A peculiar and comical sight greeted those passing by Melbourne’s Luna Park on the morning of 4 April. A middle-aged man and three women, holding a novelty sized toothbrush, were pretending to clean the large pearly whites that welcome visitors to the attraction on the St Kilda foreshore.
The man was the Greens leader, Adam Bandt; the women his candidates in Wills and Macnamara: Samantha Ratnam and Sonya Semmens, and the Victorian senator Steph Hodgins-May.
The red toothbrush, which Bandt had hauled into the local ABC studios earlier that morning, was a prop to promote the party’s push to add dental treatment to Medicare.
Stunts have been a feature of the Greens’ election campaign, a tactic to capture the attention of otherwise uninterested voters and the media.
Bandt has deejayed a set alongside the social media influencer Abbie Chatfield, paraded novelty cheques illustrating the sum of tax concessions to property investors and leant into countless trends on TikTok.
“Adam is down to clown,” a Greens insider said. That might be true.
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But Bandt is dead serious about not just consolidating the party’s historic 2022 federal election result, where it picked up the seats of Griffith, Brisbane and Ryan in the Queensland capital. He is determined to build on it.
Kingmakers in waiting?
For months the Greens have been positioning themselves as the likely kingmaker in a potential hung parliament.
It’s a position Bandt has promised to use to keep out the Coalition and force Labor to deliver its wishlist of progressive policies, including dental in Medicare, winding back negative gearing and capital gains tax concessions, banning native forest logging and making childcare free for all.
The Greens will almost certainly retain the balance of power in the Senate, meaning they will be a force in the 48th parliament regardless of what else occurs on 3 May.
But what power they have to shape the next government will hinge on how they perform in several lower house races that insiders across party lines agree are too close to call.
The success of 2022 – dubbed the “Greenslide” – means the Greens are now fighting on two fronts.
They are on the defensive in Brisbane, while targeting the seats of Richmond in the New South Wales northern rivers, Sturt in Adelaide’s eastern suburbs, Perth in the heart of the Western Australian capital, as well as Wills and Macnamara in Melbourne.
Should the party defend all its Brisbane seats and pick up others – most likely Wills and Macnamara – its numbers on the crossbench would prove hard to ignore if Anthony Albanese is scratching around for support to prop up a minority Labor government.
The prime minister has repeatedly and emphatically ruled out a power-sharing agreement with the Greens, avoiding a repeat of the 2010 Julia Gillard-Bob Brown deal that still haunts Labor.
“The Greens, I am not negotiating with the Greens,” Albanese said on Thursday as he was peppered with questions about negative gearing. “We make it very clear.”
Bandt has dismissed Albanese’s denials as political posturing, saying he would be “astounded” if the Labor leader refused to cooperate in a minority government.
The alternative election-night scenario involves the Greens losing ground, potentially sidelining them from the type of parliament they have been awaiting for more than a decade.
Blockers or builders?
Max Chandler-Mather, the Greens’ polarising housing spokesperson, isn’t one for concessions. But after the Queensland state election in October, when the Greens went backwards in seats despite lofty expectations, the 33-year-old Griffith MP had no choice.
“We’re going to have to have a long honest look at our politics and strategy and make sure we’re doing everything right,” he said.
The Queensland election was one of a series of either poor or underwhelming state, territory and council results in 2024 that suggested the Greens were in trouble or had stalled as a movement.
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The pundits and the Greens’ political opponents blamed Bandt’s federal team, reasoning that its “blocking” of Labor’s agenda, particularly on housing, its stance on the Gaza conflict and even Chandler-Mather’s attendance at a pro-CFMEU rally were turning voters off.
The major parties believe the new Greens MPs are vulnerable.
Labor is increasingly optimistic about snatching Stephen Bates’s seat of Brisbane, while the Coalition is hopeful of winning back Ryan from Elizabeth Watson-Brown.
The government desperately wants to topple Chandler-Mather to regain Kevin Rudd’s old seat. Albanese held a campaign rally in Griffith on 6 April, unveiling the sort of election pledge – a household battery subsidy scheme – it hopes will sway voters weighing up whether to choose Labor or the Greens.
The Greens are confident of holding Griffith while Labor strategists concede it is a tough ask, even with the best efforts of a highly regarded candidate, Renee Coffey.
The Greens are also under constant assault from the rightwing group Advance, which will reportedly spend $4m during the five-week campaign alone highlighting the party’s “radical” agenda.
For all noise of the past year, the Greens’ national primary vote remains steady at about 13%, according to Guardian Australia’s poll tracker.
Kos Samaras, a director at the research firm RedBridge, says he would be “alarmed” if the Greens lost Griffith but expects tight races in Brisbane, Ryan, Wills and Macnamara.
Samaras says the Greens’ national vote is holding up but its supporter base has not expanded as the former Labor strategists thought it might after 2022.
“I think this is going to be a status-quo election [for the Greens],” he says.
“What I mean by that is that, yes, they are going to try and win seats like Wills and Macnamara, but that’s always been the case.”
Voters ‘hungry’ for power-sharing
The best attempts of minor parties such as the Greens to focus the national political debate on their terms so often come to nothing.
But every once in a while, the major parties do it for them.
Bandt believes such a moment occurred last Sunday when Albanese and Peter Dutton used the respective Labor and Coalition campaign launches to unveil policies designed to make it easier for first home buyers to break into the property market.
As economist after economist lined up on Monday and Tuesday to warn the policies would drive up house prices, Bandt’s team saw their central message to voters – “you can’t keep voting for the same two parties and expecting different results” – reinforced in real time.
Sensing an opportunity, the Greens will now prioritise housing in the final fortnight of the campaign, including in advertising spending, at press conferences and during door-knocking.
On Thursday Bandt – wearing a white “fighting for renters” T-shirt – Chandler-Mather, Bates and Senator Larissa Waters stood in a Brisbane park holding a novelty cheque for the sum of $180bn, the Parliamentary Budget Office’s latest estimate for the 10-year cost of negative gearing and capital gains tax concessions.
“We have pushed for renters and first home buyers to be on the political agenda – it has happened,” Bandt said. “The experts have panned the major parties’ policies and now the door is open to some real reform in a minority parliament.”
Bandt and Waters were in the Greens party room during the last hung parliament, as was Sarah Hanson-Young.
The SA senator and the Green’s manager of parliamentary business says the major parties are in denial about voters’ appetite for a power-sharing parliament.
“The public simply does not want the major parties to have total control any more,” she says.
“There is a growing expectation that a hung parliament will force change, and voters are hungry for it. I was there back in 2010; it was a productive parliament.
“I have seen how perceptions have changed.”
