Adam Bandt has wrecked the Greens

Like the Liberals, the Greens are now leaderless and bereft of direction. Unlike the Liberals, they can’t blame Trump, or a failure to develop policies, or the inexperience of their leader, or a lack of an election strategy, or a cyclone, for why their campaign ended in disaster. They knew exactly what they were doing and where they were going under Adam Bandt. And they’ve been repudiated by the electorate for it.

Bandt now joins Meg Lees as the worst minor party leader in recent Australian history. Lees’ decision to back the Howard government’s GST ripped her party apart and began its long-term decline into irrelevance. At least the damage Bandt has wrought on the Greens is confined to its presence in the lower house.

But worse for the Greens is that 2025 represented a major opportunity for them. It should have been another 2010: the chance to capitalise on yet another Labor failure on climate and the environment. The 2010 election saw a dramatic expansion in the Greens’ Senate numbers and Bandt’s own election into the Reps, fueled by electoral disenchantment with the Rudd/Gillard governments’ failure to implement a carbon pricing scheme — despite climate change being supposedly the great moral challenge of our time.

Compared to its predecessor, however, the Albanese government is worse on climate. In addition to encouraging and subsidising fossil fuel exports, its limp safeguard mechanism effectively operates as a licence to pump out CO2 in exchange for worthless Australian Carbon Credit Units, propped up by the fiction of credits for human-induced regeneration. Combined with the government’s refusal to implement its commitment to establish an Environmental Protection Agency, its willingness to allow the rotten WA petrostate government to dictate environmental policy, its pandering to the vile salmon farming industry and its refusal to tax fossil fuel exports properly, the Albanese government should have represented a target-rich environment for the Greens.

That should have meant looking to entrench their Brisbane seats into Melbourne-like fortresses and pick up other Melbourne seats that could, one by one, have also been transformed into a permanent Greens presence in the lower house, ready to dictate terms to a minority government, if not at this election, then the coming ones.

Instead, exploiting Labor’s comprehensive failures on the environment and climate was second-order business for Bandt and his coterie. He was more interested in prosecuting economic wars on behalf of one segment of the electorate — renters — urging massive wealth redistribution and big increases in government, while allying the Greens with extreme left, and in the case of the CFMEU, openly corrupt unions. For Bandt, the main game was the economy, not the environment. And his economic message was potentially deeply alienating to traditional Greens voters.

The result: a loss of more than 1% in the primary vote in Queensland, Western Australia and Tasmania. A fall of 0.7% in the Victorian primary vote. The Greens’ vote only lifted in NSW and South Australia. For a party that operates at a sub-15% level of the national vote, and wins and loses seats off tiny shifts in preference flows, such losses are hard to absorb. And so it proved on Saturday.

Bandt losing his own seat is particularly culpable. Regardless of the impact of a redistribution that shifted some heavily Greens booths out of Melbourne, Bandt should have won easily: in the last two elections, he hit 49% on primaries, making him virtually unassailable. Now he’s gone, depriving the Greens of an anchor in Victoria and pushing the dream of a substantial lower house presence deep into the future.

It’s hard to avoid another comparison with Peter Dutton. Dutton spent much of the last term thinking he had Anthony Albanese’s measure, and believing his tactics would deliver him electoral success. So did Bandt, and both were proved wrong in the most humiliating way possible. Bandt at least had the benefit of the Queensland state election last year as a wake-up call, but that only prompted him to rethink his parliamentary tactics and bring his relentless obstructionism to an end. He stuck fast to his broader strategy, and it took him to his doom.

The question for the remaining Greens is whether they stick with the Bandt experiment of becoming Australian politics’ far-left economic party with a secondary focus on the environment, or re-focus on holding an ordinary Labor government to account for its many failings, especially on climate. The Greens are the one significant party that takes the climate crisis seriously. Maybe it’s time they returned to the war on fossil fuels and their political representatives, and ditched the class war stuff.

Should the Greens get back in their lane?

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