Bandt flags ‘Greensland’ strategy, eyes Labor seats in early start on 2025

The Greens will mobilise and start work on an election ‘ground game’ as the party seeks to replicate seat-winning strategies it used in Queensland, NSW and Victoria.

Australian Greens leader Adam Bandt. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Martin Ollman

The Greens will mobilise and start work on an election “ground game” from next month – more than two years out from the next federal poll – as the party seeks to replicate seat-winning strategies it used in Queensland across NSW and Victoria.

In an end-of-year interview with The Weekend Australian, Greens leader Adam Bandt identified the Labor-held seats of Macnamara (Victoria) and Richmond (NSW) as targets for the party in 2025 and said voters should expect phone calls from volunteers outside election years.

He revealed the Greens’ ­national conference, held in early December and closed to the media, had signed off on the party’s inaugural “national organising strategy” to begin in January that would “pick up the lessons learned from Queensland and spread them throughout the country”.

The party won three Queensland lower house seats in May, taking its representation in the House of Representatives to four.

“Our days of simply putting a leaflet in a letterbox are over,” Mr Bandt said.

“What people now do is go door to door, make phone calls and reconnect with the community, and we’re now able to do that at scale … across whole seats.

“We’ll be building up the campaign infrastructure, the likes (of which) we saw in Queensland, in other states from next year.

“The party will be selecting the winnable seats and starting to preselect candidates from early next year. And then spending that time empowering supporters to turn into advocates and be doing that work of going door to door and making the phone calls even outside an election year.

“That’s one of the lessons from Queensland, is those connections, when you start early and build them up at scale, can get results.”

In federal parliament, Mr Bandt said, the Greens would use their numbers in the Senate to try to repeal the stage three tax cuts next year, as he labelled the Albanese government’s position on maintaining the $254bn tax cuts “untenable”.

He pointed to recent deals clinched with Labor on electric vehicles and the government’s energy price relief plan as examples of the Greens negotiating amendments to legislation to achieve an outcome.

“In balance of power in the Senate, our approach, we said before the election, was to push to improve then pass legislation where it accords with our policy. We’ve been able to do that,” Mr Bandt said.

“Similarly, next year we’ll be turning our minds (to) how to do the same with respect to stage three tax cuts and stopping new coal and gas.

“These tax cuts have now been factored into the forward estimates. They’re part of the government’s budget planning. Increasingly there’s this gaping hole in the budget that will frame the government’s position over the next couple of years.

“It’s untenable for those tax cuts to persist. Part of our job is to make it crystal clear that Labor is making a choice for tax cuts for the wealthy over freezing power bills and getting dental into Medicare.”

Mr Bandt said he was in discussions with the Albanese government about progressing truth and treaty alongside a voice to parliament in 2023, saying the Greens did not want truth and treaty to “fall by the wayside”.

Facing criticism that attempting to advance all three could hamper a successful voice referendum, the Greens leader insisted there was a lot of momentum behind truth and treaty, and the Victorian Labor government had shown all could be worked on at the same time.