise Cannabis Party.

“Peace was one of the Greens’ foundational tenets, but they’re not peaceful in how they act,” he says.

“That’s because a lot of people from the hard left of politics, various socialist groups came into the Greens.”

He singles out Max Chandler-Mather, the party’s former housing spokesman who lost his Brisbane seat of Griffith, for criticism. Chandler-Mather raised the profile of housing affordability and the plight of renters, but brought a radical edge by protesting alongside the disgraced CFMEU construction union and attacking Prime Minister Anthony Albanese in parliament for being a landlord.

Others inside the party say the Greens have alienated older and more well-off voters with their rhetoric, as seen when Bandt wore a shirt saying: “FIGHTING FOR RENTERS”.

“That meant home owners no longer felt at home in the party,” one senior Greens figure says.

As for Middle East policy, former Albanese adviser Dean Sherr says: “You didn’t need to be pro-Israel to be alienated by how the Greens tried to import the conflict here and make it a central issue in our politics. They increasingly came across as a radical left-wing activist group you’d find on a university campus.”

Following Bandt’s departure, three women – Mehreen Faruqi, from NSW, Larissa Waters, from Queensland, and Hanson-Young, from South Australia – have emerged as frontrunners for the party’s leadership.

The Pakistani-born Faruqi would present a fresh face for the party but represent more continuity, given she served as Bandt’s deputy and played a prominent role in the party’s campaigning on Gaza.

Some within the party argue Waters has the most mainstream appeal and can present as a less radical figure to voters. Hutton backs Hanson-Young, who recently held a dead salmon aloft in the Senate, as the best candidate to take the party in a more pragmatic, explicitly environmental direction.

The remaining MPs are expected to meet in Canberra next week to elect their new leader in a secret ballot.

A senior member of the party, asking for confidentiality to discuss internal matters, says: “Whoever becomes leader will be more of an old-school environmentalist. The Greens will always care about social and economic justice, but the shift back to more of a focus on the environment and climate will be important.”

Debate over the party’s ideological direction is nothing new for the Greens, especially in NSW. Factional opponents have disparagingly labelled the hard-left group linked to former senator Lee Rhiannon the “watermelons” – green on the outside and red (communist) within – while the hard-left has branded more moderate Greens as “neoliberals on bikes” or “tree Tories”.

Greens senator Peter Whish-Wilson defends the party’s performance, saying: “It’s really hard to get climate and the environment on the political agenda in Canberra when it’s being ignored by the two major parties.”

Whish-Wilson said the Greens ran a strong environmental election campaign in his home state of Tasmania.

“We played a very high-profile role in the campaign against fish farms. We had massive rallies on the streets in Hobart with 6000 people the weekend before the election, and we had a number of rallies leading up to that.”

When conceding defeat to Labor opponent Sarah Witty on Thursday, Bandt did not take a backwards step on the Middle East, thanking those “who had the courage to speak up against the invasion of Gaza”.

Bandt argued that a “rip tide” from the Liberal Party to Labor – driven in part by a backlash to US President Donald Trump – had also ensnared the Greens.

“My initial take is some votes leaked away from us, as people saw Labor as the best option to stop Dutton,” he said.

“When you’re taking on the combined might of both major parties, big corporations, the coal and gas lobby, and challenging a system that puts their profit before people, there will be obstacles. But I know we are on the right path, and we won’t stop now.”

Tim Hollo, who served as communications leader for former Greens leader Christine Milne, cautions the party against panicking.

“Australia’s political system is straining to cope with the splintering of the vote in a world in crisis,” says Hollo.

“You can see that in weird results like Jacqui Lambie struggling to hold her Senate seat in Tasmania as well. The Greens fell victim to that this time, but a small shift next time could reverse it.“

Read more on Labor’s landslide election win

• Some seats are still too close to call: Here are all the races that remain in doubt – plus every seat that’s changed hands
• Interactive: See how your polling booth voted in this election
• Live results: Track every seat in the country
• Live blog: Anthony Albanese plans second term, Liberals plan a leadership change

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