The Greens are struggling to pick up extra lower house seats targeted in Sydney and Melbourne where supporters were hoping for an upset and look set to return to parliament with the same number of senators the party had in the previous term.
Melbourne MP Adam Bandt was comfortably elected for a third time but as it stands he remains the lone Green in the House of Representatives, while in the Senate, the party has lost Robert Simms in South Australia but looks to gain a Senator in Queensland.
But Greens leader Richard Di Natale was high-spirited on Sunday, saying the party maintained hopes for taking the Victorian seats of Melbourne Ports and Batman from Labor, which remain too close to call. The party stood candidates in all 150 lower house seats across the country, with party sources claiming there has been a national swing towards them of around 2%.
However, Australian Electoral Commission figures have the party with 9.9% of the lower house vote, representing a swing towards them of 1.3%.
“We have had an extraordinary result in terms of the Greens vote across the country and certainly here in Victoria in some key seats,” Di Natale said.
“What we’ve seen in some states like Victoria is a swing higher than our national average. Victoria clearly is a powerhouse for the Australian Greens right now.”
Di Natale said early on in the election campaign he believes the seats that will turn to the Greens within the next decade include Batman, Wills, Kooyong, Melbourne Ports, and the Liberal seat of Higgins in Victoria, Grayndler, Wentworth, Sydney, and Richmond in NSW, and Fremantle in Western Australia.
This election, they had highest hopes for the increasingly gentrifying seats surrounding Bandt’s in Victoria; Higgins, Wills, Melbourne Ports and Batman.
The Greens deployed extraordinary resources into Batman in a bid to get perpetual candidate Alex Bhathal over the line. Despite an army of 600 volunteers knocking on 30,000 doors, key campaign strategists from Bandt’s camp being assigned to the electorate, and sitting Labor MP David Feeney stumbling his way through an embattled campaign, election night did not deliver a clear result.
With 45 of 48 polling places returned, Feeney remains just ahead with 51.45% of the vote. But Di Natale rejected suggestions the Greens had been too optimistic in trying to target four Victorian electorates and should have instead focussed resources solely on Batman. He also denied that given the resources allocated to the seat, Bhathal should have polled more strongly.
“We were coming from a mile behind,” Di Natale said.
“Let’s remember what needed to be achieved here. We needed an extraordinary swing, because the Liberal and Labor party exchanged preferences. Unlike other marginal seats, what we needed to do was get over the combined Labor-Liberal vote.
“That’s a huge mountain to climb. To be right near the pinnacle of that in Batman and Melbourne Ports is a reflection of a terrific campaign. I don’t think anyone could suggest that a swing of 10-to-12% is anything other than an extraordinary success.”
Preferencing is what has left Melbourne Ports hanging in the balance, where Greens candidate Stephanie Hodgins-May is fighting to pull ahead of Labor’s Michael Danby, who has preferenced the Liberal candidate Owen Guest before the Greens.
A strong grassroots campaign for LGBTI activist and former Australian Rules footballer Jason Ball in Higgins saw most polling stations in the electorate plastered in green, and a visible force of volunteers on the ground before election day. But Liberal MP Kelly O’Dwyer held on, achieving 56.7% of the vote with 69.5% of ballot papers counted.
In the days before the election the Di Natale talked-up Ball’s chances, saying it could be “the upset of the election” and describing it as one to watch. It was a tough ask of Ball, with Higgins previously considered a safe Liberal seat. Ball nonetheless achieved 43.3% of the vote, with a 3.2% swing against O’Dwyer.
Di Natale maintained the seat and that of Wills were likely to fall to the Greens in the next federal election, when much smaller swings will be required, saying; “we have cemented the foundations of our party”.
Meanwhile, Di Natale attributed Simms failure in the Senate to the success of the Nick Xenophon Team. Currently in the Senate, they have 8.84% of the vote, representing a swing against them of 0.39%. He took aim at far-right One Nation leader Paulin Hanson, whose political career has resurrected after she gained a Queensland Senate spot.
“We can be certain that Pauline Hanson has made a successful return to the Senate,” he told reporters on Sunday.
“Let me just say; the Greens will stand against her racist and bigoted agenda. We won’t roll over like John Howard did when Pauline Hanson first came onto the political scene federally. We’ll take it right up to her.
“In a modern Australia there is no place for racism, there is no place for bigotry, there is no place for the sort of hatred she’s spreading through her views.
“We will be the opposition to her in the senate, taking it right up to her and letting her know that we would rather a country that doesn’t pray on people’s fears and anxieties, but rather that appeals to their better nature, that brings this country together rather than divides it in the way that she will.”
Whoever formed government would find the Greens pushing for strong action on climate change and more compassionate treatment of asylum seekers, Di Natale said.
He criticised the Labor party for its approach to campaigning on the privatisation Medicare, saying “of course, the Labor party over-egged it,” but he added the Coalition had “brought it upon themselves”.
“Unfortunately under the Coalition, with the freezing of the Medicare rebates, with the gutting of the public hospital agreement and ripping billions away from public hospitals, they did take the hatchet to our health system,” he said.
“The privatisation issue was, to be frank, a side-show. The truth was scary enough.”
