What had been a pretty ordinary year for the Greens appears to be resolving to a happy ending, after the party’s sweeping victory in Saturday’s byelection for the Victorian state seat of Northcote.
The party now has raised hopes not just for the Queensland election on Saturday, but also — if the grandiose projection of federal Greens leader Richard Di Natale is to be taken at face value — for an eventual target of 25 House of Representatives seats a quarter of a century from now.
Northcote had long been presumed to be one of four Victorian seats where the Greens posed a threat to Labor’s historic lock on the inner city, together with Melbourne, Richmond and Brunswick.
Thanks to the Victorian Liberals’ recently acquired habit of putting the party behind Labor on preferences, the breakthrough was a long time coming.
Not until the 2014 state election, when the Greens won Melbourne and made a further unheralded gain from the Liberals in Prahran, did the party gain state lower house trophies to place in the cabinet alongside Adam Bandt’s federal seat of Melbourne.
It had not been widely anticipated that the Northcote byelection would add to the tally, largely thanks to two privately conducted opinion polls — one for environmental groups, the other for the CFMEU — which credited Labor with a fairly handy lead.
So it came as something of a shock on Saturday when the Greens blew the hinges off the required 6% swing, recording big majorities not just in their hipsterish inner-city domain at the Northcote/Westgarth end of the electorate, but also further afield in Preston and Alphington.
With the benefit of hindsight, it now seems clear that Labor’s declining strength had been concealed by the popularity of former member Fiona Richardson, whose death in August precipitated the byelection.
This has been underscored by demographic trends evident throughout the band of suburbs around central Sydney and Melbourne, where immigrant populations that had sustained Labor against the mounting Greens challenge have increasingly been priced out of the market.
So while the Greens vote nationally has been fairly static over the past decade — a fact that suggests Di Natale might want to rein in his expectations, regardless of what time frame he puts on them — its support is becoming increasingly concentrated geographically, which greatly improves its prospects in the right type of lower house seat.
With the Greens now laying claim to three state lower house seats in both New South Wales and Victoria, the next question is whether they can gain a seat in the Queensland parliament on Saturday — something they have never previously achieved, thanks to the state’s lack of an upper house.
While the party holds some hope of a Prahran-style boil-over in the Liberal-National Party-held seat of Maiwar, its hottest prospect is Anna Bligh’s old seat of South Brisbane, which encompasses the southern bank of the Brisbane River opposite the central business district.
The seat scores almost identically to Northcote on the main demographic indicators, and corresponds almost exactly with the Brisbane City Council ward of The Gabba, which returned the council’s first ever Greens member at the election in March last year.
The Greens’ task in this case is rendered quite a bit more challenging by the fact that they must unseat a very substantial incumbent in Jackie Trad, the Deputy Premier and factional figurehead of the Left.
For what it’s worth, an opinion poll conducted by Galaxy Research last week called it a statistical dead heat, with Greens candidate Amy MacMahon leading Trad by 51-49 on two-party preferred.
However, this credits MacMahon with a stronger flow of LNP preferences than she is likely to receive, given that it has her last on its how-to-vote card.
The dilemma of preferencing in Labor-versus-Greens contests is one the Victorian Liberals are more than familiar with, and in the wake of Northcote, they appear to be edging towards a novel solution.
Speaking on the weekend, Victorian Opposition Leader Matthew Guy indicated the party may simply vacate the field in such seats in future, saying it was “no longer a preference machine for the Labor party in inner city seats”.
Such are the ways in which the Greens’ inner-urban insurgency stands to shake up the game of two-party politics, even if Di Natale’s dreams of dozens of seats in federal parliament are doomed to remain just that.
It’s unfortunate that South Brisbane’s Jackie Trad is under threat as she’s hardworking, likeable & intelligent. She is not an Adani supporter but was unwillingly caught in the web spun by Premier Palaszczuk whose pet project it has been. Trad was beholden to the party to toe the line regardless of her opinion on Adani.
While it could result in a great win for the Greens, Trad’s potential departure would be a loss to Qld politics in general. We need to boost the median IQ – Trad is one of the smartest ones.
On present poll figures (admittedly from the Curry or Maul and as presented by that wishful conservative clown and number molester Wardill, last week – who had Trad copping a flogging) everything will have to go right for the Greens in Sth Brisbane – not least the number of Limited News Party voters preferencing them ahead of Labor.
As Antony Green said on ABC TV too, that night.
Seems like the main role of the Greens is to split the left vote … possibly leading to a conservative government…
It sounds as though you equate a vote for the Adani Labor Party as a vote for the ‘left’? Labor has more right wingers (whingers?) than the LNP – which is why they are consistent supporters of Adani and other miners in the Galilee Basin, of asset sales like Abbot Point, of royalty ‘holidays’ and of disgusting GBR-wrecking dredging proposals such as the just-approved Townsville Port expansion which will allow a 14% increase in sea-dumping of maintenance dredge spoil – right in the guts of World Heritage listed Cleveland Bay. Labor Tories are just as capable as Liberal-National Tories of despoiling the GBR despite their lying claims of ending sea dumping. Maintenance spoil – over half a million cubic metres per year – will always be dumped in the sea unless the lazy government-owned ports are forced to lift their game. Will Labor make it happen? No way.
So you are saying that everything you accuse Labor of doing/promising, WON’T happen if the LNP form government on Saturday???????
If you’re a leftie voting for Labor, you’re doing it wrong.
The idea that votes for the Greens can help the conservatives is just wrong.
Firstly in a preferential system, especially now with compulsory preferences, there is no need to worry about splitting the vote. Anyone who would otherwise vote Labor above the LNP but chooses to vote Green will have their vote count for Labor if the Greens candidate does not win.
If the Greens do win seats, this also does not help the LNP form Government. To form Government they need a majority, if this happens then the combined Labor and Green seats must be a minority and no amount of switching numbers between them will change that.
They only have a chance in gentrified constituencors that used to be reliably Labor. Now that they have a federal leader who has tried to get rid of Rhiannon and NSW’s ‘lefty’ Greens, whose defended paying below Work Choices wages within his own house, it’s really hard to see the point of the ‘tree Tory’ Greens. http://m.huffingtonpost.com.au/2016/05/19/richard-di-natale-defends-paying-au-pair-150-a-week_a_21380542/
Constituencies*
LOL. That au pair thing was a comically transparent character assassination. I can’t believe people fell (still fall) for it.
The Greens’ are merely occupying the ground surrendered by the Labour Party.
I doubt that Gough and similar stars in the Labour Galaxy would warmly embrace the deviation to the Right that sadly the ALP have so wholeheartedly embraced since the 80’s.
Witness the remarkable result in the recent by-election held in the Victorian Seat of Northcote.
If the Greens lower house members acquit themselves well, then why shouldn’t we expect to see numbers increase substantially over 25 years? Much less than 25 years ago the prospect of same sex marriage seemed at least as remote. Things can change pretty quickly.
We keep hearing the electorate is fed up with politics as usual. Whilst s44 initially looked pretty disastrous for the Greens, a few months later the swift resignations of Ludlam and Waters have starkly differentiated the party’s representatives from the naked self-interest of the other parties’ parliamentarians.
I think there’s a pretty decent chance the overall Greens vote will start going up again, and it won’t be evenly distributed, but will radiate out from the inner urban areas. Once a couple more Greens get in I think there’s every chance it could snowball, as it becomes clearer to the less civically engaged that a vote for the Greens isn’t a “wasted vote”.
If only people would spend 5 minutes learning how our transferable preference voting works they’d see that it allows them to show the political class what they want and still ensure that they don’t get the shitty end of the stick.
If only.