Election 2022: Greens leader Adam Bandt says he sees teal independents as allies

Having gone backwards against Labor in key lower house seats in 2019 — and been superseded by teal independents in Liberal seats — the Greens are focusing on winning the balance of power in the Senate.

Greens leader Adam Bandt. Picture: Jay Town

Greens leader Adam Bandt sees the teal independents as allies in his bid to bring down the Morrison government, put climate change on the agenda and win the balance of power in the Senate.

Despite years of the Greens claiming to be an unstoppable force in inner Melbourne and Sydney, polls show they may again fail to pick up any lower house seats in addition to Mr Bandt’s seat of Melbourne, which he has held since 2010.

But it’s a different story in the Senate, where the Greens are hopeful of winning additional seats in Queensland, South Australia and NSW, on top of the nine they hold.

Asked what he made of teal independents running in previously safe Liberal seats, some of which have been targeted by the Greens, and whether he saw them as allies or rivals, Mr Bandt told The Australian: “We welcome their ­entrance into the race.

“We welcome anything that draws attention to the terrible ­climate policies of Labor and Liberal, and we’ll be campaigning hard in those seats for people to vote Greens in the Senate.”

Mr Bandt said Treasurer Josh Frydenberg’s Kooyong was the only seat being contested by a teal independent that was also being targeted by the Greens. “We’d already done a lot of groundwork before (Voices of Kooyong candidate) Monique Ryan announced she was running,” he said when asked why his party was running in that seat, where candidate ­Julian Burnside won 21.24 per cent of the primary vote in 2019.

Mr Bandt said the Greens ­believed their strongest chances of winning lower house seats were in Queensland, where they are targeting Labor frontbencher Terri Butler’s seat of Griffith, assistant minister Trevor Evans in Brisbane, and Liberal backbencher ­Julian Simmonds in Ryan. “The feedback in inner-city Brisbane is that Labor’s approach of agreeing with the Liberals on all the key ­issues is benefiting the Greens.”

Conspicuously absent from the party’s list of targets in NSW are Anthony Albanese’s seat of Grayndler, and Tanya Plibersek’s seat of Sydney, where the Greens vote has steadily declined.

Instead, Mr Bandt said, the party has its eye on Richmond, centred on Byron Bay on the NSW north coast, and Canberra.

In Melbourne, Mr Bandt says, he’s targeting Macnamara, held by popular first-term Labor MP Josh Burns, Higgins, held by Liberal paediatrician Katie Allen – also eyed by Labor – and Kooyong, as well as the inner-northern Labor seats of Cooper and Wills, held by Ged Kearney and Peter Khalil.

In Cooper, previously known as Batman, the Greens fared even worse in recent times, scoring a primary of 39.39 per cent at the 2018 by-election, which saw Ms Kearney narrowly elected, but losing almost half that following public infighting to poll 21.14 per cent in 2019, soon after now senator Lidia Thorpe lost the corresponding state seat of Northcote to Labor. The Greens’ vote similarly fell in Wills in 2019. Mr Bandt blamed exchanges of preferences between the major parties.

RedBridge polling company director and former ALP assistant state secretary Kosmos Samaras said the Greens had been suffering “issues relevancy” since the pandemic, having “vacated the field” on health and economic issues.

“A lot of people viewed that two-year period as a period of acute stress and trauma, but also a period where politics did actually matter to them. If they were on the left, the Greens were basically not around, but (Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews was,” he said.