Adam Bandt is defending the Greens’ persistent refusal to pass key parts of the government’s agenda until Thursday’s legislative landslide, urging voters to understand they were “doing it for a reason”.
As parliament cleared the last of dozens of bills before rising until next year, Bandt acknowledged that holding out against core Labor measures had drawn accusations of obstructionism.
“Yes, we pushed hard this year, and pushing the government isn’t always pretty, so I accept that,” he said in an interview with Guardian Australia on Friday.
“We will now draw a line under this year. We’ve pushed as hard as we can. We’ve got what we can from this government, and so for us now, our focus turns to keeping Peter Dutton out and pushing on climate and housing in what may well be a minority parliament.”
The party that joined the Coalition in refusing to pass significant bills unamended – and then reversed on some and struck last-minute deals on others – wants constituents to understand why it held out.
“When we explain why we’re doing it and also we point to the real outcomes that we’ve got, my sense is: people get it,” Bandt said. “They understand we’re not just having a fight for its own sake.”
“I hope that now, at the end of the year, people can see we’ve actually got something that makes a difference.”
In return for ultimately passing the bills, the Greens are claiming credit for securing an extra $500m in social housing upgrades and excluding coal, oil and gas projects from investment funding under the Future Made In Australia program and from export finance.
But Bandt is tight-lipped on events surrounding the prime minister’s decision to cancel a deal that the Greens and independent senator David Pocock had struck with the environment minister, Tanya Plibersek, to pass legislation for a new national environment protection agency.
Bandt did not deny he and his party’s environment spokesperson, Sarah Hanson-Young, met with Anthony Albanese on Tuesday without Plibersek’s knowledge to be told the deal was off.
“I’m just going to stick with what’s on the public record,” Bandt said, after Guardian Australia reported on the meeting. “I think it is abundantly clear, though, that the reason that we don’t have stronger environment laws at the end of this parliament doesn’t have anything to do with the Greens or the environment minister.”
He pointed to an industry-led campaign against the legislation and the WA premier Roger Cook’s boast that he had scuppered the deal.
“It’s pretty clear what happened this week – the logging and mining corporations told Labor not to protect the environment and forests, and Labor did what they were told.”
The opposition’s environment spokesperson, Jonno Duniam, said federal Labor was doing its WA branch’s bidding and called for clarity on the fate of the bill, which Albanese has said will return to the Senate next year.
“The ongoing rancour and feuding between Anthony Albanese and Tanya Plibersek is incredibly damaging for the Labor party – but, even worse, is preventing any good outcomes for Australia,” he said.
Albanese has denied WA exerted influence, insisting no acceptable deal had been struck.
The Greens leader denied his party’s 11th-hour capitulations on other bills were prompted by negative constituent feedback after disappointing electoral results in Queensland and the ACT.
“There comes a point where you realise you’ve pushed as far as you can and you just have to then decide what you’re going to do,” he said. “So for us it was, yes, pushing isn’t always pretty, but it was done for a reason which is … to try and get the government to shift in a way that they shifted on stage-three tax cuts. We couldn’t get there this time.”
He also rejected suggestions the Greens’ focus on opposing Labor had allowed Peter Dutton’s Coalition to rise, insisting his own sudden forceful rhetoric about the need to “keep Peter Dutton out” was prompted by Donald Trump’s election in the United States.
Bandt said the Greens had supported a range of significant measures since Labor was elected in 2022 – among them the safeguards mechanism tweaks, the Housing Australia Future Fund and wage rises for labour hire and childcare workers – but the government had squandered what could have been “a golden era of reform”.
“There was numbers there in the Senate to get a whole lot of progressive legislation passed, and we were urging the government to take that opportunity.”
Looking to the federal election, he fears Labor will repeat what its Queensland state counterparts did effectively – adopt Greens policies and take credit for them.
“That’s one thing we’re reflecting on.”
