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RUBY:

From Schwartz Media I’m Ruby Jones, this is 7am.

With the balance of power in the senate, the Greens will hold significant sway over what gets done under this government.

But at the same time, the dynamics within the Greens party room have dramatically transformed – out of 16 Greens parliamentarians, 5 are now from Queensland.

So how will they change the Australian Greens and what agenda do they represent?

Today, Journalist Paddy Manning on the Brisbane Greens and how a radical agenda began to appeal to Queenslanders.
It’s Wednesday, August 24.

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RUBY:

Paddy, the recent federal election was an extremely good one for the Greens. They picked up three new seats in Queensland, which was a big moment for them. But their success for a lot of people came as a surprise. It wasn't something that people saw coming, particularly in a state like Queensland, right?

PADDY:

I think that's right Ruby. I should say the Greens themselves were quietly confident that they were going to win seats in Brisbane ahead of the federal election. I did speak with Adam Bandt’s office as the leader of the Greens ahead of the election and they didn't expect to win all three.

But they did certainly rattle off Ryan and Griffith as being seats that they had a good chance of winning. And another seat that they thought they might win was Brisbane and also Richmond.

Archival tape -- Adam Bandt:

“This was a green slide, more people turned to the Greens than ever before. And I am so, so delighted that there’ll be so many new Greens MPs from Queensland representing this state and the people of this state in Parliament.”

PADDY:

They've had the one seat in the lower house, the House of Representatives of Melbourne, which is the leader Adam Bandt’s seat. But they have seen other very winnable kind of campaigns kind of slip through their fingers.

I wrote a history of the Greens between 2016 and 2019, and at that time, nobody was talking about how our next real significant breakthrough will be Brisbane. The focus at that time was all on inner Melbourne where, you know, of the top ten seats with the highest primary vote for the Greens in the country, five or six were in Melbourne.

So there was no kind of expectation three years ago that the Greens were going to suddenly break through in Brisbane in such a major way. I think you could say it's definitely been a surprise.

RUBY:

And the result is transformative for the party, isn't it? Because as you say, it was only Adam Bandt, the sole Greens member in the Lower House. That dynamic has been tipped completely by this result with these new members from Queensland now in the party room. So how does that change things for the Greens?

PADDY:

We're about to find out. I mean, it is remarkable that Queensland has gone from the weakest state for the Greens to the strongest. So none of these newly elected Queensland Greens have any kind of track record as politicians up until now. So it'll be interesting to see what they campaign on. And the other thing that's significant of course, is that two of those lower house seats are Liberal seats. So they’re representing areas which are relatively wealthy, they've got more conservative constituencies and the newly elected MPs will have to reflect those constituents effectively over the next three years or they'll find themselves voted out next time around.

RUBY:

Right, so is that the big challenge for the Greens now Paddy, to consolidate these seats, to prove that what happened isn’t a one-off, isn’t a fluke?

PADDY:

What we've seen generally around the country is when Greens get elected to single member constituencies in lower houses, they tend to stay there.

So they do have a reasonable prospect of holding onto those seats. However, they’ve never won three lower house seats before and two of them are liberal. So, I spoke to professor Anne Tiernan who is a consultant with the University of Queensland, she told me that there's a risk when you look at the demographic history of these electorates.

To quote her, “voters in Brisbane, Griffith and Ryan are used to being represented by the parties of government. They are educated, they have high expectations. They'll be giving feedback all the time. If those new MPs”, she said, “are much more progressive than the constituents who shifted their votes to them this time, that will quickly translate to a loss of support next time.”

That's Tiernan’s view, and I think that the Greens will be acutely aware that they cannot take these seats for granted. They also expect that they're not done yet winning seats, you know, that they're looking over at neighbouring electorates and including, I might add, the Federal Opposition Leader Peter Dutton's seat of Dickson.

We're talking against a backdrop of worsening climate change. And no state is going to feel the impact of the transition away from fossil fuels more heavily than Queensland.

And no state at the same time is going to feel the impact of warming more than Queensland.

And although Queensland does have a track record of electing conservative politicians, Brisbane is kind of on this conceptual border between metropolitan Australia and regional Australia. So, the way to think of it is that while there is an orthodoxy in Queensland, there is also a resistance to that orthodoxy. And amongst young people in inner Brisbane, you have a resistance.

RUBY:

We'll be back after this.

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RUBY:

Paddy, we’ve been talking about these new Greens from Queensland and whether they could be a lasting fixture in federal politics. The Greens certainly think they can hold on and even expand their footprint in Queensland. So why are they so confident that they’ll continue to do that?

PADDY:

So Queensland has been a kind of a no-go area for the Greens broadly ever since the party was formed, the Australian Greens was formed in 1992, so almost exactly 30 years ago. And the first senator elected was Larissa Waters in 2010 and she's still there.

But the first politician to breakthrough at a state or local level was Jonathan Sri. Now he got elected in 2016 to the Gabba ward of the Brisbane City Council.

The Brisbane City Council is unlike any other in the country in that it accounts for the majority of the Brisbane metropolitan area. It's the most powerful local authority in Australia. When Jono Sri, and he’s almost universally called Jono, when he won that Gabba ward, which covers the kind of West End area of Brisbane, inner Brisbane, that was a real breakthrough.

Archival tape -- ABC:

“The Greens now have their first Brisbane City councillor and first ever representative in Queensland local politics. Jonathan Sri narrowly won the Gabba ward…”

PADDY:

And it was also interesting how he did it.

Archival tape -- Jono Sri:

“We're going to spend a lot of time listening to ordinary residents and actually doing what they tell us to do. So that's a marked break from what we've seen with mainstream politics here in Brisbane in the past.”

PADDY:

Jono is a politician, I think, unlike any other that I’ve come across lately, he's one of those politicians that breaks the mould.

Archival tape -- Jono Sri:

“...Brisbane City Council won't allow people to gather in the mall and gather in that public space which is off the road. So the LNP is preventing people from gathering lawfully in parks and public squares. So that’s not a problem of my creation, that’s a problem…”

PADDY:

His heritage is Tamil, he was born in Brisbane, and he's an all-in activist. He is fearless, taking on unpopular causes, blending his politics with activism. And he has really blazed the trail for a new style of Greens activism.

RUBY:

So is what we’re seeing in Brisbane, the Greens success there, down to a resurgence of activism as a kind of guiding principle for the party?

PADDY:

Perhaps. Perhaps. I think here you have a genuinely radical politics.

And that's what is part of what I think makes this story in Brisbane so interesting is that a genuinely radical politics has managed to prevail in conservative seats.

So, Jono Sri says, we were talking through this election boldly and openly about capping rents and stopping negative gearing.

And so that was one of the things I was interviewing all these Greens MPs about was to say, is there an appetite in Liberal held seats for the kind of redistributive justice policies that you're advocating?

They believe that those policies have an appeal even in conservative areas. And so Larissa Waters said to me, quite simply, Liberals have kids too. Of course they're worried about housing. Of course they're worried about their kids being priced out of university education or out of, you know, affordable housing. So it's not your centrist Green that's won these seats.

RUBY:

It's your radical green.

PADDY:

It's a self-styled anti-capitalist green.

RUBY:

And so this kind of agenda and this blending of activism and politics that we're seeing from these new Greens members coming through Queensland, how does that fit in with the Greens leader, with Adam Bandt and the future that he sees for the party?

PADDY:

Well, one of the things that struck me, Ruby, actually, when I was interviewing Jono Sri, was that he seemed to be channelling Adam Bandt from an interview that I did with Bandt back in 2016. And he said, if the Greens want to win these lower house seats rather than lecturing voters on climate, they should do more listening and take on board their concerns about unaffordable housing, the high cost of university degrees and insecure work. Jono said almost exactly the same thing to me five years later.

That's the key for the Greens to lifting their vote. And that's what Jono Sri has done in Gabba ward at Brisbane City Council. That's what Michael Berkman has done in the electorate of Maiwar in getting re-elected. That's what Adam Bandt did in Melbourne. So I think it's a formula which paradoxically for whatever reason has jumped from Melbourne to Brisbane and that may be a surprise, but it's certainly something that the Greens are determined to build on.

RUBY:

Paddy, thank you so much for your time.

PADDY:

Thank you Ruby.

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RUBY:

Also in the news today...

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese released the legal advice from the Solicitor General about Scott Morrison’s secret self-appointment to five additional ministries.

Archival tape -- Anthony Albanese:

“Morning…morning…good afternoon. Thank you Andrew.”

In a press conference on Thursday, the Prime Minister read through the legal advice, including the Solicitor-General’s opinion that Morrison’s appointments were validly made under the constitution.

But the Solicitor-General also advised that the actions breached the constitutional principle of responsible government.

Archival tape -- Anthony Albanese:

“Paragraph 44 and 46 go to the principle of responsible government being, to quote the Solicitor-General, ‘fundamentally undermined by the former government's actions.’ Paragraph 47 goes to the problems that were created with multiple ministers being sworn in to a single department without the knowledge of either existing ministers who were responsible or the departmental secretaries and the problems that that potentially would have created or did create.”

Albanese also announced that his government would launch an inquiry into the appointments.

Archival tape -- Anthony Albanese:

“The Cabinet has determined that there will be a need for a further enquiry and we will give consideration at a future meeting into the nature of that enquiry.”

I’m Ruby Jones, this is 7am. See you tomorrow.

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