Adam Bandt says Greens ‘hitting a nerve’ as conservative lobby group takes aim
The Greens leader, Adam Bandt, considers it no less than a “badge of honour” to be in the crosshairs of conservative lobby group Advance Australia, as the countdown to Australia’s next federal election begins.
Advance, which boasted about its success in the defeat of the voice to parliament referendum last year, has revealed the subject of its latest campaign in recent weeks.
The firebrand group will focus solely on “exposing” the Greens – a party it considers Australia’s “biggest threat to freedom, security and prosperity” – to swing voters, in a bid to scare off hundreds of thousands at the polls.
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But Bandt, who will have been the party’s leader for half a decade next February, welcomed the attention and said it was merely confirmation the Greens posed a serious threat to the two-party status quo.
“We are clearly hitting a nerve,” Bandt told Guardian Australia.
“People know that we will fight just as hard for them economically as we will fight for a safe climate, and to protect our environment [and that] has been a big part of the reason that more and more people have switched to us.”
At the 2022 federal election, the Greens won 12.3% of the vote on first preferences, or about 1.8m votes. The party gained three lower house seats and another six Senate seats, bringing its total in federal parliament to 16. Following Lidia Thorpe’s exit last year, the party enters election season with 15 members across both houses.
The environmental and social justice party was created in 1992 and first found electoral success in 1996 when its then leader, Bob Brown, was elected to the Senate.
Since then, more and more Australians have voted Green, with the last election dubbed a “greenslide”.
But Advance’s executive director, Matthew Sheahan, was not pleased.
After Advance’s work against the voice referendum in 2023 – after which Sheahan was personally thanked by the opposition leader, Peter Dutton, as the loss became plain – Sheahan said the Greens were now his group’s sole focus.
On a Wednesday evening in July, Sheahan told those attending an online forum that his sights were set on exposing the Greens as a “toxic”, “anti-capitalist” party.
“The Greens have a very strong brand and while it’s built on a lie, it’s very powerful and it’s sucking people in,” he told the event organised by the conservative-leaning political group, the Australian Jewish Association.
Focus groups, Sheahan continued, shed insight on this. More than half of people surveyed believed Labor and the Coalition stood for very little, he said. Compare that to the 78% who had agreed the Greens stood for something – the environment – and it was clear the minor party had the “strongest” branding of any political party.
“People think that the brand is the brand of Bob Brown, where once it was a genuine, sincere, you know, quite valid party that took the view that it wanted to … protect the wilderness, our growth forests and a whole lot of other worthwhile endeavours,” Sheahan said.
“Unfortunately, it’s grown into quite a toxic non-environmental party.”
But Advance’s approach would not be the incendiary ads voters have come to expect. Instead, they’ll start “soft”, Sheahan explained, informing voters of the Greens’ other policies beyond advocating for stronger action on climate change.
Bandt has said the party’s focus at the next election would be to take on “big corporations and the billionaires” as well as fixing the housing crisis. The party has also taken a strong stance on the conflict in Gaza.
Those policies, Sheahan claimed, are “anti-capitalist” and “anti-Judeo Christian values”.
Advance’s approach will be to geotarget soft Greens voters – women aged between 33 and 49, Sheahan continued – to convince them the Greens aren’t the same party Brown founded 32 years ago.
“We think we can persuade quite a considerable lot of them,” Sheahan said.
“We can drop [the Greens’] vote in the lower house by 2% and the Senate by 4%. That’s the target.
And we’re not planning to stop there, he said.
“We’ve got to continue after the next federal election to try and expose the Greens for who they are to try and get their vote back to 4-5%.”
But the Greens are intent on another greenslide. The minor party is targeting inner-city seats held by Labor MPs, including Wills (held by Peter Khalil) and Macnamara (Josh Burns) in Melbourne. The seat of Sturt in Adelaide, held by Liberal moderate, James Stevens, and the Patrick Gorman-held electorate of Perth are also on the wish list. In northern NSW, the minor party is also eyeing Richmond, where Labor holds an 8.2% margin over the Nationals despite the Greens getting more preference votes.
Polling in the lead-up to the next federal election has shown Labor could clinch another win with a minority supported by teal and Green MPs.
Election analyst, Ben Raue, who once worked for leftwing activist group Get Up, said the major parties were “still winning a lot more seats than their share of the vote”.
“Their votes are now getting down to a point where they don’t have these huge margins,” he said.
And Bandt suggested Advance’s hyperfixation on his party could instead backfire in these seats, boosting voter awareness of the Greens’ policies – in other words, the Streisand effect.
“When you see politicians fail to act on the big crises that are facing us, a lot of people are becoming disengaged, and what we’re offering is something different,” Bandt said.
“A big part of the reason is that people are in strife, economically. Pressures are huge. The planet is burning, and they look at politicians, and politicians aren’t fixing the problem.
“We can’t keep voting for the same old two parties and expecting a different result.”
Advance is embarking on building its $5m war chest – incidentally, a similar dollar figure for its campaign against the voice referendum – and has reportedly raised $1.5m.
While the group has had little success in previous federal elections since its creation in 2018, Sheahan said he believed Advance’s campaign would affect the “tactical” Greens and teal vote in key seats.
“Our target market is so small. We’re targeting a million people. And they can’t stop us getting a message to those people,” he said.
“If we’re going to spend money and deliver and get a message to a mum, who’s 35 in Adelaide who’s thinking about voting Greens at the next election, and we can get a message to her 16 times between now and the next election. That’s the sort of number that will change her mind. There’s absolutely nothing they can do about it.”
Not everyone agrees.
The former Victorian Labor campaigner, Kos Samaras, who now runs his own polling company, said he wasn’t convinced a hard-right activist group could turn the tables on the Greens vote.
“A conservative body attempting to target Greens voters will likely fail for the same reason Greens supporters failed with their efforts in 2019, where they marched to northern Queensland to convince mining communities to embrace the closure of industries that employ them,” he said.
Raue added that it was a pretty hard sell – convincing enough left-leaning voters to abandon their beliefs and vote for candidates on the right.
“I think a lot of the time, particularly people who work in politics, [who] work on campaigns, overestimate the importance of running a campaign,” Raue said.
“Elections are fought in very different ways to referendums.”