Beating the Greens Again Next Time
Lessons from the 2025 Federal Election
Since the federal election unfolded on the evening of 3 May, I have been in a state of calm, serene happiness that increased day by day. That the Labor government was returned with a massive majority couldn’t begin to explain this feeling. In any previous federal election in my lifetime that result alone would have made me ecstatic. This time, however, I was looking for something quite different.
The Labor win was not a surprise, although the extent of it was still breathtaking. All the reliable polls had the government well ahead for weeks and the Liberals had run the worst campaign in memory.
Tuning in to watch Antony Green for the last time, my concern was about a handful of seats in which the result was anything but certain.
These seats were my own electorate of Macnamara, the adjoining seat of Melbourne, its northern neighbour Wills and the Queensland seats of Griffith, Brisbane and Ryan. All seats where the battle lines were drawn against the Greens. All seats where the national polls were next to useless.
Since the conclusion of the Prahran by-election on 8 February, my attention has been focused on Macnamara. In 2022, the Greens came within a few hundred votes of winning the seat. It was vital that Labor’s primary vote held up to keep the Greens at bay.
There was a real risk of Labor supporters in the Jewish community switching their votes to the Liberal party due to Labor’s weak response to the 7 October attacks and the rise in antisemitism. If that happened, all other things being equal, Labor’s primary vote could have dipped below the Greens and the Greens would have been elected on Labor preferences.
Early in the campaign I joined with my former federal colleague Michael Danby, who held the seat of Melbourne Ports (renamed Macnamara) from 1998 to 2019. We decided to enter the fray by endorsing newspaper and social media advertisements targeting the Greens under the banner of Macnamara Voters Against Extremism, a group supported by numerous friends and community members who also opposed the extremist Greens.
As Labor decided to run what is called an open ticket in Macnamara, not recommending how voters fill in their ballot after putting Labor first, we endorsed a How To Vote Card asking voters to vote 1 Labor and preferencing the Liberals above the Greens.
Voting Liberal wasn’t the way to stop the Greens in Macnamara. The strategic approach to defeating the Greens was to keep Labor’s primary vote up, encouraging those who were unhappy with Labor to stick with them while taking out an insurance policy by directing their preferences to the Liberals. That way, if Labor did drop to third there was a chance the Liberals could get up on higher than normal percentage of Labor preferences.
As it turned out, Labor’s primary vote surged, the Liberals floundered and the Greens dived. Labor’s Josh Burns topped the poll and was clearly re-elected on the night with Greens preferences flowing to him. Very different to the nearly two weeks it took to determine the outcome in 2022.
Our insurgent campaign against the Greens in Macnamara helped play a role in keeping their vote down and encouraging people not to preference them, with our social media ads achieving 500,000 views in some instances.
The battle for the seat of Wills took days to become clear. Fortunately Labor’s Peter Khalil was victorious in seeing off one of the most vile campaigns imaginable by the Greens and their praetorian guard the Socialist Alliance. People in Wills were told straight out by the Greens candidate to “cast their vote for Gaza.” Notwithstanding the immense resources poured into the seat by the Greens, their attempt to directly inject sectarianism into an Australian election failed. Khalil had faced a redistribution that favoured the Greens but has prevailed with a 2% margin.
And finally came the moment of sublime jubilation when it was clear that Adam Bandt had been defeated in the seat of Melbourne. A champagne moment.
I had believed Bandt was vulnerable since the redistribution changed the boundaries of Melbourne by reducing its footprint north of the Yarra and including a large slice of my former seat of Prahran.
In 2022, he received 49% of the primary vote but the new boundaries were less favourable. If his primary vote could be reduced to the low 40’s he could be beaten. My Prahran campaign against the Greens south of the Yarra started the process. Our Macnamara social media ads also reached into Melbourne, continuing what I started in Prahran.
But it would take two other vital elements coming together to toss him out. With Labor still preferencing the Greens, the Liberals needed to finish third so their preferences would be distributed, and their voters must follow the recommendation and preference Labor in large numbers.
This is of course what happened and Bandt was defeated. The same scenario played out in Griffith and Brisbane. Three of the four seats previously held by the Greens fell to Labor.
What should we learn from these results?
The Greens lost seats where the Liberals finished third and preferenced against them. If the Liberals had polled better and finished above Labor in Melbourne, Griffith and Brisbane, then the Greens would have again won all those seats on Labor preferences. So to keep the Greens out of the House, the Liberals need to keep finishing below Labor or Labor needs to join them in not preferencing the Greens.
At future elections, we cannot rely on the Liberal party performing poorly to keep the Greens from winning. We must ensure Labor voters are educated and informed so they don’t preference the Greens either.
The lid was kept on the Greens’ primary vote and this is also vital in defeating them. Their extremism on the Middle East, support for endless protests, identity politics, trans-mania, crazed economic policies and dictatorial internal behaviour have started turning people off. More people are now prepared to call them out. Each victory over them builds morale. And as we first showed in Prahran, they can be beaten.
The Greens party has never won a lower house seat in its own right, by winning more than 50% of the primary vote. Every seat they’ve won has been because of the preferential votes of one of the major parties being added to their primary vote.
Often it has been Liberal preferences getting them over the line, as was the case when Bandt first won Melbourne in 2010. Bandt’s whingeing now that Labor beat him due to Liberal preferences is just another example of the Greens’ lack of self-awareness, their contempt for voters and their continuing claim to be treated as a protected species.
The preferential system, along with compulsory voting, is part of an electoral tradition that has served Australia well. Both components tend to steer outcomes towards the centre. They make it difficult for activists to dominate voting as in the USA and ensure that elected representatives have more support than in the UK’s first past the post system, where people are routinely elected with less than a third of the vote.
The Liberal party is saying the right things now about preferences. But it was only recently, at the last state election in Victoria, that Liberal preferences helped elect a most extreme Greens member in the seat of Richmond.
The Labor party must also be brought round on this issue, particularly in the seats where the Greens could challenge by beating Labor on primaries.
This is the lesson in the Queensland seat of Ryan, the sole remaining Greens seat in the House of Representatives. Ryan is a stronger seat for the Liberals, which meant they finished first on primaries. The Greens came in second and Labor third. This was the scenario we wanted to avoid in Macnamara. As a result, Labor preferences were distributed and put the Greens over the line. Never again should a Green be elected on Labor preferences.
Beyond the issues of principle, this is also a question of survival for the Labor party. It’s not just about the extremists the Greens are now. Even before he left parliament in 2012, Bob Brown said his mission was to destroy Labor and replace it as the party of the Left.
To prevail against extremists, it’s a very good idea to take them at their word.
For reasons both of principle and survival, the Labor party and its supporters need to embrace the position that the Liberal party is their opponent, but the Greens are their enemy.
BONUS VIDEO!
In a political first, Julie Szego and I teamed up in some videos explaining the preferential voting system and how to vote to stop the Greens. Here’s one of them.
