And the Bandt played out: Inside the Greens result

Greens leader Adam Bandt has lost his seat. At 2.15 on Thursday afternoon he held a media conference to announce he had just called Sarah Witty, his Labor opponent for the seat of Melbourne, to concede defeat.

Almost 24 hours earlier, ABC election analyst Antony Green had called the result, but Bandt held back, in the hope that absent and declaration votes, which broke solidly to him in 2022, would do so again.

Fifteen years after Bandt won the inner-urban seat of Melbourne from the ALP, Labor has taken it back, along with at least two of the Greens’ other three seats in the House of Representatives. Maybe all four.

Bandt’s loss will stand as the most stunning outcome of last Saturday’s extraordinary election, even more than the loss of Dickson by opposition leader Peter Dutton.

Dutton’s seat was marginal, held by a narrow 1.7 per cent at the 2022 election. Bandt, by contrast, held his by a healthy 10 per cent. In fact, he barely needed any preferences to win it in 2022; his primary vote was 49.6 per cent.

While a subsequent redistribution cut Bandt’s margin to a notional 6.5 per cent, no one saw this coming. There were concerns about the three Queensland seats the party picked up at the last election – Griffith, Ryan and Brisbane – but not Melbourne.

Opinion polls during the campaign showed the Dutton opposition tanking but the Greens vote holding, or slightly up. The party had high hopes for a few more seats, among them Wills and Cooper in Victoria, and Richmond in northern New South Wales.

On Wednesday, after it was clear Max Chandler-Mather, the high-profile member for Griffith, had lost to Labor, along with Stephen Bates in the adjacent electorate of Brisbane, Bandt maintained the party might win as many as four seats.

“We’re feeling confident in Melbourne,” he told media. “We’re feeling very good in seats of Ryan and in Wills, but there’s going to be a lot more votes to count before we’re able to make a final determination about those. And we’re still in the hunt in the seat of Richmond.”

At his Monday media conference Bandt also expressed satisfaction in the role the Greens had played in the defeat of the Dutton opposition. Indeed, the party made that a central part of the pitch to voters in the months preceding the election.

“Keep Dutton out. Push Labor to act.” It was like a mantra, repeated endlessly by Bandt and his team.

It might have seemed like a good slogan when the polls and pundits were predicting a minority Labor government, reliant on Greens and other crossbenchers in the lower house. In retrospect, it seems the message was not received as intended.

In the privacy of the polling booth, many left-of-centre voters determined the surest way of keeping Dutton out was to vote for Labor rather than the Greens. The final tally is not yet in, but it appears the first preference vote for Labor in the House is up by something over 2 per cent, while for the Greens it is down about 0.5 per cent.

Compared with the result for the Coalition parties – likely a fall in the order of 3.5 per cent – the Greens’ decline seems minor. As it turned out, though, the historic electoral failure of the Coalition also impacted the Greens.

“So,” says one party strategist, “they crashed and brought others down with them.”

This explanation is at least partly true, and Max Chandler-Mather’s loss serves as an example.

In Griffith, in 2022, he led on the primary vote, with 34.6 per cent – well short of a majority. The Coalition candidate finished second with 30.7 and the Labor incumbent came third with 28.9.

As often happens with preferential voting, it was the third-placed candidate who determined the result. Labor preferences flowed heavily to Chandler-Mather and pushed him to a majority. The final, two-candidate-preferred (2CP) result came in 60.5 per cent to 39.5 for the Greens.

At last Saturday’s election, the order in which candidates finished changed. It was Labor first, Greens second and Liberal National Party third. Labor’s Renee Coffey got roughly the same primary vote share Chandler-Mather did in 2022, but this time it was the Coalition preferences that were distributed and they pushed Labor to a majority.

Coffey beat Chandler-Mather by only about three points in the primary vote but looks likely to win in 2CP terms by about 61-39 – largely because the candidate for the LNP finished third, rather than second.

It is one of the peculiarities of Australia’s preferential voting system that it can, in some tight three-way contests, result in big margins on the basis of small swings.

“Any time the top two is not really clear, preferencing gets really weird,” says Ben Raue, election analyst with The Tally Room blog.

“This is particularly a problem for the Greens … [who] have a much, much, much better chance of winning seats when they’re up against the Liberal in the final count than when they’re up against Labor.”

Raue contrasts the fate of Chandler-Mather with that of the Greens’ Elizabeth Watson-Brown in the seat of Ryan, which covers Brisbane’s affluent western suburbs.

In 2022 she finished second on primaries, with just over 30 per cent of the vote, more than eight points behind the LNP candidate. She got over the line, however, with preferences from third-placed Labor.

In this year’s election, Watson-Brown’s primary vote was even lower – 28.7 per cent, seven points behind the Coalition candidate – but she appears to have squeaked back into office because the order in which the parties finished did not change. The ALP again came third and she benefited from Labor voters’ preferences.

“So, Elizabeth Watson-Brown survives and Max Chandler-Mather doesn’t,” says Raue, “and the main reason for that is that Ryan is a more conservative seat.”

It’s quite perverse: the more conservative seat ends up being represented by the more left-wing Green, while the more progressive one ends up represented by the more centrist Labor member.

The bottom line here is that while the Greens lost seats in the House of Representatives, including that of their leader, it was nothing like the disaster that the 2CP result would indicate. Their primary vote was down only a little.

Bear in mind also that there is a long-term trend away from the major parties. Last Saturday, almost one third of voters – a record proportion – opted for someone else.

Younger voters, particularly young women, are far more inclined to vote for the Greens than previous generations were. At this election, more of them went for Labor, but should the Albanese government fail to sufficiently address the concerns of these younger voters on issues of housing, social justice and the environment, the Greens remain an obvious alternative.

That is not to say the party does not have problems. Analysts have noted a trend in recent local and state elections, now replicated at the federal level, for the Greens to pick up votes in areas where they have not previously done well and lose them in what Raue calls their “heartland” seats.

Some attribute this to the broadening of the suite of issues the Greens now champion, in particular their strong criticism of Israel over the war in Gaza.

Raue says Gaza appears to have won the party “big swings in seats like Chifley and Werriwa – but not big enough to win”. He cautions that he doesn’t believe this “explains why the vote’s going down in their heartland”.

Some senior Greens, speaking on condition of anonymity, argue it’s not the party’s policy positioning so much as the immoderate way those positions have been argued that is damaging.

On Gaza, for example, it is one thing to accuse Israel of committing crimes under international law but quite another to accuse the Australian government of being “complicit in Israel’s genocide” – to quote Greens deputy leader Mehreen Faruqi.

While the party has always had a broad social justice agenda, some Greens argue there has not been enough emphasis recently on its “core turf” of environment and climate.

They also worry that the party was seen to be not just obstructive but aggressively so in the last parliament. They say the feedback from voters is that the party seems too “angry” and “personal” in its critiques of the government.

In his first interview since the election, Anthony Albanese picked up on this sentiment, lambasting the Greens for forming a “Noalition” with the opposition to block government initiatives in many areas, notably housing.

The prime minister singled out the defeated housing spokesperson, Max Chandler-Mather, noting that he “stood before signs at a CFMEU rally in Brisbane, describing me as a Nazi”.

The prime minister said he found some of Chandler-Mather’s questions in parliament “offensive”.

It will be interesting to see if the Greens adopt a more cooperative, or at least polite, approach to negotiations with the government.

While the party’s performance in terms of lower house seats was poor, in realpolitik terms it does not actually amount to much. Labor’s win was so big – the government is on track to hold about 90 of the 150 lower house seats – that crossbenchers of any hue will be largely irrelevant in that chamber.

The chamber that matters is the Senate, where the Greens held all their seats. As NSW Senator David Shoebridge explains to The Saturday Paper: “I think a lot of people were really anxious about getting Peter Dutton with a side serve of Trump. I know I was. That played out with people voting for Labor out of fear of Dutton in the lower house, then voting with their heart for the Greens in the Senate.”

Labor is projected to win 28 Senate seats, an increase of four. However, to get legislation through the upper house, it needs another 11 votes. As it happens, that is the exact number the Greens have.

In one way, this will make things simpler for the Albanese government. Getting bills through the outgoing Senate required wrangling a diverse cross bench. In the new Senate, Labor will only require the Greens’ support to pass legislation the Coalition opposes.

As Bandt said in his Monday media conference: “The only barrier to getting dental into Medicare now and passing it through the parliament is Labor. The only barrier, the only obstacle, to making childcare free is Labor. The only obstacle to stopping new coal and gas mines from being opened is Labor. We stand ready in the Senate to make this the most progressive parliament that Australia has seen.”

Labor can still do deals with the conservatives, but when it comes to enacting progressive change, the only parliamentary votes that really matter are those of Labor and the Greens.

All the other minor parties and independents now face a problem of relevance, particularly the community independents.

Their performance in this election was something of a mixed bag.

Before Saturday, Kate Chaney, in the Western Australian seat of Curtin, was widely considered the most vulnerable. She won, with almost 53 per cent of the vote.

The three incumbents in NSW also were comfortably returned.

Zali Steggall has maintained her iron grip on Tony Abbott’s old seat, with about 61 per cent of the vote after preferences.

Allegra Spender gained a substantial swing and is now well entrenched, on almost 57 per cent 2CP. Sophie Scamps improved her hold on Mackellar, easily beating the Liberals’ James Brown, 55.5 to 44.5.

There is a chance of another community independent being elected in NSW. As of Thursday, Nicolette Boele was only about 200 votes behind the Liberals’ Gisele Kapterian in Bradfield.

In country Victoria, Helen Haines romped back in Indi, with more than 58 per cent of the vote after preferences.

Melbourne proved to be the toughest test for the teals. Zoe Daniel narrowly lost Goldstein in a rematch with Tim Wilson, the Liberal she beat in 2022. If Monique Ryan wins in Kooyong, and it’s not certain, she can probably thank tactical voters. The Greens’ vote share fell about 2.7 per cent there, most of which likely went to Ryan.

Interestingly, Labor underperformed in the teal seats, compared with its overall result, in several cases losing vote share. So did the Greens. This can be read in a couple of ways: either those former Labor and Greens voters actually preferred the teal candidate or they saw voting for the teal as the best way to ensure a loss for the Liberals.

The evidence would suggest the latter. Post-election analysis in 2022 showed most of the teals’ vote did not come from disaffected Liberals but from voters who had previously supported the Greens or Labor.

This fact raises questions about the teals’ future electoral prospects. If they come to be seen as irrelevant, Labor and Greens tactical voters could abandon them.

In summary, the 2025 federal election produced a great result for Labor and a troubling one for almost everyone else. Despite the Greens’ disastrous result in the House, however, it remains a major force in the parliament.

As to whether the party uses its power constructively likely depends heavily on who next leads it. Now the jockeying begins for the leadership and future direction of the Greens.

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