The greens may loose their leader
The greens may loose their leader
Stay updated with the latest results from Melbourne in the 2025 Australian Federal Election. Get live voting updates on ABC News.
Given that Labor have a lower house majority but not one in the Senate, where the Greens hold the balance of power, this will not change the need to negotiate with the Greens (or the coalition) to get legislation passed.
It still sucks, though. Bandt has been a capable leader and has presided over the transformation of the Greens from a mostly-single-issue environmental protest party to a broad party of the left of the sort that Labor can no longer claim to be, pushing issues like rights for non-homeowners and expansion of Medicare. Fingers crossed that he scrapes through.
What ? The dental into Medicare thing has long been Greens policy along with a whole other bunch of stuff.
They tried under Gillard to force the issue but had to accept children only in Medicare as a compromise..
The environment policy centrism flows through into everything though, so it should stay front and centre eg public and alternate transport lowers; emissions, pollution, urban sprawl, human misery, heath expenditure, cost of living etc etc Medium density well insulated housing similarly helps lower hosing costs amd that all flows from sound environmental policy.
You seem to be getting confused by media either ignoring them or pillorying them for devades, rather then actual Green ploicy ?
The only real new thing was housing policy re renters based on Max etal actually experiencing housing stress and donating significant portions of thier parliamentary income to homeless charities rather then buying houses and fleecing tax payers ah la ALP/LNP/Teal politicians.
I've been voting Green for15 years, Independents before that for 30 years but alas in that time its seen preferences fall through to shit stain lite, aka ALP.
The whole thing is only going to get worse as Anthony Green quipped on election night, as new funding legislation mostly just supports the ALP and LNP.
Finally someone says it out loud. It was doing my head in how this was staring at us right in the face as a possibility but got overshadowed by Dutton getting obliterated. I don’t know how, but Labor have someone manage to vaporise not one but two opposing party leaders in a single election. It’s nuts.
This would just be another parallel between us and Canada. Yes, Pierre Poilievre losing his seat, and Dutton following in his footsteps, has gotten most of the attention. But New Democratic Party leader Jagmeet Singh also lost his seat in Canada.
It's about time the AEC adopts a 3CP count on election night for 3-way seats.
For those unaware, on election night, AEC workers count the 1st preferences of votes, and then conduct a 2CP count to the 2 candidates the Commissioner (or the Division Returning Officer, not sure which...but it's someone high up in the permanent AEC staff) has decided are most likely to win. This is great in most cases, but if the AEC gets it wrong it can lead to wild results where the person who was believed to have won on the night has actually lost, and either the 2CP loser on the night actually wins, or even the winner can be someone who made no appearance in the 2CP on the night.
I don't know who the 2CP was between on election night in Melbourne (I was too busy doing that counting in Ryan—ours was between Greens and LNP),* but the need to "re-throw" between Labor and Greens implies it was probably Greens/LNP? If so that seems strangely out of alignment with previous results so I don't understand why they did that. If they did in fact 2CP between Labor and Greens I wonder why the recount would be so far off of what was declared on the night.Doing a 3CP count on the night, only in seats where this kind of thing is considered likely, would give a much better indication. Yes, it would be more anticlimactic because you'd lose the ability to confidently declare who did win, but it would at least mean the numbers you're seeing on the ABC (or your media source of choice) are definitely accurate and unlikely to change by large amounts over the coming week. And you can just make an estimate of how preferences will flow from the 3rd in 3CP to the other two. (Before anyone asks, it would definitely not be viable to do a 3CP and then a 2CP on the night. I didn't leave the booth until 11:30 pm last night as it was; extending it too much more than that would be unreasonable. Besides, you couldn't start a 2CP until every booth had done its 3CP, including the postal votes and prepolls. And that's just not how it works. Each booth does their own thing based on guidance set out ahead of time.)
3CP would actually speed up the result, allowing workers to get home earlier and the media to get reliable answers sooner. Each ballot would take a bit longer to count, but the number of ballots to be counted is absolutely decimated (in the modern, not Roman, sense). Instead of counting nearly 700 2CPs, we'd be counting less than 250 3CPs at my booth. The disadvantage is the potentially higher error rate. (A less important disadvantage is the lack of ability to use the 3CP to find errors in the 1st preference results...but you only lose this ability in the 1 candidate that would have undergone 2CP redistribution but is now part of the 3CP...in my booth our redistribution of the Labor candidate results meant we noticed we had undercounted her 1st preference results initially by 1.)
So in summary:
- 3CP would reduce post-election-night surprises
- 3CP would give the media accurate, if incomplete, results that can be used to make informed speculation about the final result
- 3CP would speed up the count on election night, saving the AEC money, their workers sleep, and giving the media information faster
I don't know if this would require legislative change, a directive from some Minister, or just an internal AEC policy change. But whatever it is, it needs to happen.
Ok I found the ABC liveblog from last night which said this:
the electoral commission was counting preferences between the Liberals and the Greens because they were the final two parties in 2022
I don't understand this, because the AEC Tallyroom website says the final two were Labor and Greens. But at least I now know who they were counting...unless the ABC was wrong on both points.
edit:
* Ok I found the ABC liveblog from last night which said this:
the electoral commission was counting preferences between the Liberals and the Greens because they were the final two parties in 2022
I don't understand this, because the AEC Tallyroom website says the final two were Labor and Greens. But at least I now know who they were counting...unless the ABC was wrong on both points.
@Zagorath @Hotstillnasty I think the issue in Melbourne was also caused by the electoral boundaries changing, and some significant booths with very different political leanings changed electorates.
You'd hope redistribution was considered in the calculation of leading candidates, but it's a little opaque?
On top of this, the swings at some booths were wild - with the greens dropping from 64% of primary vote to approx 40% of primary vote in my local booth - something the AEC can't take into account when planning.
@Zagorath @Hotstillnasty I guess this is the reason there are re-counts when the result is close.
- The AEC has begun a preference re-throw between Labor and the Greens. At this stage only Postal votes have been thrown and these flow 75.9% to Labor and 24.1% to Greens. Given the high Liberal vote for postal votes, this sample of preferences may be skewed and projects to Labor ahead but Melbourne is being left in doubt until further preference counts are completed.
- Sarah Witty leads by an estimated 2,899 votes.
- Previously held by GRN with margin of 6.5%.
This is somewhat on topic:
We “destroyed” Greens: Megamillionaire disinformation group “Advance”
The group that ran the “No” campaign against the Indigenous Voice to parliament — funded by the Liberal Party and fossil fuels multi-millionaires — claims to have “destroyed” the Greens.
In an email titled “BREAKING: Greens destroyed by Advance blitz”, US-style disinformation group “Advance” has claimed its “critical work” had “helped stop the Greens in their tracks”.
“The Greens have been belted,” Advance executive director Matthew Sheahan writes in an email.
He states the group’s so-called “Greens Truth” campaign “cut them (Greens) down from six seats to at most two. Maybe one” ...
To be fair, it was only a correction to the hubris of the libs from the last election.
They ran on the slogan put Labor last, which they did on their preference flows. What they never accounted for, was the greens would get a much higher primary vote in a lot of these inner city seats.
It appears after the last election and the Greens sweeping 6 seats they realised that this was not the best for their billionaire donors and preferenced Labor ahead of the Greens this time around.
Pure ego saving bullshit. Notice how they avoid the big red elephant in the ballot box....
Antony Green said on Saturday night that he believed Mr Bandt would end up retaining Melbourne.
Antony Green said 2 hours ago that he believed Mr Bandt would end up retaining Melbourne.Greens leader Adam Bandt looks like he's in a good position to be re-elected in the seat he's held since 2010.
Postal votes had been breaking strongly to Labor, with Bandt getting just 23 per cent of preferences from them. For victory, he needs that number to be above a third.
The good news for him is that all four of the polling places counted today have beaten that target.
Based on current preference flows, Bandt trails his Labor opponent, but if today's counting trend continues, Bandt should be re-elected.
At this stage, no early voting centres have been recounted.It's still a dangerous spot though. The LNP votes will doubtless (largely) flow through to Labor. If enough people are spooked with the Greens housing policy, then the preference flows might not be as favourable.