‘Rabid and divisive’: the Greens’ road to ruin leads election debacle in Queensland
Brisbane voters took a baseball bat to the Greens at the state election. They would be wise to heed the lesson.
Delwyn Cameron voted Green at the 2020 Queensland election and helped the minority party win a famous victory when it unseated former deputy premier Jackie Trad.
But the retired student guidance officer couldn’t bring herself to do it again last Saturday. For the first time in her life, 72-year-old Ms Cameron went for the Liberal National Party.
“I used to think Bob Brown was fabulous,” she said of the Greens’ charismatic founder. “Still do, really. But I don’t think the party today is anything like the party he created. They’re a bit rabid … divisive and I’m very disappointed in them.”
For the first time in a long time, the Greens lost ground in an inner-city bastion as voters in a ring of hotly contested Brisbane seats administered a stinging rebuke at the October 26 poll.
Instead of welcoming a crop of new MPs into the fold, the Queensland Greens were rocked by the likely defeat of Amy MacMahon in South Brisbane – the rainmaker who took out Trad four years ago – and a punishing swing in the primary vote of 7.3 per cent against Michael Berkman in his seat of Maiwar.
For a nerve-racking interval, it looked like they would be erased from the sandstone edifice of state parliament house.
So much for the perceived wisdom that once in, the Greens are impossible to dislodge. They lost rusted-on voters such as Cameron in South Brisbane, where the party boasted a full deck of representatives at local government, state and national levels.
The election debacle has put in play the Greens’ three federal seats in Brisbane and unleashed soul-searching about whether the hard line adopted against Israel had backfired, alienating voters dismayed by surging anti-Semitism and the Greens’ lurch deeper to the political left. Recriminations are set to erupt internally.
Berkman told The Weekend Australian: “The first thing we’re doing is active outreach to the electorate to get feedback directly from the community. And I’ll be, you know, listening very closely to that advice to understand what people’s position is and how we ended up here … it’s not the result we wanted.”
While the Greens vote largely held up statewide, it crashed where it matters most to them: in their heartland within an easy bike ride of the Brisbane CBD.
The meaty swing against Berkman, whose breakthrough win in Maiwar in 2017 established a beachhead in Queensland parliament, was the first he had experienced in three elections, imperilling the seat in early counting. He gave up most of a hard-earned margin of 6.3 per cent after preferences.
South Brisbane, a jewel Labor desperately wanted back, remains too close to call and will come down to which of the major parties finishes second behind MacMahon, allowing the clinching tranche of preferences to be distributed. Initially, she looked gone for all money owing to the LNP’s decision to preference Labor ahead of the Greens, reversing the strategy that doomed Trad in 2020. Then Labor’s Barbara O’Shea opened a narrow lead in the count over the LNP candidate, Marita Parkinson, firing hope for the Greens that MacMahon could yet scramble home. The result may not be known until well into next week.
In riverside McConnel, where the Greens went after senior Labor minister Grace Grace, their primary vote dipped by 3.2 per cent; it fell 4.3 per cent in the leafy avenues of Cooper on the inner northside, another ALP seat on their target list. For once, the Greens’ vaunted ground game backed by squadrons of eager young volunteers faltered.
Electoral analyst John Black, a former Labor senator who now unpicks demographic trends in voting, said the Greens bled support at both ends of the spectrum, among university students as well as high-earning professionals and retirees ensconced in some of Brisbane’s priciest addresses.
“They lost the parents, the grandparents and the kids,” he said. “So this is a serious blow to them … as you go further out they started to pick up votes here and there, but not many.”
The swing to the LNP after preferences ran to 7 per cent statewide and delivered government on a net gain of at least 16 seats, with another two possible. Premier David Crisafulli will have a solid majority of up to seven in the new parliament.
Labor’s relief at averting the threatened wipe-out promises to be short-lived, though there’s no doubt the loss could have been worse. Steven Miles, who has traded places with his LNP opponent, will likely head an opposition of 35 MPs, keeping his side in touch. The Greens emerged as the biggest loser of election 2024.
The result also cemented the status of Fortress Queensland for the federal Coalition. Since John Howard’s day two decades ago, about three quarters of the state’s federal seats – currently numbering 30 – have been held by the LNP. Perversely, Labor lost one of only six seats north of the Tweed in regaining power under Anthony Albanese in 2022. Crisafulli’s strong victory lifts the Coalition’s merged franchise in Queensland to 70 per cent of seats in the 93-place state parliament.
Both major parties believe the Greens are in trouble in their three federal seats of Brisbane, Ryan and Griffith.
The party’s impish housing spokesman, Max Chandler-Mather, is credited with devising the strategy that doorknocked them to victory in those divisions at the last federal election, at the expense of the LNP in westside Ryan and Brisbane. Chandler-Mather seized Kevin Rudd’s old seat of Griffith south of the river, ousting the former PM’s successor, Terri Butler, a promising frontbencher.
Peter Dutton will be heartened by Crisafulli’s victory, though not necessarily by his shaky performance on the campaign trail. The federal Opposition Leader has a higher mountain to scale than his fellow Queenslander managed – 21 seats for a majority in the House, against the deficit of 12 confronted by the LNP under Crisafulli. The Greens’ collapse at the state election belies the belief that the LNP won just about all there was to be had in Dutton’s home state in 2022, with a haul of 21 federal seats.
The party is hopeful of enticing the former MP for Brisbane, Trevor Evans, to make a comeback there. One well-regarded Coalition strategist says the openly gay economist is the “perfect candidate” to take on Greens incumbent, Stephen Bates, who has failed to shine in Canberra and no doubt suffers in comparison to the high-profile Chandler-Mather. The seat of Ryan, formerly a conservative prize taking in some of Brisbane’s wealthiest postcodes, is also seen as gettable.
In addition, Dutton will be eyeing the Lockyer Valley-based seat of Blair held by Labor’s Shayne Neumann since 2007. The LNP likes its chances of getting him sixth time around, having shaved 3.6 points off the ex-frontbencher’s margin since 2016. (Though Newman’s vote did rally in 2022.)
Labor is not without opportunities, particularly in the far north Queensland seat of Leichhardt. The state seat of Cairns withstood the cobalt wave that washed through the regions on Saturday and long-serving federal LNP member Warren Entsch is retiring in Leichhardt. Labor doesn’t discount its chances in Brisbane, either, though unseating Chandler-Mather in Griffith is seen as a big ask.
Voters such as Cameron hold the key. She is Jewish, and was offended by the Greens’ attacks on Israel as a “colonising” power responsible for the “crime of apartheid” against Palestinians in the occupied territories. The feisty retiree took up her concerns directly with Chandler-Mather, MacMahon, Greens councillor Trina Massey and former mayoral candidate Jonathan Sriranganathan.
“After 9/11, I said to our teachers, ‘please keep an eye on our Muslim students so they don’t get pushback they shouldn’t get’ and I reminded Jonathan and the rest of them of that,” she said. “Only now it’s the Jewish kids’ turn and part of the problem is the language they have used about Israel – language that is causing a rise in anti-Semitism in our schools and in the community, and I asked them to think carefully about what they were saying. I don’t think they listened to a word.”
She joined the Queensland Jewish Collective, a registered third-party interest group that targeted the Greens in South Brisbane and Maiwar. Cameron was one of dozens of volunteers who letterboxed streets around her home in West End. She said the voters’ message had to be heeded. “I am a progressive at heart and if they lost me, they lost a lot of others like me,” she warned.
Berkman said an internal review would examine what went wrong for his party in inner Brisbane. He rejected criticism that the Greens’ attacks on Israel and multiple homeowners – the focus of Chandler-Mather’s campaign against negative gearing – were too extreme and pointed out that Miles had picked up their policies on 50c public transport fares, free school lunches and establishment of a new public power retailer.
“I think, ultimately, we’re in this position where we’re trying to take apart a longstanding two party system,” Berkman said. “So we’re up against the party machines from both directions … and it’s never going to be easy. But, yeah, we’ve obviously got a bit of reflection to do, coming away from the weekend’s contest.”
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