Unlike many members of the Labor Party, I do not harbour a burning hatred for the Greens. Their values are admirable and, in many cases, indistinguishable from my own.

But most importantly, Labor must never forget that the Greens exist in large part because Labor has dropped the ball on several progressive issues. Key among these are refugees and asylum-seekers (an issue notably absent from the 2025 election campaign). In 2001, when Labor under Kim Beazley more or less supported John Howard’s approach towards asylum-seekers, a large chunk of Labor supporters got up and left for the Greens. They never came back.

Yet, in the aftermath of the 2025 federal election, the Greens are at risk of a total wipeout in the lower house. What is certain is that they have lost two of the three Brisbane-based lower house seats that they won in 2022: Griffith and Brisbane. Shockingly, Greens leader Adam Bandt’s seat of Melbourne is still too close to call. The Greens have held this seat for more than a decade, and losing it would be a major blow to the party. Despite a strong swing towards the Greens in Wills (in the northern inner suburbs of Melbourne), Labor will most likely hold onto that seat.

All of this raises the question: in an election where a centre-left government disappointed so many of its progressive voters, and the opposition Coalition careened further to the right, what the hell happened to the Greens?

At this stage, it is hard to see where the overall Greens vote will land. At the time of writing, the Greens are seeing a small drop in their first preference vote in the lower house. That may change as more votes are counted, particularly if the Greens fare better with pre-poll votes as opposed to ballots cast on election day.

In my opinion, the reason for the Greens’ lacklustre performance has got to do with the differences between campaigning for the lower house vs. campaigning for the Senate. For a long time, the Greens have been primarily a party of the upper house. Because the Senate is elected proportionally based on the number of votes in each state, geographic concentration of voters in a particular seat is less of a problem. A Senate-based party can broadcast its message and pick up supporters regardless of where they live: the inner-city, the outer suburbs, or rural areas.

However, when campaigning for a lower house seat, a party needs to tailor its message towards the specific demographics of the seat they hope to win. The more seats a party holds in the lower house, the greater the risk its message to attract new voters will alienate previous supporters. To me, this is the critical problem that the Greens encountered during this campaign. Trying to win over new supporters in the northern suburbs of Melbourne, for example, while trying to retain supporters in inner-city Brisbane, is an incredibly difficult task.

This is the problem that Labor has faced for a long time, and one of the reasons that Greens’ criticism of Labor’s shyness of several issues has struck me as short-sighted. The bigger a party gets, the more difficult it is to find a message that cuts across demographics and delivers multiple lower house seats. In 2019, the Greens criticised Labor leader Bill Shorten for saying “one thing in Queensland and another in Victoria”. In 2025, they discovered exactly why that is sometimes necessary.

A tangible example is the war (nay, genocide) in Gaza. The Greens’ outspoken support for Palestine and criticism of Israel was morally the right thing to do, and undeniably the reason for a strong swing towards them in the Melbourne seat of Wills. However, it may be an issue that cost them votes in Brisbane. Of course, we won’t know the precise reasons why Greens voters shifted in Brisbane, but I suspect that this will be one reason.

If you think that I’m being unfair and that the Greens being brandished as radical over their stance on Gaza is a media beat-up, I’d invite you to notice how the Greens softened their rhetoric on this issue as the election campaign heated up. Bandt previously had declared that Prime Minister Anthony Albanese was “complicit” in genocide, but when invited to repeat that accusation on the ABC’s Insiders program by David Speers, the Greens leader refused to do so. The Greens are a professional political outfit; they wouldn’t have softened their rhetoric unless internal party research and polling showed that it was costing them votes.

The final reason behind the Greens losing seats at this election is again related to the structure of Australia’s electoral system, namely, compulsory preferential voting. The collapse in the Liberal primary vote has helped Labor win at least two seats off the Greens, because the Liberals coming in third place on first-preference votes meant that their preferences got redistributed and (unsurprisingly) these mostly flowed towards Labor, helping them beat the Greens on a two-party preferred basis.

Now, please indulge me for a moment while I engage in some partisan criticism. Extolling the virtues of Australia’s preferential voting system was a core plank of the Greens’ electoral strategy. They told people (correctly) that you cannot waste your vote in a compulsory preferential system. If your first preference doesn’t get elected, your vote is still counted. Insofar as the Greens educated a younger audience on this feature of our voting system, hats off to them.

However, Bandt’s love affair with preferential voting lasted about two hours on election night. When explaining why the Greens were losing seats to Labor, he blamed the preferential voting system. Describing Labor as winning “because of Liberal preferences”, as if this is somehow illegitimate, was both self-serving and hypocritical. In 2022, the Greens won seats because of Labor preferences. Apparently winning preferences from the Right is only okay when you’re the Greens, but when you’re Labor it is something to be ashamed of.

Ask yourself this: would the Greens prefer a situation in which more people put the Liberals first? Probably. And that is totally legitimate, but it shows that they are just as self-serving as any other political party. Fine by me, but time to drop the line that you’re about “doing politics differently”.

Ironically, this isn’t even the full story. In both Griffith and Brisbane, Labor finished ahead of the Greens on first preferences. In either a first-past-the-post or preferential system, the Greens would still have lost both seats.

For a long time, the Greens have tried to shake off the shackles of being perceived as a Senate-only minor party. To that end, they have succeeded. Their only hubris was in thinking that this meant a linear growth in seats.