[Theme Music Starts]

DANIEL:

From Schwartz Media. I’m Daniel James, this is 7am.

Just before 4.30 last Wednesday afternoon, Antony Green called it for the ABC: Greens leader Adam Bandt had lost his seat.

15 years after Bandt won the inner-urban seat of Melbourne from the ALP, Labor had taken it back – along with another two… leaving the Greens with just a single seat in the house of Reps… and no leader.

The wipe out of the Greens came as a shock to the party that entered the campaign hoping to expand its influence and numbers in the parliament.

Today, national correspondent for The Saturday Paper, Mike Seccombe on where it all went wrong, and what now for the Greens.

It’s Monday, May 12.

[Theme Music Ends]

DANIEL:

Mike, last Thursday, Greens leader Adam Bandt finally addressed the media and conceded that he lost his seat of Melbourne. What did you make of his speech?

MIKE:

Look, I guess some people would say it was not the most gracious.

Audio excerpt – Adam Bandt:

“Thanks for coming out. I've got a few remarks that I'd like to make and won't be taking any questions at the end of it.”

MIKE:

Ironically, Peter Dutton's concession speech was probably the most gracious performance he ever gave. But frankly, I kind of like what it said about Bandt. He got into politics because he was passionate about issues, particularly the environment and climate change, and he maintained that passion in defeat.

Audio excerpt – Adam Bandt:

“I want to thank Melbourne voters for regularly giving me the highest vote including in this election and to thank you for the last 15 years and the chance to do some amazing things together.”

MIKE:

It was a stunning outcome, you know, I thought his loss was even more surprising than that of Peter Dutton in his seat of Dickson. He only held it by about 1.7 per cent at the 2022 election. So it was in play. Bandt, in contrast, held his seat by a very healthy 10 per cent In fact, he barely needed preferences to win in 2022. His primary vote was 49.6 per cent. So he looked to have a pretty firm hold on it, even given the fact that since the last election, there'd been a redistribution in his seat. Which took some of the more progressive areas out and put some more conservative areas in. But he still had a notional margin of six or seven per cent. So yeah, short answer, I didn't see this coming and I don't think anyone did.

DANIEL:

Yes, it was very surprising. What about the other Greens’ seats lost? How surprising were they?

MIKE:

Not nearly as surprising, frankly, but still a bit unexpected. The opinion polls during the campaign, even as they were showing the Dutton opposition was tanking, showed the Greens vote was holding or in fact increasing slightly.

But the Greens three Brisbane seats, Griffith, Brisbane, and Ryan. It became increasingly clear, I think, during the election campaign that those three seats were in play. All the parties put big resources into them. But the way they fell and probably in the case of Ryan didn't fall was still remarkable because it was all about preference flows.

You know, it's a bit complicated, but let me try to explain.

If we take Griffith, for example, which was Max Chandler-Mather's seat. In 2022, he came first on the primary vote, right? He got 34.6 per cent of the vote. So he finished first, but he was still well short of an outright majority. The Coalition came in second and Labor came in third. So what this was that Labor preferences were distributed because they go upwards according to the vote share and they pushed Chandler-Mather not just over the line but to what looked like a very big win, 60-40 after preferences.

But this time around, the order in which the candidates finished changed. So Labor came first, Greens came second, and the Liberal National Party, the Coalition party came third. So instead of Labor preferences being distributed and flowing to Max Chandler-Mather, Coalition preferences flowed and they went to the Labor candidate, which led to what appeared to be a hammering, basically 60-40 in the other direction. So that was the pattern there.

Brisbane followed essentially the same pattern and the Greens candidate, Stephen Bates, was behind Labor on the primaries and the Coalition preferences went to Labor. He was gone.

I spoke to the excellent election analyst, Ben Raue, about this. And he said, this is a peculiarity of the preferential voting system that we will see more and more over time. And that is that anytime the top two contenders are not clear, once you get into a three-way contest, preferencing gets, as he put it, really weird. And he says the Greens have a much, much better chance of winning seats when they're up against a Liberal in the final count than when they are up against Labor because of the way the preferences flow.

So if we go to the third Brisbane seat, Ryan, that shows the flip side of this. There, Elizabeth Watson-Brown won it in 22. Her vote share actually declined at this election. It was down to just 28.7 per cent. So seven points adrift of the LNP, and yet she appears to have squeaked back into office. And the reason for that was that the order of finishing of the parties didn't change. Labor again finished third, and so Labor preferences flowed to her. As Raue summed it up the preferential system has delivered kind of a perverse result here, which is that the more conservative seat wound up electing the more left-wing candidate, i.e. the Green, the more progressive seat ended up electing the less left-wings candidate with Labor.

DANIEL:

So while there was a minor swing away from the Greens, was this more of a case of the Coalition crashing and bringing the Greens down with them?

MIKE:

Not entirely, but to a considerable extent. Someone in the Greens described it to me by way of a sporting analogy. They said it was like one of those races where one competitor falls and trips another on the way down. The bottom line here is that while the Greens lost seats in the House of Representatives, including, you know, that of their leader Adam Bandt. Their primary vote was only down a little.

So in this election the Greens actually did not do that badly in terms of their overall vote share, it was only down about half a percent. And bear in mind also that there is this long-term trend away from the major parties.

So last Saturday, almost a third, record, opted for someone else. Younger voters, particularly young women, are far more inclined to vote for the Greens than previous generations were. At this election, sure, more of them went for Labor, but should the Albanese government fail to sufficiently address the concerns of these younger voters on issues like housing, social justice, the environment, climate change, the Greens remain an obvious alternative and continue to be an entirely viable political outfit, which is possibly more than can be said at this stage for the Liberal Party, I think.

DANIEL:

After the break - Adam Bandt and the big red toothbrush.

[Advertisement]

DANIEL:

So Mike, let's talk about the actual campaign the Greens ran. What was their pitch to the electorate?

MIKE:

Well, the mantra, the relentless slogan that they kept saying was, keep Dutton out, push Labor to act. This was repeated endlessly by Bandt and his team.

Audio excerpt – Adam Bandt:

“We're in reach of winning new seats across the country. This is our chance to deliver again. For real change, to keep Dutton out and to get Labor to act, vote one Greens.”

MIKE:

And the intent of it was obvious. They were framing the Greens as a progressive safeguard that if voters delivered a minority parliament, and let's remember that that looked a very real prospect in a month or so. They and the crossbench would be there to stop the worst instincts of the Liberals.

In retrospect, though, it doesn't look as smart, does it? Because obviously when voters went into the polling booths, they decided that the best way to keep Dutton out was just to vote Labor and not the Greens.

DANIEL:

So you think the Greens made a major miscalculation on betting that a minority government was almost an inevitability?

MIKE:

Yeah, I think so. I think so. Their central campaign issues? I wonder about that too. I think the Greens always do best when the focus is on environment and climate and it wasn't in this campaign.

Audio excerpt – Reporter:

“Okay, Adam, we've got to talk about the…”

Audio excerpt – Adam Bandt:

“The toothbrush in the room.”

Audio excerpt – Reporter:

“We can't not talk about it. Obviously you want dental in Medicare.”

MIKE:

Instead, we had Bandt running around with the giant red toothbrush about putting dental into Medicare.

Audio excerpt – Adam Bandt:

“Look people are putting off going to the dentist because they can't afford it and when you do go if you need something more than a routine treatment or your child needs braces it can run into the thousands of dollars.”

MIKE:

Not a bad idea, I would suggest, but I'm not sure it cut through.

DANIEL:

There has been a trend though, where the Greens have been losing votes in what you might consider their heartland - particularly places like Victoria. First in state and local elections, and now federally. What are people within the party saying is the reason for that?

MIKE:

Well, as you won't be surprised to know, there's a number of different interpretations on this. So there's the degree of argument within the party. But you're right, some people in the party and outside the party attribute this to the sort of broadening of the suite of issues that the Greens now champion, you know, in particular, a lot of people single out Gaza, and they're very strong support for the Palestinians and they have very strong criticism of Israel.

Oddly enough, Ben Raue suggests that the Gaza issue appears to have won the party some big swings in some seats, you know, like Chifley and Werriwa in Western Sydney, which have quite substantial Muslim populations, but not big enough to win. And he says that he doesn't think that Gaza explains why the vote was going down in their heartland.

But some of the Greens I spoke to, who wanted to stay anonymous, argued that it wasn't so much the party's policy positioning that has been damaging, but more the sort of immoderate way that those positions have been argued, you know, on Gaza, for example. It's one thing to accuse Israel of committing crimes under international law, but it's quite another thing to accused the Australian government of being, and I'm quoting here, complicit in Israel's genocide. You know, that was what Mehreen Faruqi had to say a couple of months ago.

Audio excerpt – Mehreen Faruqi:

“So long as we have defence contracts with Israeli weapons companies, the Labor government is complicit in genocide. So long as we refuse to impose sanctions on Israel, this Labor government is complicit in genocide. And there are no excuses for inaction.”

MIKE:

The Greens have always had a broad social justice agenda, but some people in the party argue that there hasn't been enough emphasis on the core turf of environment and climate, and that the party has come to be seen not just as obstructive, but as aggressively obstructive in the last parliament.

I spoke to some who said the feedback they were getting from voters on the booths was that the party seemed, and I'm quoting here, too angry and too personal in its critiques of the government.

DANIEL:

It was a point that Anthony Albanese and the Labor Party really hammered that the Greens had been obstructionist throughout the first term.

Audio excerpt – Anthony Albanese:

“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 the environment.”

DANIEL:

In his first interview since the election, he spoke about the Noalition, the Greens have formed with the opposition. So did that sentiment resonate with voters, do you think?

MIKE:

What I think is that Anthony Albanese is the canniest politician in Australia. And the fact that he kept hammering that point suggests that Labor knew it was resonating. And I think there is some truth to it. They perhaps held out too long in some cases. Of course, the counter argument is that they got some results. Max Chandler-Mather hung out and hung out in the housing policy and eventually got a few billion dollars extra out of the government by doing so. But along the way, it got a bit ugly.

Audio excerpt – Anthony Albanese:

“He should have a good look at the way that he asked questions in the Parliament and maybe what he needs as a mirror and a reflection on why he's no longer in Parliament.”

MIKE:

And the prime minister singled out Chandler-Mather, in particular, in that interview that you mentioned, noting that Chandler-Mather had stood up at a CFMEU rally in front of signs that described him as a Nazi. Albanese, I think, was genuinely offended by that. Chandler also took it up to Albo for owning a rental property and put that in terms that Albanese found offensive and were frankly pretty strong.

Audio excerpt – Anthony Albanese:

“So, you know, I think he should have a look at the way that he conducted himself. In question time, including the questions that he asked of me, which I found pretty offensive and which, some of which were ruled out of order.”

MIKE:

So it'll be interesting to see now that Chandler-Mather is gone, now that the leader is gone if the Greens adopt a somewhat more cooperative or at least polite approach to negotiations with the government in the future.

DANIEL:

So do you think the public still sees them as valuable in terms of holding the government to account in the Senate?

MIKE:

I do, I do. I mean, you know, their performance in the House of Reps was poor, but because Labor's win was so big, that's kind of irrelevant. You know, they're going to have probably 90 out of 150 lower house seats. But the Greens still performed very well in the Senate. They held all their seats. They've got 11 Senate seats, which, as it happens, is exactly enough to give Labor the votes it needs to pass legislation. And this may not have happened entirely by accident. I spoke to the Greens' New South Wales Senator, David Shoebridge, and let me quote him. He said, I think a lot of people were really anxious about getting Peter Dutton with a side-serve of Trump, and that played out with people voting Labor out of fear of Dutton in the lower house and then voting with their heart for the Greens in the Senate. And you know, I think that's right. I think the electorate at large does not like a government to control both houses. And I think in the current climate, they probably want a Labor government that is slightly less timid than the last one was, a bit bolder on policy. And certainly, Greens in the balance of power will be pushing in that direction.

DANIEL:

And obviously whether the greens adopt a less combative approach when dealing with the government will come down to leadership – and we’ll have to wait and see who the new leader will be. But given they’ll hold that balance of power in the senate the government is going to have to negotiate with them at some point. So what do we know about what the Greens’ agenda will be for the next parliament?

MIKE:

Well, Adam Bandt at that media conference on Monday, he spelled it out, you know, and he made the point, he said the government now can't blame any independent Senator for not getting its reforms through.

Audio excerpt – Adam Bandt:

“The only thing stopping getting dental into Medicare, stopping new coal or gas mines or rebalancing unfair housing tax breaks is the government itself.”

MIKE:

And he's absolutely right. He was absolutely right also when he said that this could be the most progressive Parliament Australia's ever seen. It comes down essentially to how bold Labor is, because, you know, the Coalition can't stop them if they want to do radical things, because the Greens will happily wave it through. So it will be interesting to see, won’t it.

It really comes back, I guess, not so much to the Greens, as to whether Labor has the nerve to actually push the envelope a little bit on some of these things.

DANIEL:

Nerve is one word for it, Mike. Thank you so much for your time.

MIKE:

Thanks. Cheers.

[Advertisement]
[Theme Music Starts]

DANIEL:

Also in the news today…
Dumped industry and science minister Ed Husic has called the deputy prime minister Richard Marles a “factional assassin”.

Husic was axed last week as Marles and the Victorian Right successfully argued to take a frontbench place from the New South Wales Right.

Attorney General Mark Dreyfus has also been sacked and Mr Husic questioned why the prime minister didn’t use the huge mandate of his win to protect the two ministers from the factional fight.

The new cabinet will be announced today.

AND

Hours after US President Donald Trump announced a ceasefire between India and Pakistan, both countries have accused the other of breaching it.

Clashes between the two nations have been escalating for weeks, triggered by a mass shooting of tourists in India-controlled Kashmir.

India blamed Pakistan for “repeated violations” of the truce and said it was retaliating.

Both countries are nuclear-armed.

I’m Daniel James, this is 7am, thanks for listening.

[Theme Music Ends]