All That Is Green Doesn’t Fester for Much Longer

There wasn’t much to cheer about in the recent Australian election – the demise of execrable Liberal Party ‘Wets’ like Bridget Archer here in Tasmania notwithstanding – but one result shines bright: the collapse of the Greens in the lower house, and the big ol’ cherry on top: leader Adam Bandt losing his seat.

As well as their Dear Leader, the Greens lost another two seats in the House of Representatives, the chamber of government. Their presence in the lower house has been reduced to just one impotent MP. Likewise in the Senate, the chamber of review, the Greens have gone backwards in every state (Senate seats are counted statewide) bar Tasmania and South Australia. Blame the Greens’ vote holding steady in Tasmania on the influence of the ‘sea change’ Boomer retirees. South Australia is, well, South Australia.

So, was this just a one-off bad election for the Greens, or a sign of a longer-term decline?

Like the Australian Democrats before them, the Greens have had their turn at pretending to status as a third party but their star is fading rapidly.

The parallels between the Australian Democrats and the Greens are even more suggestive. Like the Greens, the Democrats were the party of middle-class brow furrowers: the sort of people who live in the richest suburbs and fret over boutique lefty issues like climate change. Like the Teals today, the Democrats were Liberal Party ‘wets’, the ‘doctors’ wives’ faction, who split off to form their own would-be third party in 1977. For their first decade, the Democrats enjoyed minor, if growing, support. Their influence peaked in 1990, with eight seats and the sole balance of power.

Tellingly, too, like the Greens, their power rose and fell in tandem with Labor’s, peaking during the Bob Hawke years, and crashing during John Howard’s reign. In other words, like the Greens, they were the party of rich people who spouted fashionable lefty opinions, but couldn’t bring themselves to vote for the scruffy oiks in Labor. But they were happy to take Labor’s preferences.

The Democrats’ crash hit the final stretch in the late 1990s, after the defection of leader Cheryl Kernot to Labor. Other members, reading the writing on the wall, defected to the Greens. By 2016, the party was de-registered by the Australian Electoral Commission (they were re-registered in 2019, but have spectacularly failed to win even a fraction of votes).

Are the Greens on the same downward spiral?

In fact, the Green’s high-water mark of first-preference votes was over a decade and five elections ago. Since then, their primary vote has steadily declined. That was largely obscured, though, by the ever-reliable Labor preferences. Thanks to Labor’s support, the Greens’ parliamentary representation peaked in 2022, even as their vote kept declining. Even at this election, despite the Greens’ descent into open anti-Semitism, Labor still directed preferences to them, which makes the Greens’ dire election result even more telling.

The preferred narrative for the Greens’ 2025 shocker is that the party too-obviously embraced extremism. There is some merit to this claim. After all, in the aftermath of the Hamas atrocities on October 7, 2023, it was Greens’ MPs who marched with the slavering Muslim mob who swarmed the vigil for the victims at the Sydney Opera House, chanting ‘Gas the Jews’. That was only the beginning.

The Greens have been the hardest of hard-line ‘pro-Palestine’ (i.e., anti-Jew) agitators. When a Jewish MP’s office was firebombed, when other Jewish properties were firebombed and vandalised with anti-Semitic graffiti: the Greens were there. When MPs’ offices, including the prime minister’s, were attacked and blockaded: the Greens were there. When pro-Hamas graffiti defaced the Australian War Memorial, the Greens cheered it on. And when the Hamas genocidal war cry was bellowed in the Australian parliament, it was Greens MPs.

So, are the Greens a ‘kiwifruit’ (green on the outside and inside) environmental party, who morphed into being first a ‘watermelon’ party, and now a ‘raspberry’ (red from the outside, in) party? That narrative might seem plausible: but only if (like, I suspect, most of their voters), you never paid attention to their actual policies.

In reality, the Greens haven’t ‘turned away from their environmental foundations’, they’ve just stopped even pretending to be an environmental party. The idea that the Greens under Bob Brown were ‘kiwifruit’ is a popular fiction. They were always the ‘watermelon’ party. Witness, for instance, Brown’s tirade at then-President George W Bush during a joint parliamentary address. Their 1995 founding principles emphasised ‘ecological sustainability, intergenerational equity, and social justice’. So, two-thirds of their policy foundation had nothing to do with the environment whatsoever.

They only look like raspberries now, because they’re finally being kinda-sorta open.

The Greens have always been the most secretive party in Australia. They’re the only large party whose conferences are closed to media. When Lee Rhiannon and others mounted a leadership challenge against Brown, it was kept under wraps until after the fact. All that’s changed in the last 18 months is that the Greens’ extremism got laid out for all to see.

There was a reason, then, that hardcore Stalinists like Rhiannon flocked to the Greens. There was a reason a student Adam Bandt declared them ripe for takeover and makeover into an openly hardcore Marxist party.

But if the Greens were secretive extremists, they were good at one thing: branding.

In that, of course, they had the willing support of the mainstream media, most especially the taxpayer-funded broadcaster. ABC staff were three times as likely as the rest of Australia to vote Green. Even more than the rest of the MSM, the ABC were willing accomplices in the Greens’ deceitful campaign to brand themselves as woolly-jumper-wearing tree-huggers.

The Greens’ branding exercise was so successful that they managed to still hang onto a sizeable minority of the vote even as no-one actually knew who they were. Polling showed that very few Australians, even among their own voters, could name a single Greens politician. Including their leader, Adam Bandt.

The ‘brand’ worked well for the Greens – right up until it didn’t.

The Greens’ brand helped them while they were mostly keeping their heads down and their extremism in the shadows. With their openly extreme anti-Semitism of the past 18 months, though, the Greens finally blew it. When their only insurance was their brand, once that brand became tarnished, the Greens had nothing left.

Their One Big Idea of the 2025 election – ‘pro-Palestine’ – was poison to the bulk of the electorate, and didn’t translate into votes in Muslim-dominated seats. While there were big swings against Labor in Muslim seats, the Greens didn’t benefit. Instead, the anti-Semitic Muslim vote swung to Muslim Vote-supported candidates: not in big enough numbers to unseat Labor MPs, but absolutely of no benefit to the Greens.

So, the Greens are convincing no one on environmental issues, and ‘pro-Palestine’ is a single issue that’s not only toxic to most voters, but has no shelf-life. By the next election, the left will have found yet another new ‘cause’ to shriek and stamp their feet about. As the grim reality of Labor’s ‘Net Zero’ policies smash household budgets even harder, ‘climate change’ will be as toxic as ‘pro-Palestine’.

The other reason the Greens’ appeal to the left has declined is that Labor under Albanese is moving ever-further left. Anthony Albanese is, after all, a protege of Whitlam-era communist Tom Uren. As a nascent politician, Albanese was part of the hard-left faction, which allied with groups like the Communist Party of Australia. Albanese remains a creature of the Socialist Left faction of the ALP, along with his close allies Penny Wong and Tanya Plibersek.

The question, then, is whether a new party of the far-left will rise to replace the Greens, as the Australian Democrats were once displaced by the Greens, or whether Labor are just doing the job for them.