A week before the 2018 state election the Victorian Greens leader, Samantha Ratnam, said her party would seize the balance of power and join Labor to form “the most progressive government this state has seen”.
It was an extraordinarily bold claim. Not least because Ratnam had been, just a year earlier, a suburban mayor whose council had been at war with both the state and federal governments.
She was wrong: Labor won in a “Danslide”, and the Greens lost half of their eight seats across the lower and upper houses.
Ratnam won’t make the same mistake again, even if her party is in a much stronger position heading into the 26 November election, buoyed up by its historic result at the federal poll in May.
“A lot of things can happen on election day. As a party, you try to leave no stone unturned, you knock on every door, but predictions aren’t very useful,” she says.
Ratnam has experienced a meteoric rise through the Greens. The social worker joined the party in 2009, about the time federal Labor imploded over climate change policy.
Within three years, she was a councillor in the city of Moreland – now Meri-bek – in Melbourne’s left-leaning inner north.
A month before she became a councillor, 29-year-old Jill Meagher was raped and murdered in a Brunswick alleyway after drinks with colleagues. The shocking crime led to an outpouring of grief in the community and sparked a conversation about women’s safety.
In its wake, the then Coalition state government offered $250,000 for CCTV cameras, as long as the funding was matched by the council.
Instead of immediately committing the funds, which Ratnam says was “a huge proportion of our annual budget”, the council first consulted with police, the community sector and legal organisations.
“Throughout that six months, we had this conservative government using the conservative press to put huge pressure on us, going on to talkback radio saying that the council is going to be responsible for harming women,” she says.
“All the while the evidence is coming back from all the research we’re doing that the cameras will not prevent violence against women.”
The council ended up committing $125,000 to the project and the other half to family violence prevention. A 2016 report found the cameras largely failed to reduce crime and improve perceptions of safety.
After Ratnam was elected as the council’s first Greens mayor in 2015, it moved to ban Australia Day celebrations, prompting a war of words with the federal government. Then assistant immigration minister Alex Hawke was particularly angered by a Socialist Alliance councillor’s comparison between celebrating Australia Day and the Holocaust.
“The government absolutely rejects the extreme and divisive nature of the discussion Greens and Socialist councillors are promoting,” he said at the time.
“Ratepayers of Moreland, who have not been consulted and who did not sign up to dumping Australia Day, have every right to feel ashamed and angered by this divisive move.”
A year later Ratnam replaced former state Greens leader Greg Barber as MP for the northern metropolitan region, in Victoria’s upper house. She was then elected unopposed as leader.
Deputy Greens leader, Ellen Sandell, says the quick ascension took some by surprise.
“But honestly, I couldn’t think of a better person for the job,” she says.
“She came from a long career in the community sector as a social worker, working in local government, being a mayor.
Ratnam has said neither she nor the public knew that Barber’s resignation had come two days after bullying and sexism allegations were aired within the party. He later reached a $56,000 settlement with a staffer, and has said his resignation was unrelated to the complaint.
Baptism of fire
The Greens’ 2018 election campaign was marred by scandal, with one candidate withdrawing after a complaint of serious sexual misconduct, the party defending another for rapping sexist and homophobic lyrics and a third quitting over jokes about shoplifting and derogatory comments about a female Liberal senator on social media.
Satirical tweets written by a staff member for the then member for Northcote Lidia Thorpe added to the narrative peddled by Labor that the Greens had a “woman problem”.
Ratnam says Labor’s infamous dirt unit behaved “unethically”.
“At a time when we want more young people to get into politics, here we had a ferocious and vicious attack against [our candidates] and things they may have said or done when they were young, growing up in the era of social media when they didn’t know once it was online it was online forever,” she says.
The party was also victim to the group voting ticket in the upper house, where a slew of micro-parties that did deals with so-called preference whisperer, Glenn Druery, secured seats with a low number of first preference votes.
Sandell says it was a huge blow, but the party, headed by Ratnam, immediately went to work bolstering probity process of candidates and improving internal dispute rules.
“She managed that process really well. To be appointed as leader and then have to have such a hard time in that first year, to never give up, to constantly be moving forward, bringing people with her, it’s got us to a very strong point,” Sandell says.
Three continents and five schools
Ratnam says growing up, she had no choice but to be political.
“Everyone spoke about politics all the time. The difference between who was elected was literally life or death, war or peace,” she says.
Ratnam and twin sister, Amanda, were born in England in 1977, before their family moved back to Sri Lanka two years later.
She was six when was caught up in a day of riots targeting Tamils in Colombo in July 1983, a month that has since been dubbed “Black July”, marking the start of the Sri Lankan civil war.
She and her sister were at an aunt’s home in Wellawatte, a suburb with a large Tamil population when they received a phone call.
“It was my aunty’s best friend, she was Sinhalese, and she said she had heard they were burning houses in Wellawatte,” she says.
“She said, ‘I’m going to get you, you need to leave’.”
As they drove past homes engulfed by flames, Ratnam’s aunt – and then the children – began to cry.
Within weeks at least 1,000 people were killed and 700,000 Tamil families exiled.
Ratnam’s family began making plans to leave. They first went to Canada, in 1987, before heading to Australia two years later and settled in Melbourne’s south-eastern suburbs.
“Within that two and a half year period, we had lived in three continents and attended five schools, it was a lot,” Ratnam says.
By the time she began studying politics and social work at university the politics of immigration had changed in the wake of the Tampa affair, the 11 September attacks in the US and the children overboard scandal.
“They [the government] ‘othered’ a whole group of people who look like us and that had huge ripple effects across society and we started to experience much more overt racism,” Ratnam says.
Making a mark
Ratnam has been busy since 2018, not only in getting her party in fighting form for this month’s election.
She made history as the first pregnant Australian political leader, with daughter Malala making her first appearance at parliament at just two months old, when Ratnam returned from maternity leave to vote for a six-month extension to the government’s state of emergency powers.
“She now says things like, ‘Mum has to go to parliament’, it’s very cute,” Ratnam says.
Both her and Sandell’s experience as mothers has been reflected in the party’s new policies, including a plan for five days of reproductive leave for public sector workers.
The Greens’ core election platforms, however, are stronger climate action, greater integrity in politics and addressing housing affordability. Griffith MP Max Chandler-Mather has also been brought in to help replicate the party’s federal campaign strategy.
Asked again about their prospects come 26 November, Ratnam replies: “We’re feeling confident. We’re feeling hopeful.”
