The Greens have a chance to grow up or disappear

Anthony Albanese says he has got the message from the federal election result and will stake his claim to the centre ground as his opponents reassess where they go from here. The removal from parliament of Greens leader Adam Bandt is testament to the strength and wisdom of the nation’s electoral system.

While the Liberal Party must examine whether it did enough self-reflection after the defeat of Scott Morrison in 2022, the Greens must decide whether they have any future beyond that of protest party wreckers from the extreme far left.

This is a question that has dogged Greens parties around the world. In Germany – to where the environment-centred Greens party can trace its ideological roots – the Greens are now far apart from their Australian cousins. For a party that built its reputation on opposing nuclear power, last year more than half of the German Greens party members opposed the closure of the country’s last remaining nuclear power plants.

French media organisation Le Monde described the Greens party, which was founded on a manifesto of pacifism, as now the most enthusiastic cheerleader for rearmament and sale of weapons to Israel. The German Greens enthusiastically support Israel’s wars in the Middle East, and in foreign policy are aligned with US neo-cons, happy to promote “Western values”, if necessary by means of military intervention.

Alarmed at the perceived damage to brand equity, the Greens in NSW wrote to their German counterparts last year to convey their “mounting disquiet in light of the discrepancy between foundational Greens principles and the recent discharge of German Middle Eastern policy”.

Saturday’s election result confirms it is the Australian Greens that increasingly are out of touch. The Greens will lose at least three of their four lower house MPs, with only Elizabeth Watson-Brown a chance of winning a tight race in the Brisbane seat of Ryan. After holding out, Mr Bandt on Thursday finally conceded the seat of Melbourne, which he had held for 15 years.

Mr Bandt blamed the result on the principled stand of One Nation and the Liberal Party in giving their preferences to Labor ahead of the Greens. In defeat, Mr Bandt cut a figure of a party leader who had overplayed his hand. He urged media to treat the “climate crisis as if there is a war on”.

He lamented the fact that climate change had not been a bigger part of the election campaign narrative, and conceded he had struggled to get anyone to take the party message seriously: “When we get up and say we have to stop approving gas and coalmines, people just kind of shrugged and said we expect people to say that because that is your point of differentiation.”

In truth, the Greens’ hard-left prescription under Mr Bandt was a recipe for economic ruin and social disharmony for the nation – higher taxes and higher spending, foreign policy confusion and elevated sovereign risk because of a ban on new coal and gas mines. As recently as Tuesday, he was crowing that the Greens would use their balance-of-power position in the Senate to force Labor to deliver.

With firebrands Mr Bandt and defeated Brisbane MP Max Chandler-Mather out of office, the Greens have an opportunity to decide if they will continue to turn left and towards potential electoral oblivion or seek to refocus on the issue that most people thought they were always all about – the environment.

Like all Australians, Mr Albanese has a lot to be thankful for in the Greens’ poor performance at the ballot box. The Greens will continue to hold the balance of power in the Senate but their authority has been comprehensively diminished.

Mr Albanese said it was hard to find “any joy” for the Greens. Mr Bandt’s is a lesson in political hubris that must not be forgotten by Mr Albanese if he wants to remain true to his word and bring the next parliament back to the centre.