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| A not-election related image from May 3. |
Don't get used to it
Use your hard work for good
Change those things your left-wing parents
Only dreamt that they could
-- Madeline Leman, ‘Something I haven’t Seen Before’
“We are trying to fundamentally transform Australian politics, economy and society in favour of ordinary working people. And that sort of project will have more setbacks than victories, because the forces we are coming up against are enormously powerful… and time and again in history, brilliant people like you have suffered setback after setback after setback. And only after then have we cracked through and won.” -- Greens housing spokesperson Max Chandler-Mather, who lost his seat after Liberal Party preferences secured victory for Labor in Griffith, to supporters on election night.
“Israeli airstrikes have killed at least 40 people across Gaza during the past 24 hours … as Israel’s government prepared to order an expansion of its military offensive … Aid officials have warned of a humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza, with famine again looming.” -- The Guardian, May 3
There is no question May 3, 2025 was an historic night.
Needing a win to secure a home final in the 2024-25 A-League season, the Western Sydney Wanderers came from behind to defeat the Macarthur Bulls 3-1 at Campbelltown Stadium. Having endured mediocrity for almost a decade, thousands of delirious Wanderers fans who’d travelled to Sydney’s deep south-west sang and let off flares in joy. Despite some tough years, the Wanderers’ late season resurgence shows that with hope and determination, you can advance.
There was also a federal election that day and so at half time, the score poised at 1-1, fans checked their phones to see the Australian Labor Party had already won.
Records were broken that night. The 9213 attendance was the largest ever for a Macarthur home game, though it was a shame for the Bulls that most of the crowd wore red and black. Having a record attendance of just over 9k, only achieved because away fans took over the ground to celebrate their own season, is almost as embarrassing as the Liberal Party’s election result.
With a cost of living crisis, a housing crisis, and against an incumbent government that has done less to inspire anyone on anything than Perth Glory’s most recent A-League season, the Liberal/National Coalition’s primary vote collapsed to about 32%. This is down from around 35% in 2022 and about 10% lower than 2019. They are on track to lose up to 14 seats, on top of the 19 lost last time.
It is satisfying to see hard-right forces fail, but I have concerns for some people. Take progressive NGO GetUp. They’ve built a multi-million dollar fundraising model based on sending spam emails insisting members of their “movement” (whoever signed an online GetUp online petition in 2011 and never unsubscribed) urgently send them more money so they can bravely face down imminent threats like Liberal leader Peter Dutton, who promptly lost his own seat.
On May 1, with Coalition insiders conceding they were heading for disaster, I received the following email:
I never found out if tragedy struck and GetUp had to scale back their “final, crucial ads push”. But it was probably just as well I never chipped in $12, or too many GetUp ads might have left one party with so much control over the state even North Korea would blush.
Two days after the election, I got a new email hailing “the role GetUp members” played in winning this “important victory”, before ending with a new ominous warning: backed by powerful forces, “the hard right is growing”, and could I “chip in” to help GetUp “hold the line”?
In the real world, the elections confirmed what previous elections suggested: the Liberal Party, historically Australia’s most electorally successful party and a major pillar of the two-party system, has collapsed as a mainstream centre-right party.
Furiously egged on by an increasingly irrelevant Murdoch press, it has descended into ideologically driven hard-right culture wars, alienating large parts of its traditional constituency (especially women, appalled by its misogyny) but not picking up alternative support in an increasingly multi-racial country it doesn’t understand.
The Labor Party has largely moved into the vacated political space, replacing the dysfunctional Liberals as the main party of Australian capitalism. The Labor Party is now the predominant party of the establishment, backed by key sectors of capital (high profile, ideologically driven exceptions like billionaire Gina Rinehart notwithstanding).
But the Labor Party has not taken all the space electorally. Since 2022, a swathe of traditionally Liberal Party seats have been won (and mostly defended) by a range of socially liberal independents. Loosely known as the Teals, they are denounced by the Murdoch press as virtually Communist for believing that women should exist in public life and that climate change is real. In fact, they are elected by people who voted Liberal until the party descended into farce.
Major party decline
Labor easily won the two-party preferred vote, but its primary vote only rose 2.1% and remains at historically low levels. Labor outperformed expectations, but there is little evidence of popular confidence in its rule.
This marks a sense of alienation and distrust with the major parties that is underpinned by material realities. Living standards are falling. Whole generations are priced out of the housing market and rental stress is spiking housing insecurity and homelessness. Healthcare and childcare costs are rising. Climate change-supercharged extreme weather is wreaking havoc and devastated communities (like the northern NSW city of Lismore) are largely abandoned in the wake. Many (especially Arabic and Muslim communities) feel fury and despair as Australia continues exporting lethal weapons to Israel as it commits what Amnesty International, in a 300-page report, denounced unambiguously as genocide.
These issues affect different people differently across the country, but they add up to a political malaise. Few could honestly say they are being “represented” by either major party – whether they are well-heeled professionals in a blue-ribbon seat or struggling to pay the rent in deep suburbia.
Some are doing well, of course, like property developers enjoying artificially inflated housing prices and generous tax breaks, and the 1 in 3 corporations who pay no tax at all. But below them there is uncertainty and fear for the future. In this context, Dutton’s flirtation with MAGA-style politics backfired, with the uncertainty that Trump has unleashed on the world making many uneasy.
Yet the explanation for the Coalition’s result goes beyond Trump. Dutton swung wildly from pushing (then abandoning) MAGA-like policies to decidedly unMAGA-like measures like matching Labor health spending promises cent-for-cent.
The Coalition also thought it wise to pledge to build nuclear power plants at unknown expense or timescale, leading to inevitable questions of exactly whose electorates these plants would be built in and which ones might get the waste.
The shocking quality of the Liberal campaign helps explain the result, but it is itself a symptom of the Liberals’ degeneration. Further evidence is what passes for “moderate” in today’s Liberal Party. Sussan Ley, an apparent “moderate” who has now been elected the Liberals first-ever federal woman leader, spoke favourably earlier this year of the colonisation of Australia by comparing it to Elon Musk’s fantasy plan to colonise Mars.
Then again, she was up against Angus Taylor, who combines the stench of incompetence, corruption and membership of Peter Dutton’s hard right faction. Anyone left in the Liberal Party caucus who accepts that it is the 21st century was hardly spoiled for choice.
Greens’ challenge
Labor fears not just the seepage of votes to their left but the potential for a more sustained challenge in its traditional heartlands – it fears the potential that a force like the Greens could do to it what the Teals have done to the Liberals.
Post-election, Labor loudly gloated over the Greens losing 3 of their 4 lower house seats – including Greens leader Adam Bandt, who lost the seat of Melbourne that he’d held since 2010.
A narrative has been pushed by Labor and the media of a popular rejection of the Greens for daring to challenge Labor on several fronts. Two issues have especially drawn Labor’s ire – the Greens demand for an end to support for Israeli crimes, and their refusal for monthd to pass Labor’s housing bill without amendments, on the apparently outrageous grounds it would make the housing crisis worse.
In reality, Labor refused for months to negotiate with the Greens over the housing bill. The Greens, led by housing spokesperson and MP for Grifith Max Chandler-Mather, organised door-knocking campaigns in Labor electorates to talk to people directly about their position. All up, they knocked on 20,000 doors, with Chandler-Mather hosting a series of online “town halls” to discuss the campaign.
Showing his contempt for ordinary people, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese decried this campaigning as the Greens acting in bad faith. The Greens eventually passed the bill after finally negotiating $3.5 billion in funds to go directly to public housing.
Labor sought revenge, and poured resources into a successful bid to win Chandler-Mather’s seat of Griffith back from the Greens. Having offered gracious words to a defeated Dutton, Albanese laid the boot into Bandt and Chandler-Mather after their losses.
But it wasn’t just Labor loudly claiming victory against the Greens. Right-wing attack group Advance Australia, with millions of dollars in corporate donations, ran an hysterical campaign against the “extremist” Greens. Proving they are GetUp for rich people, Advance insisted post-election that they had “destroyed” the Greens. I can just imagine the new fundraising emails landing in CEO inboxes.
Advance Australia 'destroys' the Greens.
There are two key claims made against the Greens – that they were punished for their “intransigence” over housing and Gaza, and that they have supposedly strayed from their “roots”.
The narrative does not add up on either front. Nationally, the Greens’ vote stayed steady at almost 12%, slightly down from 2022. Keeping all their Senate seats, the Greens have secured sole balance of power in the upper house.
The 3 seats the Greens lost were due less to a supposed rejection of the Greens as to the mathematics of the preferential system. With the collapse of the Liberal vote, much of which went to Labor, the two parties with the most votes in these seats were Labor and the Greens. Liberal preferences then flowed to Labor, giving them victory. Labor, having constantly accused the Greens of “collaborating” with the Coalition, owe these victories to Liberal preferences.
In the case of Bandt, a further factor was the redrawing of the boundaries of his seat. Public housing estates in which Bandt has built a strong base were moved to the neighbouring seat of Wills. In these areas, the Green vote was again high, with the Greens falling just short of winning Wills for the first time.
Greens’ vote
There is some nuance to the Greens national vote, however. There were swings against the Greens in some inner-city seats, but also swings to the Greens in various multi-racial working class areas. This occurred in southern Brisbane, western Melbourne and most impressively in Western Sydney, with the Greens securing swings in every Western Sydney seat.
In the Western Sydney seat of Blaxland where I campaigned, the lower house swing to the Greens in the seat was only about 1% (with a strong Muslim Votes-backed independent campaign taking much of the local fury at Labor over inaction around Gaza and other issues). But the senate vote in the seat more than doubled from just under 6% to more than 13%.
Western Sydney also shows the independents’ challenge affects Labor too. In Fowler, incumbent independent Dai Le, who dramatically won the seat from Labor in 2022, was re-elected. In Blaxland and the neighbouring seat of Watson, MV-backed independents rode waves of community anger to significantly reduce Labor’s previously large winning margins. MV candidates have insisted they are only getting started.
The second claim about the Greens is that they have abandoned their supposed roots as a purely “environmental party” by taking up such causes as housing and Gaza. Presumably also through their push to expand Medicare to include dental (a huge expense for many people), to abolish student debt and make education free, and to provide free child care – all to be paid for by new corporate taxes.
It doesn’t take much imagination to look at these policies and see the ghost of the Gough Whitlam Labor government. Elected in 1972, in just 3 years the Whitlam government famously extracted Australia from the Vietnam War, created Medicare and introduced free education, among other reforms of the sort Labor has not just stopped promising but, in government, actively worked to undermine. The Greens taking up this reforming mantle embarrasses a Labor Party that wants the Greens to sit in their corner and talk about trees.
Of course, critics of the Greens prefer not to notice the Greens also condemning Labor for opening new coal and gas mines, calling instead for a major expansion of renewables.
Accusations of abandoning their “roots” also ignores actual Greens’ history. The Greens were formed in the 1980s and early ‘90s around four pillars:
* Ecological sustainability;
* Social justice and economic equality;
* Participatory democracy; and
* Peace and non-violence.
The Greens have always stood for more than just “the environment”. It is true that exactly how they have approached broad social issues, and the exact mix in their focus, has varied over the years. But variations of the mix they campaigned for in 2025 were there from the start.
If anything, the Greens don’t always fully synthesise these four pillars; that is, treat them as parts of a connected whole. The Greens sometimes present different policies as if they are siloed proposals with little connection to each other: over here is climate action, in an unrelated column is housing, in the next unrelated column is First Nations justice, and in a different silo altogether is ending AUKUS and supporting Gaza.
Yet they are all connected – Greens policies on these issues represent a challenge to the current powers-that-be and their system. Both major parties act as they do because they are beholden to the actual economic centres of power in society. The same corporate interests making huge profits from fossil fuels are intricately connected to the property industry (just look at where major banks’ capital is invested). This economic power sees its interests as best served globally by allying with the US, part of which means uncritical support for Israel.
It is entirely consistent for the Greens to talk at the same time about ecological sustainability, and housing, and refugee rights, and peace, and economic inequality, and plenty of other injustices -- both in terms of their own founding principles and the actual reality of the country.
Greens’ trajectory
Exactly how to best express this is a big question.The electoral breakthrough for the Greens in Brisbane in 2022, where they shocked the political establishment by winning 3 seats, was closely associated with a push to emphasising “universalist” type politics. This emphasises collective interests of the majority against a political class that serves a powerful minority.
Led by a tendency emerging from their South Brisbane branch, the Queensland Greens had been growing in electoral strength from about 2015, with a focus on grassroots work to build community support to challenge a political establishment captured by corporate interests.
These politics were seen most clearly in Chandler-Mather’s high profile campaigning on housing. But they were also symbolised by Greens’ Brisbane MP Stephen Bates, a young working-class queer man, who was just 29 and famously working a retail job when he won his seat in 2022.
Outside the media glare, the Greens used these new seats to set up local programs to provide free meals and other forms of financial help for those struggling, largely funded out of their MP’s salaries. They also campaigned on a range of local issues such as around flight noise and plans to close a public school to redevelop a stadium.
Chandler-Mather was explicit about his project. When myself and Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal editor Fred Fuentes did a 2-hour interview with him in late 2023, Chandler-Mather insisted the goal was to transform the Greens into a mass working-class party.
His interventions in parliament showed how his project was aimed against the “political class” as a whole. In one viral clip of a parliamentary speech, as he tried telling the story of a desperate constituent in the face of Labor jeers, an emotional Chandler-Mather spoke over the heads of MPs to “anyone watching”, insisting that the thing that scared the political class most was ordinary people having hope.
When Labor brought in profoundly undemocratic laws to gut the CFMEU (using long-standing criminality in the construction industry as its excuse), Chandler-Mather addressed an angry rally of union members in Brisbane, copping more abuse from Labor and the media for daring to do so.
No wonder Labor worked so hard to unseat him, and Albanese sneered so unpleasantly when they did.
In this context, a rise in Green votes in more working-class suburban areas may be important. It is far too soon, and the shift still too limited, to draw hard conclusions, but it is certainly possible the more universalist-type messaging and policies found a stronger resonance in these areas (as did support for Gaza in places like Western Sydney).
In Western Sydney, it is worth noting the swings build on a growing vote in the region in the 2024 local council elections. Amid a higher vote across the area, the Greens won seats on Blacktown and Cumberland councils for the first time.
Yet despite those Green shoots, it is hard not to feel the Greens election campaign missed opportunities. Amid a crisis of legitimacy for the major parties, with space opening up on the left and people’s living conditions worsening, the Greens vote stayed steady rather than grew.
In particular, the perspective put forward by Chandler-Mather in that 2023 interview has undoubtedly taken a hit. It is not just that the 3 seats lost were held by figures who seemed clearly associated (to varying degrees) with this social democratic reform-type perspective, this perspective already seemed weaker in the Greens election campaign itself.
Greens’ campaign
Two factors seemed to be behind this. The first was the 2024 Queensland state elections in which the Green vote in inner-suburban Brisbane stalled for the first time since 2015. And the second was the election weeks later of Donald Trump.
The Greens took a well-developed platform to the Queensland election with a heavy focus on public ownership to tackle the myriad of crises people faced. But with the Liberal National Party poised to win, the election instead centred on the contest between the LNP and the incumbent Labor government, which ran some watered down versions of popular Greens policies to save what they could.
In the aftermath, there was a sense that the Greens, in campaigning hard against the status quo in general, had not done enough to make clear their specific opposition to the LNP and its profoundly reactionary platform. When Trump won the US elections, this concern seemed to deepen.
It led to a seeming over-correction, with the Greens federal campaign slogans overwhelmingly emphasised stopping Peter Dutton – explicitly connecting him to Trump. To this they added that the Greens would “push Labor to act”.
With the exception of the heavily publicised “put dental into Medicare” proposal, this largely crowded out the actual policies. Other measures with potentially wide appeal received less focus, like combining rent caps with creating a public developer to build badly needed homes (shifting the solution to the housing crisis into public hands). The Greens powerful message to sanction Israel and cease arms deals in the midst of Israel’s genocide was also quieter than the constant refrain of “Keep Dutton out, push Labor to act”.
At its most extreme, the Greens even talked about a potential “golden era of progressive reform” if a minority Labor government had to negotiate with Greens MPs able to then “pressure” Labor to do the right thing.
The problem is, it is hard to condemn the Labor Party so strongly for active complicity in the genocide in Gaza, then suggest they might bring in a golden era of reform if only enough Greens MPs are there to “push” them.
No doubt this messaging did reflect real pressures on the Greens. Much of their traditional middle-class base, especially in inner cities where they were trying to hold or win new seats, were understandably horrified at the thought of a Dutton prime ministership.
But campaigning in the Western Sydney seat of Blaxland (admittedly a Labor safe seat with the main challenge from a Muslim independent), Dutton was just not a factor among people coping with collapsing living standards and often seething with rage over Gaza. The evidence for this is the high vote for the Muslim independents in Blaxland and Watson, who directed their fire squarely at the party in government to give expression to the widespread sense in the community of being ignored and betrayed.
In this regard, part of the issue may be a need for greater flexibility in campaigning and more space for different emphasises around the same basic policy focuses. Re-assuring a voter in Griffith or Melbourne that the Greens strongly oppose Dutton is understandable, but in Blaxland the concerns are very different.
Part of the problem of so heavily emphasising “keep Dutton out” is it does little to give people a reason to vote for you specifically. After all, Dutton is to the right of most of Australian society, including huge chunks of the traditional Liberal Party base. To oppose Dutton, you don't need to vote Green; there were no shortages of candidates wanting to stop him too.
The attempted point of differentiation was the call to push Labor “to act”, but this can ring quite false. It is not just that the Greens had spent the past 3 years denouncing Labor (accurately) as a political arm of the property and fossil fuel industries, and (accurately) as being complicit in genocide. The harsh reality is few people have any hope or expectation Labor will do anything good at all. Even people voting Labor didn’t really expect that – they just looked at the alternative.
There is a layer of politically engaged progressive people who believed that with the right mathematical outcome of seats (a minority government dependent on Greens’ and independents’ support), some positive reforms may be possible. But this does not really translate into broader society – people hear “keep out Dutton and make Labor act” as “support Labor”.
It is important to emphasise that there is absolutely no guarantee that a different approach would have led to a better electoral outcome. But it is not simply about votes in one election, but what type of politics you wish to campaign on. After the breakthroughs of 2022 on universalist type politics that targeted the political class as a whole, it feels like the Greens missed the chance to more fully test out the type of politics that led to them securing that historic breakthrough.
One thing that should also be emphasised is that the Greens also operate under a resource stretch that the major parties do not. The swings in places like Western Sydney were achieved with very limited resources, and pose the question of what potential support might be won with more. In Brisbane, the party had to direct a lot of resources and energy to try to keep their 3 inner suburban seats (ultimately only keeping Ryan), posing the question of what further gains could have been made in southern Brisbane with bigger campaigns.
We can also add the problem of a dominant media narrative – likely far more effective than Advance Australia hysterics — that echoed Labor Party talking points. Over-emphasising the point can become an excuse for results that fall short of expectations, but it is a factor that can be hard to counter without strong campaigning on the ground. It cannot be easily overcome by social media campaigns alone.
Future directions
If anything, the Labor attacks may well be helping the Greens post-election. It gives the Greens the chance to say clearly “no we aren’t going to stop opposing war crimes or supporting people’s right to affordable housing". Labor is providing the sharp differentiation between themselves and the Greens that was lacking in much of the campaign itself.
The question remains though, of whether the Greens will focus on their more traditional role of seeking to be a “moral voice” to “hold power to account” from within the political system, or seek to challenge the political status quo itself.
On one hand, there is a pull towards the “moral voice” approach by the nature of the Greens weight in the Senate, where the party has the balance of power. It favours an approach of high-profile commentary through the media, whereas trying to win and hold lower house seats requires more localised community base-building.
On the other hand, the swings in multiracial, working-class areas, achieved with still limited campaigning, suggest the potential for the Greens to extend beyond their largely middle-class constituency and take more of the political space Labor has abandoned. The Greens may have lost 3 of their 4 lower house seats, but are still within touching distance of winning at least a handful in the next election.
The most likely outcome will be a mix of both, with the exact weight of either and how they interact to be determined. The party appears optimistic about increasing their presence and vote in places like Western Sydney, and the next period will certainly provide no shortage of opportunities for a political force willing to organise around people’s collective interests in the context of several worsening crises.
In this regard, and in terms of the space to the left of Labor, it is also worth noting the sizable swings to socialist candidates in Victoria in several seats. In Wills, socialist councillor Sue Bolton, who has built a base through constant involvement in community campaigns, received a swing of more than 5% to win 8% of the vote (unprecedented for her party Socialist Alliance).
The Victorian Socialists, who ran high-profile social media figure and renters’ rights advocate Jordan van den Lamb (known as “purple pingers”) for the senate, also received significant swings and high votes by socialist campaign standards in several Melbourne seats.
In Wills, in a sign of often-elusive socialist unity, SA and VS ran a joint campaign, producing material supporting Bolton for the lower house and VS for the senate.
The story of these results and associated campaigns is best told by those directly involved, but these experiences will be part of the process of building a challenge to the political establishment rooted in working-class politics to the political establishment. This is even more the case with the post-election announcement by VS that they plan to extend the party across the country and run candidates in every state.
Overall, the elections marked a win for the status quo – an incumbent government, which has done little of note, secured a larger majority without winning many more votes against an Opposition that has collapsed into dysfunction.
For the Greens, having secured a big breakthrough last time, it shows progress is not linear, and, while their vote held up, forward momentum stalled.
But that’s not an uncommon story, as any Western Sydney Wanderers fan can tell you. One week after the 3-1 win over the Bulls, the Wanderers lost 2-1 to Melbourne Victory to crash out of the finals race. There were clear positives in the season, but there’s more work to do.
* I am a member of the Parramatta Greens. The views, asides from those about the Wanderers shared by all right-minded people, are entirely my own.
Either red or blue
Doesn’t matter to me how ya roll
Twenty one forty two yeah I already told ya
Just tryna kick it with my homies and some doja
You didn't understand it
Cause you take your place for granted
Now you lost yourself inside your little world
- A. Girl, 2142*
* 2142 is the postcode of Granville, a suburb in the seat of Blaxland.
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