The Greens’ unexpected election losses, wiping out three of their four lower house MPs including leader Adam Bandt, has triggered questioning about the party’s direction.
The mainstream media has blamed The Greens’ losses on “being too obstructive in parliament”, as Nine Papers’ correspondent and establishment shill David Crowe put it.
Over the last three years, Labor continually branded The Greens as “blockers” in the Senate for refusing to wave through its policies such as on housing and climate.
This was a dishonest and self-serving attack from a conservative Labor government—but it was promoted in the media in an effort to force The Greens to give in to the political establishment.
Most of the time The Greens did give in, eventually voting to support Labor’s climate policies including its hopeless Safeguards Mechanism.
The party opposed Labor’s housing bills for more than a year, only to change its mind and pass them late in 2024 as the election approached.
Balance of power
The Greens have continually claimed that they could deliver change through using their bargaining power in parliament to “get outcomes” from Labor, including through minority government.
Greens Senator Dorinda Cox’s defection to the Labor Party, in some misguided hope of influencing Labor policy from the inside, is an even more open acceptance of this logic that change takes place mainly in parliament.
But this balance of power strategy—attempting to get concessions from the government in exchange for its votes in the Senate—delivered almost nothing.
Anthony Albanese deliberately refused to give The Greens any major concessions—seeing this as a way to marginalise the party and hold back its electoral support.
This poses a major challenge for The Greens. But the party’s leaders have no answer to it.
New Greens leader Larissa Waters is set to adopt an even meeker approach saying, “People want us to be constructive in parliament … and that’s my inclination.” This means The Greens are even more likely to wave through Labor’s policies, settling for only minor amendments.
Waters is still talking up the fact that The Greens hold “sole balance of power in the Senate” after the election.
As Waters put it, “The Labor Party have a choice. They can work with us … or they can choose to work with the Coalition,” needing the votes of one of the other party to get legislation through.
But this is hardly any different to the situation in the last term of parliament, when Labor needed The Greens’ support for any measure the Coalition opposed. The only difference now is that Labor doesn’t need votes from other crossbenchers as well.
Labor has already chosen to work with the Coalition many times, passing measures with its support to attack refugees and to impose Administration on the CFMEU.
This shows the limits of The Greens’ power to bring change through parliament. Not only will they struggle to force Labor to deliver change, they can’t even stop the government pushing through new right-wing attacks on unions, racist policies or cuts to the NDIS.
Queensland Greens activist Jonathan Sri has rightly argued that this focus on parliament has meant that, “The Australian Greens are in many respects acting more and more like an establishment political party.”
After the election he wrote that, “Our talk of power-sharing with the centre-right Labor government” and respect for parliament means that The Greens are no longer seen as outsiders fighting against the system.
But the major problem for The Greens is not just “giving establishment vibes” and being unable to win votes through tapping into anger at the political establishment. It is the whole focus on parliament as an institution capable of delivering serious change.
Real change is won through mass movements and campaigning in the workplaces and on the streets, not through a focus on making deals in parliament.
The Greens’ parliamentary focus reinforces the illusion that voting can deliver change, through electing someone to parliament to act on behalf of working class people instead of fighting to change things ourselves.
The federal election saw almost two million people vote Greens—in opposition to Labor’s support for the genocide in Gaza, backing for coal and gas companies and failure on climate action, and failure to tax the rich to fund services.
While The Greens lost votes in some areas, with Max Chandler-Mather suffering a 2.9 per cent drop in his primary vote in Griffith and Adam Bandt losing 5.3 per cent in Melbourne, there were clear swings towards the party over Palestine in seats like Wills and Scullin in Melbourne and suburbs like Arncliffe in Sydney.
This shows the potential to build much stronger movements to fight the Albanese government’s support for genocide, military spending and big business interests and to win a better world.
By James Supple
