Bandt’s leadership in spotlight amid $7m right-wing assault on Greens

Senior Greens have backed Adam Bandt’s leadership of the party even if it fails to retain its trio of seats in Brisbane in the face of a $7 million right-wing assault and a cash and brain drain to the teal movement.

Opposition Leader Peter Dutton is confident of regaining the Greens’ riverside seat of Ryan from Elizabeth Watson-Brown, while Labor is bullish about snatching the neighbouring electorate of Brisbane from Stephen Bates. Labor is also putting significant resources into defeating the Greens’ firebrand housing spokesman Max Chandler-Mather in Griffith on the other side of the river.

Greens leader Adam Bandt held a campaign event with the party’s housing spokesman Max Chandler-Mather this week.Credit: Alex Ellinghausen

Greens senator Dorinda Cox and the party’s founder Bob Brown both said Bandt, who has led the party since 2020, should remain in his post even if its parliamentary ranks are thinner following the election.

“We all have our eyes on the seats we’re confident we will win, and should we lose them obviously we will have to understand what went wrong, but I don’t think that’s a leadership discussion,” Cox said. “That’s a discussion about the whole party, MPs, senators, party processes and many different facets.”

Bandt campaigned with Chandler-Mather on Tuesday. The leader’s trip to Brisbane followed a series of forums and fundraisers in recent weeks that were attended by party luminaries such as Brown as the minor party seeks to hold the seats they claimed in 2022 amid widespread antipathy towards Scott Morrison. The Greens hold Brisbane, Ryan and Griffith on margins of 3.7 per cent, 2.6 per cent and 10.5 per cent respectively.

Chandler-Mather with party elder Bob Brown in Brisbane earlier this month.Credit: Instagram

The Greens fell short of their goal of claiming four seats in Queensland parliament in the October state election, with former Greens senator Andrew Bartlett saying the party should review whether some of its MPs’ “in your face” style had turned off voters.

Chandler-Mather took a confrontational approach to Labor on housing and dominated debate for much of his time in the portfolio. But he has had a smaller media presence since he defended the scandal-plagued CFMEU at a rally in August.

Despite media depictions of Chandler-Mather as a potential future leadership candidate for the Greens, party room sources said he and Bandt worked well together. Chandler-Mather would not be likely to replace Bandt at such an early stage of his career, the sources said, and the next leader would be more likely to be one of Greens senators Sarah Hanson-Young, Larissa Waters or David Shoebridge.

Brown talked up the Greens’ chances in Brisbane at this election, saying its MPs benefited from the power of incumbency and argued polling that was predicting tight races in Greens seats could be like it was in 2022 when surveys failed to pick up on the Queensland ‘Greenslide’.

“Adam is a very impressive character,” Brown said. “He’s got my full backing.”

“We’ve seen all the missteps of Dutton, and Albanese has had a number as well. You don’t see that with Adam Bandt; he’s a very sure and steady hand on the tiller and an impressive leader of a minor party which is a very difficult part of the political spectrum.”

Bandt was only the second Greens MP voted into the lower house before 2022, having won his seat of Melbourne in 2010 and holding it ever since. He polled a primary vote of 49.6 per cent at the last election.

Under Bandt, the party has vastly increased its parliamentary representation, helped secure billions in funding for public housing, worked with the government to pass a major emissions reductions scheme called the safeguard mechanism, and claimed they applied pressure on the government to explore changes to property tax concessions last year.

Brown pointed out the Greens had retained a primary vote of between 12-14 per cent in recent polls, adding that anti-Greens campaigns from right-wing organisation Advance and major parties made it a “David and Goliath” battle.

An Advance spokeswoman said the group was spending $7 million against the Greens this election cycle, including $3 million in the lead up to the campaign and $4 million during it, half of which would go to advertising in Brisbane. “We’re stopping at nothing,” said the spokeswoman, Sandra Bourke.

The rise of teal independents, who take a more moderate approach to the Greens, has also increased competition for volunteers and donations. Three Greens sources, who spoke anonymously to discuss internal matters, said former Greens volunteers were joining Climate 200-backed community independent campaigns, diminishing the party’s pool of experienced and well-off supporters.

At Tuesday’s event, Bandt spruiked the party’s newest election commitment to spend $11.5 billion on free school breakfasts on top of plans to push for the expansion of Medicare into dental, an end to native logging, and the removal of property investor tax breaks.

The 53-year-old former lawyer told this masthead to “ask me in a couple of weeks’ time” if he would remain as leader if he went backwards but said the signs for this election were encouraging.

“We’re a week away from people starting to vote, and my focus at the moment is just campaigning to ensure that our three amazing members of parliament are returned and that we grow across the country,” Bandt said.

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