Didn’t the Libs already try that in the Parliament house Prayer Room?
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I’m sure Tim will bring that tradition back in.
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Adam Bandt still had the highest primary vote in Melbourne.
30k votes capturing 40% of the vote.
The Labor candidate got 24k.
He was dudded on preferences.
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The Greens are ineffective and don’t have policies that are in any way implementable. They won’t be around much longer.
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Some good learnings from folks in this thread. Who says our education system’s farked?
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‘Dudded’ is not the word. Everyone knows how the preference system works, everyone knows there are very good reasons why it was designed to work the way it does. The Greens won three of their four seats last election on preferences. You can’t benefit from the system one day, then complain when it works against you the next time round. Sometimes the pendulum swings the other way.
I don’t think there’s one single reason why Bandt lost. There’s a lot of factors converging. He won by such a significant margin last time partly because the Lib outpolled the ALP candidate, leading him to recieve the vast majority of Labor preferences. So when the Lib vote collapses and now he’s fighting with the ALP candidate for Lib preferences in the runoff between the top 2, he’s under the pump.
However, it’s not JUST that. The collapsing Lb vote did hurt the Greens a lot in three of their four seats, but they’d be dumb if they just blamed all their woes on that. Their primary vote went backwards too. Part of that in Bandt’s case was due to redistribution - the seat of Melbourne absorbed a chunk of labor-strong areas around South Yarra, which was unlucky for him.
But there’s got to be a bit of soul-searching too. The Greens are in a tough spot strategically if they want to expand. A lot of their historically strong areas are now Teal, and if the Greens ran hard against Teal incumbents, they’d be shooting themselves hard in the foot with their base. So they made the choice to branch out to the whole ‘party of renters’ thing, targeting younger voters instead. Which is fair enough, god knows nobody else seems to give a ■■■■ about those guys. But it did mean that while they gained significant swings to them in outer suburban and western suburban electorates, they lost primary vote in areas where they were strong. And when you’re relying on preferences to win in the first place, losing even a small amount of primary vote can lead to you being wiped out real fast if things go wrong.
I suspect Chandler-Mather won’t be getting invited to too many Greens tea parties any time soon. He was a really good local organiser and was heavily responsible for the Greens winning the Brisbane seats last time around, but I think his handling of the housing stuff alienated too many people. He was too loud and too demanding and too up himself. Being a principle-based minor party is a balance between sticking to your principles and striking agreements with the majors so you can point to SOMETHING you’ve achieved, and so that you can maybe strike agreements with those majors again. Chandler-Mather got a lot of media cut-through and attention, but he also went too hard populist. Bandt let him go too long because he was getting on the news (god knows it’s hard enough to get the media to pay attention to what the Greens are saying about their own policies, rather that what other people say), and was left with a mess.
However, as I’ve said several times, Albanese seems to have a pretty solid strategy for nobbling the Greens in the upper house these days, and it’s quite possible that he’d not have negotiated in good faith anyway. Offer the Greens one crumb of good reform in a massive ■■■■ sandwich of a terrible bill, refuse all amendments, dare them to block it, and then say that they’re ganging up with the Libs to be obstructionist if they do. And given the ALP have proven multiple times that they’re perfectly willing - even eager - to team up with the Coalition to vote for scummy cynical stuff like the nobbled NACC, the gutting of environmental laws to protect salmon farms, and doctoring of electoral rules to lock out independents - it puts a lot of pressure on the Greens to pass that ■■■■ sandwich bill for fear of getting something even worse. It’s a very tricky wedge for the GReens to negotiate, and it’s only going to get harder.
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Yeah nah they tried to privatise water up here, went down like a lead balloon……
Edit
They ended up with a water wholesaler and two retailers. Wholesaler owned by the state, two retailers owned by groups of councils, other retailers retained by individual councils.
Touché
not quite sure about this one
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100% correct re Mr Mather. Letting him run unchecked rebounded badly. The CFMEU stunt needed to have consequences and when it didn’t it reflected poorly on the Party’s leadership.
The redistribution did hurt him. He lost several strong Green areas to neighbouring Wills and inherited a slice of the abolished Higgins. While that area is Green-friendly (as part of the once Green Prahran state seat) it’s a different type of Green constituency to that north of the river. One which Bandt lost significant portions of for all the reasons you mentioned.
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Not really commenting on the greens politics. Just the numbers.
I’d take a guess that quite a few MPs that enjoy 40 percent of the primary vote with that many candidates would get elected.
I mean especially when it’s usually green preferences which get Labor MPs in around the country over conservative candidates.
True, but it depends where the other 60% of the vote goes. There was basically no other leftwing candidate running (other than Fusion, if you count them, which I don’t). Everyone else was to the right of Labor, let alone the Greens. As soon as the Lib primary vote dropped below the ALP, meaning that Bandt and the ALP candidate would be the last two standing, he was in trouble. The great majority of Lib and One Nation and Trumpet preferences were always going tto go to Labor over the Green. I thought he’d squeak home when his primary vote share was around 43%, but since Sat night it’s only gone south to only 40%, and that;s way too low. Plenty of Libs on 40% lost to Teals last election in the same way.
And of course, we can’t forget that if Bandt’s primary vote share hadn’t dropped 4%, he’d have been fine. It’s not all about preferences. He lost primary support as well.
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I had personal experience with him and he was a divisive nasty farkwit.
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Was this before or after he deserted the Labor Party ?
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Given that they have 11 Senate Seats, they will be able to exercise a level of power in determining what legislation gets through (unless the LNP back Labor legislation).
So…IF (deliberately in capitals) they can get someone relatively savvy into the leadership role who can work with Labor, they should be able to impact the country going forward.
It will depend on whether or not they look at where they went wrong during this last term…and what cost them votes.
Maybe they will be smart enough to work it out…but I’m not holding my breath.
They should all read Peter Garrett’s biography to get some hints on how to work within the political establishment.
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I’d take an honest, gutsy, environmentally-minded farkwit over a spineless ALP/LNP fraud any day.
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Funny that so much is made of the internal recriminations within the smouldering pile that is the Liberal Party after the Abbott, Scomo Dutton generation of failed leaders made it unelectable.
I should think they absolutely need to look in the mirror and have a good look at what Australians vote for these days and move at least some way towards that model as a base.
Its clear the Coalition has been captive of growth through mining ( resource exploitation ) while Labor wants to also run a population ponzi scheme growth model to generate employment. Eventually under both systems resources will run out and hard times will hit us pretty hard. Take a look at Nauru.
Go back to 1997 in the UK. The Major government was crushed by Blairs Labour who moved from an unelectable far left position more to the centre. We have just seen the mirror image of a similar scale. In that case, it took the Tories about 10 years to get back in.
A healthy opposition is needed in our system to create stable government. So the libs need to get their act together asap. There appears to be no alternative opposition force.
He suffered an 8.5% two party preferred swing. Thats what hurt him.
The ALP who have just won in a landslide only enjoyed about 34.5% of the primary vote. The Libs 31.5%
Bandt lost his seat capturing 40% of the primary.
Thats the reality.
Dutton only got 35%(the most of any candidate) and lost on 2PP.
But Richard Marles for example sits in one of the safest ALP seats in the country but only got 43% of the vote. His two party preferred is nearly 70.
Because of preferences.
In 2011, after he was elected to parliament.
I reckon anyone who stands for office shows a commendable amount of guts, and Greens are environmentally-minded. My experience with Adam Bandt showed he lacked honesty and integrity, or perhaps he was just another grubby lawyer being a smartarse at my expense.
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