The Greens must radicalise, or perish after the 2025 election

The media and political narrative is clear: the Greens’ woeful election performance is the result of voters punishing them for their dangerously radical beliefs (don’t bomb hospitals, starving children is wrong, you should be able to afford the dentist) — the rabid ravings of frothy-lipped eco-terrorists, gone feral from inhaling the fumes of dangerous culture war dogma (trans people should be protected, refugees shouldn’t be tortured, etc).

But if you truly think the Greens ran an “extreme” campaign, you’re probably a tenured columnist writing for somewhere like, oh, I don’t know, [REDACTED]. Among a creaky old media who vaguely remember Bob Ellis as Australia’s Chomsky, the Greens will always appear as a nightmare vision of Unabomber-adjacent Wahhabism. It’s wild that the party’s senior members still haven’t learnt this rather blunt, obvious lesson: these people will always hate them, no matter what they do.

Throughout the federal election, the Greens’ leadership — perhaps cowed by recent state results — pulled back on what various multimillion-dollar smear campaigns framed as their divisive, extremist ideas, such as climate justice, Aboriginal land reform, and ending Israel’s genocide in Gaza. Instead the party made funding social services by taxing megacorps (if this is “radical”, God help us) the centrepiece of an otherwise listless campaign — and were somehow surprised by the vitriol they received from the government, media and lobby groups.

The greatest trick Anthony Albanese pulled this election wasn’t trouncing Peter Dutton; it was sidestepping climate justice and Israel’s genocide in Gaza during the campaign. He achieved this in large part thanks to an obliging media that also prefers to avoid those conversations. Gaza was (and is) Albanese’s greatest weakness, just as surely as it will be the core of his legacy.

The Greens understood this. The past two years saw the party’s diverse left-wing base galvanised by issues the prime minister loathes touching. What momentum the Greens have had since 2022 stems from a growing, popular discontent around issues that are as “distant” as Gaza and as immediate as the price of groceries. Passionate volunteers, grassroots organising and genuinely leftist and progressive actions lent the party an energy that, for a while, made it seem like 2025 was theirs for the taking.

Instead, the party pivoted to policies and messaging that hinged on centrist compromise. Inevitably, the wind went out of their sails, and that excitement and energy rolled back like Bob Brown’s hairline.

There is an awareness among this “new” young-left faction that the party’s leadership and Bike Tory rusted-ons let them down — that they blew it by trying to beat Labor at its own game.

“We tried to become all centrist during the Richard Di Natale era,” a prominent party strategist told me on the condition of anonymity, “and that didn’t work.”

“We need to keep these diverse communities that have found the Greens through our advocacy on Gaza,” they said. “If we stop talking about Gaza, we stop demanding racial justice, we stop demanding economic justice, and we just try and be like some centrist climate movement — then what separates us from the teals?”

On the party’s new blood, they said: “All these young people and immigrant communities who voted for us for the first time: if we take one step back, why would they stay with us?”

The argument that Gaza cost them the election is a non-starter. “We didn’t do it to be popular,” this person stated flatly. “We did it to do the right thing.”

If there’s anything Albanese understands, it’s that doing the “right” thing isn’t worth the bother. The Greens’ failure to exploit this during the election was an own goal. The prime minister’s petulant sooking about Max Chandler-Mather edged levels of cringe that should have been weaponised against. Instead, we were all told to act like his nappy-filling had a shimmer of cool to it.

What may have undone the Greens more than anything is that familiar weakness of any progressive party whose reformist policies require considered conversation.

“My experience campaigning was where there were higher levels of housing stress or income stress, the impacts of anti-politics were much stronger,” a young and well-regarded Greens organiser told me. “When people are too worried about paying rent or eating, they don’t give a fuck about politics.”

And yet, it’s these folks they found the easiest to win over to their cause. “The anti-politics people were by far the easiest demographic to swing to voting Greens for the first time,” they told me.

“It was the message of winnability that usually got them over the line: in our campaign, we told everyone just how close it was last time and you’d just see people’s eyes light up. Like, decades of political stagnation and being told constantly that change is impossible had left them completely switched off and the idea that that change was within reach really cut through.”

They went on to say that, with hindsight, the disappointing outcome makes sense “as a party coming up against a really strong contradiction: in a lot of cases, the classes of people we’re talking to have contradictory interests. Broadly, who’s benefiting from the status quo, and who’s not — I think that’s what’s come through in the results.”

The party may succumb to its enemies’ revisionism, however. These younger party members dread that the elders will steer them towards something resembling an appendage of the ALP, existing solely to prod the government in the ribs when it’s about to steer the proverbial “progressive patriotism”-fuelled Dodge Ram off the road.

The charge that the Greens are radical is frightening because they appear to be the only party addressing reality. Climate catastrophe is now inevitable. Refugees are being illegally mistreated. Israel is committing genocide. I can’t afford to go to the dentist.

The only radicalism I see in parliament is the prime minister’s radical centrism, the performance and maintenance of which requires a strain of disengagement that is genuinely, frighteningly, extreme.