Almost no one outside Brisbane saw the Greens coming in 2022. Those who did literally saw them coming, such was the scale of the party’s shoe leather campaigning and “social work” election strategy that won three seats in the heart of an otherwise conservative state.
Three years on, there is a temptation to look at those seats – Griffith, Ryan and Brisbane – and overlay the national debate, to turn them into a referendum on how the Greens have used their expanded place at the national table to agitate and irritate on issues beyond the environment, particularly on housing and Palestine.
The rightwing lobby group Advance has plastered the city with billboards saying the Greens “aren’t who they used to be”.
On the eve of the election campaign, Max Chandler-Mather, the Griffith MP and chief architect of the grassroots strategy in Queensland, spent his morning serving a free breakfast at a school in his electorate. He says polling and political analysis almost invariably miss the direct outreach initiatives – a free community pantry, volunteers filling sandbags – that have been run by Greens MPs since 2022.
“If you did a map of Brisbane right now you’d have a lot of dots in a lot of metropolitan suburbs across Brisbane that included free community meals running on any one night, running community gardens, or helping people directly on the ground,” he says.
“Neither major party can match our level of volunteer organisation. Not even close.
“How do you measure literally thousands and thousands of conversations that sometimes go for 20 minutes, where you find out everything you can about this person’s life and how that will help? This is why they missed us coming in 2022, it’s why people on the ABC election night coverage looked shocked when the results came rolling in from Queensland.”
Major party ambitions
Labor and the Coalition have seized on a weaker-than-expected showing by the Greens at the Queensland state election, and have begun circling Griffith, Ryan and Brisbane as potential gains. Anthony Albanese and Peter Dutton visited the city on the first full day of the campaign.
Chandler-Mather has become a national figure since 2022, earning hostility from Labor for his opposition to its housing legislation and further criticism for addressing a CFMEU rally in August. By contrast the Brisbane MP, Stephen Bates, and the member for Ryan, Elizabeth Watson-Brown, have kept a much lower profile outside their electorates.
The Liberals believe their best chance is to win back Ryan; Labor hopes to win back support in Griffith, which is Kevin Rudd’s former electorate.
Brisbane appears to be a genuine three-way contest. In 2022 Bates ran third on primary votes, but ultimately claimed the seat for the Greens after a complex preference count. His opponents – Labor’s Madonna Jarrett and the LNP’s Trevor Evans – are running again.
The major parties are talking up their chances.
“I can come up with a good reason for all three of them why they can’t win, but one of them has to,” an LNP source says.
Evans – the former MP who has significant backing from young moderates in the LNP – needs to win back at least some of the vote lost in the anti-Morrison swing from 2022. On that measure, issues such as the Coalition’s plans for nuclear power might make a bounce difficult.
“The Dutton strategy seems to be focused on the outer suburbs and I think there’s some concern that might hinder Trevor’s campaign,” the LNP source says.
Labor sources say they think Brisbane is a “real chance” but acknowledge the task is more difficult than in 2022.
“Logic says our best chance to win it was last time, when there was momentum to change the government,” a Queensland Labor figure says.
“So it’s probably more about being a referendum on the local member [Bates]. And are all those people who voted for the Greens maybe starting to realise they can’t deliver on the promises?”
The Greens are also running a large campaign in another seat, Moreton in Brisbane’s south, vacated by the retiring Labor left figure Graham Perrett, that has focused on expanding the party’s vote in multicultural and working-class areas.
At the state election, the Greens vote rose outside the inner city, but fell in the party’s strongholds. One explanation could be that gentrification in the inner city is pushing some younger voters further out in search of cheaper housing.
Another, says John Mickel, a former Labor Speaker in Queensland and now an academic and commentator at the Queensland University of Technology, is that the Greens’ focus on housing and other issues might alienate affluent, environmentally conscious voters who have previously supported the party.
“There was a certain slab of people my age, around about 60 … the Bob Brown tree hugger, that type of person, who once the Greens get on to Palestine and all that other jazz have drifted away.
“I sense those sorts of people were the ones that were lost in Maiwar.”
The Greens held the state seat of Maiwar – which is within the federal electorate of Ryan – but lost about 7.4% from the party’s primary vote.
“What the Greens are trying to do is to be a catch-all party,” Mickel says. “When you start to do that they have to adopt positions that are going to alienate [some voters].”
Housing issue hits home
In Musgrave Park, in the centre of Chandler-Mather’s electorate of Griffith, there are about 30 people living in tents. Looking down on them are luxury high-rise apartments. The area has renters and affluent homeowners. It is a petri dish for a national housing debate that is often viewed as a zero-sum game between renters and property owners.
Chandler-Mather, the Greens’ housing spokesperson and a champion of rent caps, talks about a family in his seat “with a million-dollar mortgage” coming to one of his free meal evenings.
“The thing that links climate change and housing is a deep anxiety about the failure of the major parties to do anything meaningful to address either of those issues in the long term,” he says.
“These are communities who are contemplating what this will mean for their kids and grandkids.”
Two well-funded rightwing campaign groups have begun targeting the Greens across Brisbane. The billboards labelling Greens MPs as “extreme” are hard to miss.
But like their opponents, the Greens also sense a critical moment to defend their 2022 gains and their foothold in the national debate. Since November, the party has taken in more than $900,000 in campaign donations, including several large contributions from the national party.
Chandler-Mather says the scale of the attacks by rightwing groups is “an enormous compliment”.
“And I think that speaks a lot to the fact they recognise us as a much bigger threat to the power that those billionaires hold over politics than either major party. They recognise better than us I think, that if we were able to scale the sort of organisation we have in Brisbane that it would pose a direct and material threat to those organisations that often pay zero dollars in tax. That’s why they’re coming after us.
“If we win, for us this is a template for progressive movements across the country around how to fight back against the far right. It’s a template we can give to other people across the country.
“For us Brisbane is ground zero for that fight for against a lurch towards US-style politics.”
