The Queensland election lessons for the Greens and Labor

Anthony Albanese’s press conference last Sunday, the day after the Labor Party’s emphatic loss in the Queensland election, was a heroic effort of damage control.

Labor went into the election with a commanding majority in the state parliament – 52 of 93 seats. Last Saturday, Queensland voters took away about a third of them.

The final numbers were not in when the prime minister spoke, but it already was clear Labor had been routed.

Nonetheless, Albanese insisted on looking on the bright side. The result, he said, “was much better for Queensland Labor than what was anticipated just weeks ago, let alone months ago”.

It’s true that for the better part of a year opinion polls had predicted a worse result for Labor. An Australian Financial Review-Freshwater Strategy survey at the end of September, the formal start of the election campaign, was typical of what many public polls were showing. It had the government led by Steven Miles “on track for a wipeout”.

The poll found Labor’s primary vote was at just 30 per cent, down 10 points from the previous election. The conservative alternative, the Liberal National Party, was up to 43 per cent.

Labor’s numbers ticked up through the campaign, however. In the end, the swing was a little over 7 per cent, which was still enough to cost it as many as 19 seats.

Albanese chose not to dwell on Labor’s losses to the Liberal National Party. Instead, he focused on a small victory: Labor, he said, had regained one seat it lost to the Greens at the previous election.

That win, he said, “sends a message … that people who elected Greens party representatives to state and federal parliament expected them to play a progressive role, not to play a blocking role. To seek to bring people together, not to divide people. And I think there’s a big message in this result for [federal Greens leader] Adam Bandt.”

This was a questionable assertion in several ways. First, because it was not clear – and at time of writing still is not clear – that Labor has actually taken the seat of South Brisbane.

It certainly looks likely that Labor will win it, even though the Greens incumbent, Amy MacMahon, won the most first-preference votes – just over a third of them. Labor finished a close second, the LNP a close third, and One Nation a distant fourth.

Assuming that order holds, Liberal preferences will elect Labor. It remains possible, however, that postal ballots, which tend to break conservative, and the flow of preferences from One Nation voters, could see Labor slip into third place, in which case Labor preferences will re-elect MacMahon.

Such are the vagaries of preferential voting that the preferences of the most right-wing party in the contest for the seat could end up handing it to the most left-wing party.

Second, Labor’s late rally, in the view of many observers, was significantly aided by its adoption of a number of Greens policies.

The promise of free school lunches, for example, was a Greens policy adopted by the Miles government as it sought to minimise its losses.

Likewise, 50 cent public transport fares were announced by Miles a few months ahead of the election – and then adopted by the LNP a few weeks ahead. Cheap or free public transport was Greens policy taken to the 2017 and 2020 state elections.

The Greens promised to establish 200 bulk-billing GP clinics – at a cost to government of $4.75 billion over four years. Labor did not quite match that one but still promised 50 such clinics.

“So,” says Richard Denniss, executive director of The Australia Institute, and a former Greens strategic adviser, “a Labor premier, desperate to be remembered well and win back votes, went full left. And that helped Labor claw back support in the final days of the campaign.”

Indeed, analysis of polling data by The Australia Institute showed the anti-Labor swing among those people who voted on Saturday was 4.9 per cent, compared with an 8.6 per cent swing among the 44 per cent of people who voted early. So Labor won the polling day on a two-party preferred basis, “albeit narrowly”, the research concluded.

One should take with a grain of salt any suggestion the Miles government might have won if people had voted later, but it does suggest Labor might benefit from being open to more progressive ideas.

That goes to the third questionable aspect of Albanese’s post-election analysis: that the down-to-the-wire result in South Brisbane was somehow attributable to voter perceptions of the behaviour of the federal Greens.

“Actually,” says ABC election analyst Antony Green, “it’s largely to do with the change in Liberal preferences.”

At the last election, the Liberals placed the Greens above Labor on their ticket. This time they reversed that.

More broadly, the Queensland results do not show that voters deserted the Greens. The party’s overall share of the vote was about 9.5 per cent, unchanged from the 2020 election.

That is not to say the Queensland result was a happy one for the third force in Australian politics. If it loses South Brisbane, it loses half its representation in the state parliament. The outcome of the election looks the worse for the fact that the party went in talking a big game. It was hopeful of picking up as many as four extra seats.

In the view of Kos Samaras, a former Labor campaign strategist and now director of the political consultancy and polling outfit RedBridge Group, the Queensland election result confirms a worrying trend for the Greens: the party is still getting roughly the same number of votes, but not necessarily in the places it needs them.

Historically, he says, the Greens appealed to younger voters, “18- to 34-year-olds in specific geographies”, mostly inner-urban electorates. More recently, the party has picked up more votes outside those areas, but in the places where it used to draw its greatest support it has stalled or gone backwards.

“So there has been a broadening, but also a flattening,” says Samaras. “And that flattening is what is hurting them among older Millennials.

“What we’ve seen since Albanese has been elected is a very aggressive agenda by the Greens, and they think that that works for them. Well, it doesn’t. It’s costing them now, significantly.”

Samaras cites as evidence the Greens’ performance in several other recent contests: the New South Wales local government elections, the Brisbane City Council election and last month’s ACT election. In all three, he says, the party underperformed.

Those first two examples aren’t as clear-cut as they seem.

The NSW local government elections, says Greens NSW campaign manager Chris Kerle, generated the Greens’ best-ever result.

“We elected 65 councillors in 2021 and elected 73 this time around,” he says.

Kerle points out that the party regained the mayoralty of Byron Shire, and increased representation in Ballina, Byron, Newcastle, Northern Beaches, Sydney and Wollongong.

He notes that Greens candidates “broke through” in Blacktown, Cumberland, Nambucca and Tamworth councils for the first time, and gained new seats in Bathurst, Campbelltown, Canterbury-Bankstown, Mosman, North Sydney, Ryde and Wingecarribee. Which suggests, to use Samaras’s terminology, there has been a “broadening” of the Greens’ appeal beyond its inner-urban heartland, but no flattening.

In the March poll for Brisbane, Australia’s biggest local government area, the Greens won only two of 26 wards, compared with five for Labor, 18 for the LNP (plus the lord mayor), and one independent.

This was a doubling of the Greens’ previous representation, however, and the party achieved large swings that saw it outpoll Labor in 10 wards.

Samaras’s critique is harder to counter in relation to the ACT, where Labor has governed for the past 23 years, mostly in concert with the six Greens.

At the October 19 election, the Greens lost two seats.

Antony Green points out, however, “their vote was only about 0.9 per cent down”.

The result does not suggest the party did particularly poorly, Green says, but that they barely squeaked into six seats at the last election and “were at a point of support where any drop would cost them seats”.

It certainly did not indicate any rightward drift by ACT voters, says Stewart Jackson, senior lecturer in government and international relations at the University of Sydney. The two seats lost by the Greens were won by similarly left-leaning independents.

“The ACT illustrated quite clearly that strong independents with left-of-centre politics can challenge the Greens effectively,” he says. “So that’s something for the party to think about.”

The detail about these other contests is useful context for the contention that the Greens are in serious electoral trouble – as put by some commentators on election night in Queensland, and hinted at by Albanese in his Sunday media conference.

“Yes, they did badly,” says one former Greens strategist, speaking anonymously so as to be more frank, “but it’s not the existential crisis that some have portrayed it to be. It seems like every time the Greens have a dip or something doesn’t go quite right, it’s like, ‘Have the Greens peaked, are the Greens over?’ ”

The former strategist does give some credence to Samaras’s view that the “family feud” between Labor and the Greens is mutually destructive. It damages the Greens to be perceived as obstructionist and damages Labor to be seen as weak.

“And there is fault on both sides,” he says.

On the Labor side, he points to the continual efforts to portray the Greens as “extremists” for taking positions that are not so radical.

Likewise, he says, the Greens have been unnecessarily intransigent, and have occasionally slipped into left-wing populism, “whether it’s being divisive on Palestine, or blocking Labor’s housing policy, or the antics of Max [Chandler-Mather] supporting the CFMEU, or overstepping on the RBA, or just generally taking too aggressive a stance…”

“So parties need to work out how to work together, rather than just fight each other, because when they do, they reinforce each other’s negatives, and that just helps the LNP,” the former Greens strategist says.

“And in the case of some individual offices, they have worked together.”

He points to the “very detailed, negotiated deal” between Bandt’s office and Climate Change Minister Chris Bowen on the safeguard mechanism to reduce emissions by big industries.

“There have been a number of other examples when they have worked together. Think about the 43 per cent [emissions reduction] target, or Tanya [Plibersek] and Sarah [Hanson-Young] working together on the Murray–Darling and the nature repair market.

“But it needs to happen at a higher level. Maybe it’s a Bandt/Albo problem. Albo, though, is such a brawler he doesn’t seem to want to work it out.”

It’s debatable whether the Greens do, either. At their post-election media conference on Monday, the party made slightly conciliatory noises.

“We’re up for working constructively with the government,” Bandt said, “just as we have to date and passed many pieces of legislation together.”

Chandler-Mather also extended the offer of cooperation. “Our door is open,” he said. “We genuinely want to find solutions to the cost-of-living and housing crisis.”

Both Bandt and Chandler-Mather, however, insisted that would depend on Labor dropping what they called its “my way or the highway” approach to negotiating.

We’ve heard that from them before, of course, but the evidence of the Queensland election added weight to their call for greater cooperation.

Labor lost badly, but as Albanese himself conceded, it could have been much worse. Very arguably, the thing that made the difference was Labor’s adoption of policies from the minor party.

The Greens also lost, arguably because voters saw them as too intransigent.

There was a lesson for both parties in the result. They can either find a way to work together or they can hand the keys to the Lodge to Peter Dutton.

Whatever their differences, neither Labor nor the Greens want that. 

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