Their founder now calls them unlikeable and authoritarian. Can the Greens change their spots?

Not so long ago, Adam Bandt was a very happy man. It was the winter of 2022. The Morrison government had been defeated and Bandt, in his fifth term as the member for Melbourne, was accompanied in the lower house by three new Greens colleagues who’d won seats in inner-city Brisbane. The “old” parties – Labor and the Coalition – were in terminal decline as far as the Greens leader was concerned. “We created a Greenslide, and we’ve put down even deeper roots in Greensland,” he declared. “Next election, I know we can grow again. I think we can win even more lower house seats.”

Illustration by Dionne Gain

Bandt stayed on his high for the next three years. He looked ahead to the prospect of Labor falling into minority government status in 2025 and how that would enable the Greens to have a direct role in setting national policy. He worked with his housing spokesman, Max Chandler-Mather, to block the Albanese government’s housing policies, deemed to be insufficient, by joining with the Coalition in the Senate. Bandt and Chandler-Mather convinced themselves they were creating a whole new Greens-supporting political constituency of mostly young, angry renters. They overplayed their hand. The government stared them down and the Greens eventually folded late last year, waving through Labor’s legislation.

But the damage was done. The Greenslide was going into reverse. Most renters don’t want to stay renters forever. They wanted action on building more houses; Labor’s prescription might not have been ideal, but it did offer action while the Greens for too long delivered inaction and boasted about it. It was a shocking failure of strategy. Much of the talk in politics, encouraged by Bandt publicly, was about a possible Labor-Greens minority government.

At the May 3 election, voters with the power to make a definitive difference acted assertively. Two of the “Greenslide” seats went to the ALP, and Bandt himself was turfed out of Melbourne, which Labor’s Sarah Witty won with a swing of more than 8 per cent. There is now just one Greens MP in the lower house, Elizabeth Watson-Brown.

A couple of points need to be made. One is that although the Greens lost three of their four seats, the party’s lower house vote was still 12 per cent, just as it was in 2022. The other is that while the party was hurt in the lower house, it is by no means irrelevant. One of the biggest running stories about the Albanese government’s second term is that it will have to rely on the Greens in the Senate to get its legislation passed. The Greens have 10 senators and the balance of power. They are the legislative gatekeepers.

But they have been on a long march to try to fulfil the wish of one of their founders, Bob Brown, to replace the Labor Party as the pre-eminent “progressive” party. That venture is not going well and took a bad hit at this election. In fact, the 2025 outcome could well come to be seen as a watershed for the Greens. It suggested very strongly that while the public is OK with the Greens having a substantial presence and role in the upper house, it’s much less interested in entrusting them with a direct role in government.

Just to put the Greens’ new single-seat status in context, the party’s 12.2 per cent share of the national primary vote is certainly substantial. But the other parties holding one seat are Centre Alliance, with 0.2 per cent of the vote, and Katter’s Australian Party, with 0.3 per cent. The Greens’ lower house vote share has hovered around 12 per cent for six consecutive elections. And on May 3, many of its older, cashed-up supporters in gentrified suburbs, put off by the performative politics of Bandt and Chandler-Mather as well as its aggressive stance on the Israel-Gaza conflict, flipped to the Labor Party. In my local polling place, a hitherto heavily Green part of the seat of Wills, there was a 7 per cent swing away from the Greens, which, along with similar vote shifts elsewhere, was enough to keep Wills in Labor’s hands.

Bandt’s successor as leader, Larissa Waters, has a massive job ahead of her in navigating the responsibility of holding the balance of power in the Senate while also recalibrating the tone and behaviour of the party. There is a key question about the Greens’ mission. The party grew out of the environmental movement, a global phenomenon, and is still struggling with broadening itself. The split over transgender rights and restrictions on discussing the issue within the party, which has led to the expulsion of a co-founder, Drew Hutton, is an example of this. Hutton has described the modern Greens as aggressive, weird, unlikeable, authoritarian and doctrinaire.

The Greens are correct when they say support for the major parties has eroded. But other, less dogmatic options have emerged to fill that gap. Effectively, since the 2013 election, community independents including the so-called teals have been slowly eating the Greens’ lunch in prosperous parts of Melbourne, Sydney and Perth. They’ve shown how to be passionate about climate change while appearing moderate.

An unknown is just how willing the party will be to engage in rigorous self-analysis. The signs are not encouraging. Bandt, as the departing leader, did himself and, more importantly, his party, few favours in his exit statement. By his telling, he lost because Labor, the Liberals and One Nation ganged up on him to exchange preferences. Nothing to do with his performance. The surest way to keep the party stuck at 12 per cent or less is to always either ignore its failures or blame someone else for them. The Greens need only look at how the Coalition is now in the business of tearing itself apart as some of its players want to fight against reality over net zero. For the moment at least, Labor has found a way to secure a massive majority with a primary of less than 35 per cent thanks in great part to the stubborn wrongheadedness of its opponents, including the Greens.

Shaun Carney is a regular columnist, an author and former associate editor of The Age.

The Opinion newsletter is a weekly wrap of views that will challenge, champion and inform your own. Sign up here.