Inside the decline & fall of Adam Bandt and the Greens
There is a clear sign of structural, strategic failure that could be the beginning of the end for the Greens as they follow the historical trajectory of other minor parties and independent groupings that have overreached, faltered, failed and disappeared. Who remembers the Australian Democrats?
The failure of Adam Bandt as Greens leader and of the Greens as a party at the 2025 election is self-evident.
Bandt lost his seat of Melbourne and at least two, possibly three, of his colleagues also have lost their seats, leaving the Greens without a presence or any influence in the House of Representatives, the chamber of government.
In the Senate, in the counting so far, the Greens vote has gone backwards everywhere except in South Australia and Tasmania, and the party is unlikely to improve on its current 11 senators as Labor is expected to improve.
This is indubitably a heavy defeat for Bandt and the Greens. But there is more than just a one-off setback for the party in the 2025 results: there is a clear sign of structural, strategic failure that could be the beginning of the end for the Greens, certainly in the lower house as they follow the historical trajectory of other minor parties and independent groupings that have overreached, faltered, failed and disappeared.
Who remembers the Australian Democrats?
What’s more, Bandt’s attempts to blame major party conspiracies and preference flows to explain away the loss do not stand up to scrutiny, nor do they address the real reasons for failure – the Greens turning away from the fundamentals of their environmental foundations, a sympathy for extremist behaviour and radical economic policies that have alienated Australian voters.
When Bob Brown founded the Australian Greens on the base of environmental issues and was elected to the Senate in 1996 the Greens were like kiwifruit: green on the outside and on the inside. As time progressed, particularly in NSW, the Greens’ radicalism led to them being labelled watermelons: green on the outside but red on the inside. Now they have become raspberries – red all through.
At a high-water mark of representation in both the Senate and the House of Representatives after the 2022 election, the Greens pursued a radical economic agenda seeking national rent controls, the removal of investment breaks on negative gearing and capital gains tax, and offering vastly expanded social housing construction, higher welfare payments and free dental care.
After the Hamas terror attacks on Israel on October 7, 2023, in which more than 1200 people, including elderly women, Holocaust survivors and babies, were killed and hundreds more people were taken captive, the Greens adopted a hardline pro-Palestinian position calling for the severing of ties with Israel and sanctions.
Greens members appeared at protests outside MPs’ offices when Jewish properties were being firebombed and sprayed with graffiti and Labor and Liberal parliamentarians’ offices were attacked, defaced and barricaded, including Anthony Albanese’s electorate office in inner Sydney.
The pro-Palestinian push within the Greens continued right through to polling day, with some campaigning Labor MPs being abused for hours on polling day and being accused of being “baby killers and supporting genocide”.
Facing failing results during the week as counting continued, Bandt defiantly declared the radical Palestinian position had not cost the Greens support and, while it was obvious there had been seats lost, he maintained the Greens’ overall position had held up and he was proud of his aim to “keep Peter Dutton out”.
This general claim that Greens’ support holds up is despite specific losses of representatives and failing results in the Queensland state election, the Northern Territory election, the Brisbane City Council election and even in the Canberra Green house of the ACT.
On Monday, as Bandt put a gloss on the Greens failure, he said he was “incredibly proud of our role in keeping Peter Dutton out” and that the Greens with 11 senators were the “sole balance of power in the Senate”.
Bandt’s argument was that the new Senate was less complex than the last and the Greens were the largest single bloc: “With Greens in sole balance of power in the Senate at the moment, the government can’t blame other individual senators for not being able to get things through,” he said.
“The only barrier to getting dental into Medicare … is Labor. The only obstacle to making childcare free is Labor. The only obstacle to stopping new coal and gas mines from being opened is Labor. We stand ready in the Senate to make this the most progressive parliament that Australia has seen.”
Bandt also sought explain the Greens’ failure by shifting the blame on to the unexpected poor showing of the Liberals, that the Coalition and Labor had worked together on preferences to keep the Greens out despite what he described as an all-time high of support.
“One of our lessons from Melbourne over the years has been that we know we’ve got to be able to win seats in our own rights, that we will have Liberal and Labor working together on preferences, together with others to try and oust us, because we are actually offering a genuine alternative,” Bandt said. (This from a party that has benefited from preferences since its inception.)
But the undeniable electoral numbers and the grim reality of the mechanism of government and parliament tell a vastly different story for the Greens, suggesting their days are numbered and they are now a party in decline.
On the first question of “keeping Peter Dutton out”, the Liberals’ self-inflicted loss wasn’t engineered by the Greens, and while it was true the Coalition had put the Greens last in many electorates the Labor Party gave its first preference to Greens’ candidates in the vast majority of seats.
The idea of a toxic Labor-Greens minority government that Dutton tried to exploit, as did the Prime Minister, appears to have pushed more voters into the ALP camp than the Coalition’s, so keeping Dutton out contributed to putting Bandt out.
Bandt’s radical pro-Palestinian stance does actually appear to have hurt the Greens’ vote and not to have hurt the Labor vote.
In the Labor-held seats where there were high Muslim populations, candidates endorsed or supported by Muslim groups and where the government was attacked by the Greens for not doing enough for Palestine, the Greens failed.
In the western Sydney electorates of cabinet ministers Tony Burke and Jason Clare, Watson and Blaxland respectively, there were candidates campaigning with Muslim support, Ziad Basyouny and Ahmed Ouf respectively.
In Watson, Burke suffered a primary vote swing away from Labor of 5.6 per cent and Basyouny picked up 15.2 per cent. The swing to the Greens was 1.36 per cent.
In Blaxland, Clare suffered a primary vote swing against Labor of 5.1 per cent, Ouf got more than 19 per cent and the Greens got less than a 1 per cent swing.
In the neighbouring Labor ministerial electorates of Chifley, held by Ed Husic, a Muslim, and McMahon, held by Chris Bowen, there was a small swing towards Husic and the Greens got a 3.8 per cent swing, while Bowen got a 2.6 per cent swing against him and the Greens got a positive 2.5 per cent.
So, in the seats with high Muslim populations there was a big swing to the Muslim-endorsed candidates, with a clear strong preference back to Labor, and the Greens hardly benefited.
After the election, Muslim community leader Rifi Jamal, who started the Friends of Tony Burke campaign, said: “The community and Gaza’s best interest is for our friend Tony Burke, who has proved over the years that he is on the side of our community, is to put him back into the decision-making corridors so he can continue to reflect our voice, our aspirations and our interest where it matters.”
In Melbourne, in the seat of Macnamara held by Jewish Labor MP Josh Burns, where Palestinian policy was a big issue, Burns got a primary swing of 5.5 per cent towards him and the Greens had a swing against them of 2.4 per cent.
In Wills, sitting Labor MP Peter Khalil, whose office was attacked and who was harangued for hours on polling day as a “baby killer”, was the centre of the Greens campaign to win a seat from Labor. There was a primary swing against Khalil of 0.32 per cent and the Greens received a 1.99 per cent positive swing, which translated into a two-party-preferred result of 52 per cent for Labor to 48 per cent.
Wills is probably the only seat where the pro-Palestinian message worked for the Greens and ultimately that was not enough.
Nothing helped Bandt in his own seat of Melbourne, which he lost to Labor after an almost 9 per cent two-party-preferred swing against him and left the Greens without a leader.
But there is much worse here for the Greens than just an electoral failure last Saturday.
There is also the fact the pro-Palestinian position – if it did hold up Greens support in other electorates – is a single issue with no shelf life through to the next election.
There are even more grounds for Greens despair, although it may be hidden by delusion, and that is the downgrading of environmental concerns below the Palestinian protest and economic radicalism.
The Greens did pressure the Albanese government on environmental issues, but extreme and unrealistic demands to stop all gas and coal mining and energy generation – which can be made only by a party with no responsibility – pushed some Greens and certainly some Liberal voters to vote for Labor.
In essence, the environmental management of the Albanese government by Tanya Plibersek, with its own share of controversy, local disputes and industry concerns, and notwithstanding the unpopularity of the actions of Bowen on renewable energy, has positioned Labor in the middle between the Greens’ extreme claims and the Coalition’s nuclear policy.
According to Felicity Wade, national co-convener of Labor Environment Action Network, the ALP’s environmental wing, Labor filled a void left by extreme Greens.
“It certainly seems that people felt the Greens were too shouty and uncompromising as well as lacking focus on the core business of climate and the environment,” Wade tells Inquirer, after a successful campaign that helped eight Labor MPs with environmental priorities get elected.
“For most of their voters, the environment is a first-order concern. While the Greens’ lack of focus on climate and environment hurt them, on the flip side Labor’s approach to these issues won us votes.
“It’s one of the issues where people just expect the government to get it done. Labor has found the pathway, sitting between the extremities of the Coalition and the Greens. And the electorate gave us a big thumbs up.”
This Greens failure helped Albanese build a mammoth majority but it also will mean that he has to manage the increased influence of the left wing in caucus, the positive impact of environmental policy for Labor and the lingering legitimate concerns of industries ranging from salmon farming to green tape and gas production.
Albanese has made it clear a middle course is his aim on environmental issues as he attempts to lock in the support Labor has won from the Greens and Liberals and develop “sensible decision-making”.
“We want to make sure that a federal environmental protection act can support industry and jobs and provide certainty but also produce sustainable outcomes. You can protect the environment while you’re also standing up for jobs and certainty for the resources sector,” he said on Thursday.
“One of the things that has occurred and is a great frustration when it comes to the productivity agenda that will be very much part of our second term, building on what we’ve done in our first, is the delays and delays and more delays that occur.”
Given he has intervened on issues over the head of his environment minister, this will be an early indicator of how Albanese may treat the environment and its management. As far as economic policy is concerned, the virtual eradication of the Greens by a Labor government that campaigned on no changes to negative-gearing tax breaks, no changes to capital gains tax and no new taxes backed by a Coalition with similar policies, means the agenda of rent freezes and investment crackdowns is off the table.
This aspect also goes to the continued relevance of the Greens in the Senate where Bandt, as former leader, said they could influence the government because of the “sole balance of power” in the upper house.
Albanese said of the new Senate, yet to be fully determined: “What I hope comes out of the new Senate is a bit of a recognition that one of the reasons the Greens political party have had a bad outcome in the election is the view that they simply combined with the Coalition in what I termed the Noalition, to provide blockages, and that occurred across a range of portfolios, housing, Treasury, as well as environment.”
This is a message for the Coalition as well: Coalition senators are, in fact, the biggest single bloc of senators after the government and if they wish they can render the Greens irrelevant in the upper house by agreeing to work with Labor on sensible and necessary reforms just as John Howard did when in opposition.
It all adds up to decline and fall for the Greens.
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