Is this the Green ceiling?

Earlier this week we looked at the Australian election result in the light of the fortunes of its two major players, first the ALP government and then the Liberal-National Coalition. Unequivocally it was a victory for the first and a defeat for the second. The third major player, the Greens, tell a somewhat more complicated story.

The Greens went into the election with four members of the House of Representatives and twelve positions in the Senate (one of which is actually held by an independent, who left the party in 2023). Senate counting is ongoing, but the six Greens positions up for re-election are all secure. In the lower house, however, three of the four MPs have been defeated, including leader Adam Bandt, with Elizabeth Watson-Brown in Ryan the only survivor. Potential gains in Macnamara, Richmond and Wills have not materialised, although in the latter two they came very close.

The nationwide Green vote is currently sitting on 11.7% for the Reps (down 0.5% on 2022) and 12.0% for the Senate (down 0.6%). A fair bit of what’s still to be counted is absentee votes, on which the Greens usually do well, so those numbers will probably come up a bit, but even at best they’ve clearly failed to make any discernible improvement.

There are two narratives going around about this. The more popular one is that the Greens under Bandt’s leadership veered off towards the far left and paid an electoral price for it (Bernard Keane is representative of this view). The less common – but understandably popular among Greens supporters – is that the losses were a temporary aberration produced by one-off factors, including an intense anti-Green campaign from News Corp and others, and an unusually low Liberal vote, which often pushed them into third place from which their preferences ran against the Greens.

There is some truth in both views. My opinion is closer to the first, but it’s important not to overstate it. Back in 2011 and again in 2018 I produced a table showing what had happened to the Greens vote in every state: it’s time to update that. Here is the Greens primary vote in every jurisdiction in the last eight elections, plus last week’s federal result (lower houses only, but upper houses show the same pattern):

	1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9
Federal	5	7.2	7.8	11.8	8.6	10.2	10.4	12.2	11.7
N.S.W.	2.6	3.9	8.4	9	10.3	10.3	9.6	9.7
Victoria	0.7	1.2	9.7	10	11.2	11.5	10.7	11.5
Queensland	6.8	8	8.4	7.5	8.4	10	9.5	9.9
W. Australia	4.7	7.3	7.6	11.9	8.4	8.9	6.9	11.1
Sth Australia	n/a	n/a	2.4	6.5	8.1	8.7	6.7	9.1
Tasmania	11.1	10.2	18.1	16.6	21.6	13.8	10.3	12.4
A.C.T.	9.1	9.1	9.3	15.6	10.7	10.3	13.5	12.2
N. Territory	n/a	n/a	4.2	4.3	3.3	2.9	4.5	8.1

There is no sign of a general fall in the Greens vote; apart from Tasmania, it is at or close to its maximum everywhere. But there is also no progress being made. In several places there was a sharp dip after the vote first reached double figures, from which it gradually recovered and then plateaued. It does rather look as if there’s a natural ceiling to Greens support somewhere around the 12% mark (again, with Tasmania as the exception).

So it may be that the Greens vote was going to stagnate regardless of their strategy. But it does seem that Bandt was taking the party in an unhelpful direction. His defenders argue that Greens policies are not extreme and sit within a social-democratic mainstream, but the problem was more one of tone than of actual policy. As I remarked on Facebook a couple of days ago, “It should be possible to support the Palestinians without conveying the impression that you hate Jews, and it should be possible to support renters without conveying the impression that you hate landlords.”

The Greens also, of course, are quite right to complain that the electoral system works relentlessly against them. Proportionately, they should be winning about 18 seats instead of struggling just to hold one. But the party has always faced that challenge, as does every minor party under single-member districts. That’s the cause of what I described in last week’s election preview as the “almost total absence of the far left from the electoral scene” – but transforming a Green party into a far left party isn’t going to help.

We’ll talk more about the effect of the electoral system in a week or two when the results are more complete. We’ll also have something to say about the Senate, in which the Greens will remain powerful at least for another two terms. But tomorrow I want to focus on the Greens’ competitors in the minor party space, and particularly on the Teals.