The Greens’ federal housing spokesperson, Max Chandler-Mather, says the Queensland election result shows federal Labor needs to drop its “deep hostility” to the minor party – or risk losing next year’s national poll.
The Liberal National party’s victory at the weekend – its first majority in almost a decade – relied upon gains from Labor in regional areas, including heartland seats in central and north Queensland.
The Greens had hoped to pick up several seats in inner Brisbane, including in areas they won at the 2022 federal election. But election night proved disappointing for the leftwing party, which lost South Brisbane to Labor and conceded ground in several target seats.
The prime minister, Anthony Albanese, said on Sunday the Queensland result sent a message to the federal Greens leader, Adam Bandt.
“Containing the Greens party shows that people who elected the Greens to parliament expected them to play a progressive role, not a blocking role,” Albanese said.
Much of the immediate analysis on election night suggested the Greens’ struggles, coming after marginal losses in the Australian Capital Territory election, pointed to problems with the party’s federal agenda.
But Chandler-Mather, who has been at the forefront of tangles with Albanese and Labor over housing, said Saturday’s outcome showed the ALP had expended too much effort fighting the Greens rather than working with them.
“The frustration is that Labor spends so much of their time and resources attacking us,” Chandler Mather said. “If they had held on [in regional areas] then there could have been a minority government with us in the balance of power.
“The lesson for federal Labor is if the prime minister wants to spend the next six months fighting and attacking the Greens then he’s going to hand the keys to Peter Dutton.”
Labor did pivot campaign resources to Brisbane in the final days of the Queensland election as polls pointed to the party holding more ground in the city. The government also shifted substantially to the left in the 10 months after Steven Miles became premier, including adopting several Greens policies.
Chandler-Mather said these included cheap public transport fares, increased mining royalties, free school lunches and other measures that proved popular. “The only reason that Labor was able to recover so much of their vote in Brisbane is they adopted so much of the Greens policy platform,” he said.
The alternative to Labor losing the next federal election was for them to “drop … the deep hostility to the Greens [and] come work with us,” Chandler-Mather said. “Reach the sort of compromise they reached last year on housing. We’re ready to do this.
“They can’t say this election demonstrates the Greens are unpopular when they adopted most of our platform.
“Our policies are broadly popular. That’s sort of the message we’ve been trying to communicate with the federal Labor party, which still seems to be on the strategy of trying to destroy the Greens.”
Labor sources on Sunday talked up the prospect of taking back federal Brisbane seats held by the Greens, including Chandler-Mather’s electorate of Griffith.
Reflecting on the Greens’ failures to pick up seats on Saturday, Chandler-Mather said the minor party “needed to get better” at communicating wins and the impact Greens MPs had shifting policy debate to the left.
“Labor might think that all of this means the Greens are going away. [But] if you look at our core vote in our future target seats, the foundations are there still.
“If anything we’re finding we’ve had more volunteers this election than we ever had before. The reality is that we just saw [Labor’s] biggest political shift to the left in Queensland political history, entirely based on the premise of trying to stop the Greens.”
Michael Berkman, the Greens MP for Maiwar, appeared to have held on to his seat despite concerns on election night it could go to the LNP. He said on Sunday that Labor had held off the party by “pouring more resources into keeping us out than they did into challenging the LNP”.
“Steven Miles just lost government,” Berkman said. “He lost government in a contest where, if he’d actually identified the real enemy and gone hard, he could have held on to government.”
Asked on Sunday about Labor’s victory in South Brisbane, Miles said he did not want to comment on other parties. “Those wider results are more for you guys to discuss,” the outgoing premier said.
“I’ve always been of the view that the best way to deliver results on things like the environment is through governing. And that’s why I’ve never supported the Greens.”
