Adam Bandt is the right leader to heal the Greens’ internal divisions and take the policy fight up to the Coalition and Labor. Whether that will translate into higher popular support for the Greens remains to be seen.
Bandt comes from Perth, represents Melbourne and has the left credentials to appeal to the radical anti-capitalists of Sydney and Brisbane. How that sits in the Greens’ spiritual heartland, Tasmania, will be interesting to watch.
Bandt is a very different Greens leader to either Bob Brown or Christine Milne, both pure Tasmanian environmental activists motivated by a core philosophy that the Greens were “neither left nor right but out in front” – a slogan picked up by die Grünen in the 1980s. The whole point of forming a Greens political party, for them, was that neither Liberal nor Labor were capable of responding to the ecological crisis that has been increasingly plain since at least the publication of Limits to Growth in 1972.
Brown, who nearly joined the Liberal party as a young man, maintained this stance as Greens leader throughout his career, having symbolic meetings with Tasmanian premier Robin Gray in 1989, before deciding to back Labor premier Michael Field into minority government, and meeting with Tony Abbott in 2010, before deciding to back Julia Gillard. But it was not for show: the Greens propped up the minority Liberal government of Kate Carnell in the ACT in the 1990s, and Tony Rundle in Tasmania under then state leader Christine Milne.
Although he was not an environmental activist, and once toyed with joining the Labor party, Richard Di Natale inherited the Brown and Milne philosophy. Following Labor’s defeat in 2019, with leader Anthony Albanese taking the party back to the middle, Di Natale styled the Greens as the “real opposition”. Di Natale was a non-ideological leader who declared at the beginning of his leadership in 2015 that the Greens were the “natural home of progressive, mainstream Australian voters”, including small-l liberals. After Milne was criticised as being too intransigent in refusing to deal with the Abbott government, Di Natale as Greens leader took a pragmatic approach, doing outcome-driven deals with the Coalition, particularly under Malcolm Turnbull, including on multinational tax avoidance and senate voting reform.
The drift to the centre under Di Natale – more perceived than actual – upset the left of the Greens, inspired by the rise of outwardly socialist politicians like Jeremy Corbyn in the UK and Bernie Sanders in the US, as anti-austerity politics bit overseas. Radicals in NSW, Victoria and Queensland felt their party had become hostage to “tree tories”, or “neoliberals on bikes”. In Brisbane, radical Greens councillor Jonathan Sri told me his camp was very wary of career politicians, “guys in suits talking down to people”.
Bandt’s background is not environmental activism but hard left politics – he quit the ALP to join the socialist “Left Alliance” as a student at Murdoch University, worked for years as an industrial lawyer at Slater and Gordon, and later did his doctorate on Marx and the law. He will satisfy a hunger in the Greens for a leftwing populism, to respond to the populism of the right. If that means the occasional rhetorical boil-over, so be it. In his first press conference on Tuesday, Bandt made clear he will not be doing deals with the Coalition. He will focus on working with Labor and the crossbench to achieve outcomes, and he has racked up a solid track record from his position in the lower house, brokering the deal that got the Medevac legislation up in the last parliament.
Having boosted his vote in Melbourne over four successive elections, and seeded successful campaigns in neighbouring federal and state seats, Bandt is well-placed to restore the Greens’ electoral fortunes in the party’s heartland. He knows what it takes to win over a majority of voters in a lower house campaign, which is what the Greens need to do to grow – it’s one of the key differences between them and the Democrats.
For the past decade at least, the Greens have done well when Labor makes a meal of climate action – certainly in 2010, and very arguably in 2019. There are signs that Labor is going soft again under leader Albanese, with resources spokesman Joel Fitzgibbon cuddling up to the climate deniers in the Parliamentary Friends of Climate Action and spruiking coal exports, and powerful CFMMEU president Tony Maher, who regards Adani’s Carmichael project to open up the Galilee Basin as just another coal mine, telling Crikey last week his union would “never come out and oppose a mine that creates jobs”. We hear a lot about opponents of climate action on the right, not so much on the left.
As the Greens climate spokesperson over recent years, Bandt has toured coal communities in Western Australia, Victoria, New South Wales and Queensland. He will be about building bridges to coal workers, not shouting at them. His proposed “Green New Deal” – a term borrowed from the Justice Democrats in the US – is radical policy with its massive public investment in renewables, job guarantee and universal social services. It is unapologetically socialist – as NSW Greens MP David Shoebridge tweeted yesterday to One Nation’s Malcolm Roberts – but it is also the kind of response that is commensurate with the climate emergency now staring us in the face.
• Paddy Manning is the author of Inside the Greens: The True Story of the Party, the Politics and the People
