Simultaneously branded as “too extreme” while acting too moderate, Jonathan Sriranganathan looks at the Greens’ electoral paradox, calling for a thoroughly anti-establishment approach that radically embraces grassroots power, mass participatory democracy, and systemic change.
A frustrating paradox: the Australian Greens policy platform and strategic approach is far too conservative to meet the urgent need for deep systemic change, yet a significant proportion of voters still seem to consider the party “too extreme”.
This isn’t because of anything the Greens themselves have done. It’s because of the sustained, combined attacks of major parties, right-wing minor parties, and cashed-up, oligarch-funded entities like Advance Australia. To respond by treating that “extremist” criticism as valid would be giving mining billionaires, property speculators and weapons manufactures exactly what they want.
We won’t beat them if we play by their rules.
Yes, the other, bigger factor this time around was that lots of voters switched to Labor to keep out Dutton. But inner-city Greens supporters also switched to Labor in the 2024 Queensland state election. And when everyone rebelled against Morrison three years ago, the Greens were able to capture much more of that swing. Our policy platform has barely changed since 2022, but voters’ perceptions of us evidently have.
“Too extreme” is a conveniently ambiguous attack framing that allows different people to amalgamate and substitute their own pet grievances.
For some, “extreme” means solidarity with persecuted minorities, whether that’s trans folk, refugees or First Nations people. For others, “extreme” apparently means saying “hey, maybe we shouldn’t send weapons to a country that’s systematically bombing hospitals and schools”. Even calling for modest housing reforms that would bring Australia into line with many western European countries is supposedly extreme.
Those who profit from maintaining the status quo have branded the Greens “fringe”, “radical” and “extreme” since the party’s inception. In response, we seem to have watered-down our calls for change.
In the recent federal election, key party spokespeople barely mentioned Aboriginal land rights or the ongoing persecution of refugees. Even our main climate action demand buried the most important objective – our messaging de-emphasised our very moderate, science-backed policy goal of ending all thermal coal exports by 2030 (five years too late in my opinion), and focused only on banning new coal, gas and oil projects.
The party’s 2025 headline campaign narrative – fund social services by introducing a slightly higher tax rate for a small number of the largest and most profitable corporations – was deliberately chosen to have broad, mainstream appeal. And indeed, most voters I spoke on the ground in Brisbane’s south side were hard-pressed to identify anything in the Greens’ actual list of key policy priorities that they disagreed with or objected to.
Anyone who tries arguing that the party’s core messages were “too radical” either hasn’t been paying attention, or is deliberately trying to scare the Greens into submission.
We already know the dangers of always uncritically meeting people where we think they’re at. We know where endlessly moderating our policy demands to satisfy industry lobbyists and oligarchs ultimately leads to – the modern Labor party. If our end destination is big, positive change, that’s a dead end.
Our movement has already sanded off our rough, radical edges in order to appeal to an imagined conservative centre, with little to show for it. Just like major party politicians, Greens MPs now spend big on billboard advertising arms races, wear suits into parliament, and respectfully engage in mainstream media forums and interviews as though the parameters of debate have not been heavily constrained and controlled by corporate interests.
But the propaganda war is entirely asymmetrical. When using conventional campaigning tactics and channels (I now include centrally-coordinated doorknocking and social media posting as “conventional”), for every person we reach with a message, our political adversaries are reaching ten.
The lesson we should take from the poor results in May 2025, and other recent state elections, is that we can’t out-perform the political establishment’s attacks against us when we play by their rules and conventions.
From a conventional election strategy standpoint, the Greens’ national campaign made a couple of obvious errors…
In the last term of parliament, we rightly picked a big fight on housing, winning new supporters and increasing our political relevance. Similarly, our solidarity with Palestine was clearly a major friction point with the political and media establishment.
Both these issues represented strong, positive points of difference between the Greens and the major parties, and both were being used as flamethrower fuel by our political adversaries. But spooked by state election disappointments (I assume), the party leadership de-emphasised housing and Palestinian solidarity during the campaign itself, retreating to “safer” terrain like free dental care.
The Greens should have defended our position on these issues strongly, challenging the major parties on their support for ever-growing house prices and their unwillingness to directly criticise Israel’s genocide. By backing off, and not even properly educating our supporters, we allowed our adversaries to reframe these issues in ways that made the Greens look like the unreasonable ones.
Having said that though, even if our top-level messaging focus this election had been different, I’m still not sure it would’ve changed the overall outcome dramatically, because the Greens remain shackled by a deeper tension that we’ve refused to grapple with head-on…
Is our long-term goal system change, or system tweaking?
If it is system change, do we look credible when we try to downplay this goal, and cast ourselves as mere reformists, even as our political opponents argue the opposite?
This election, the Greens appear to have lost some support among upper-middle-class voters who, alongside other factors, were made nervous about the Greens being too radical or extreme. Simultaneously, we gained a lot of new support in poorer, more culturally diverse suburbs. Presumably, the latter communities are less deterred by “extremist” fear-mongering. They were attracted to a party that seemed more anti-establishment and willing to challenge the major parties.
This highlights to me how, in terms of broad political orientation, the Greens are still sitting on the fence.
Adam Bandt and co. have sought to position the Greens as a centre-left social democratic party, further left than the aspirations of some centrist reformist Greens, but still several steps short of full-on system change (and perhaps not as compelling for those of us with legitimate critiques of centralised top-down government). However, party leadership has largely neglected to meet the growing public appetite for unequivocally anti-establishment politics, leaving most voters (and even members like myself) uncertain about whether Greens MPs aim to fundamentally transform the current system and tear down unjust hierarchies, or simply replace those at the top of the existing political pyramid.
When a politician is more obviously a system outsider (as I was during my seven years as a lone Greens city councillor in Brisbane), consistently voting against right-wing administrations, refusing to make deals behind closed doors, and building grassroots power through community organising, people are more forgiving when you clearly violate establishment norms and conventions. You’re at least behaving consistently with what’s expected of you.
But most voters don’t pay much attention to the details of what political parties say and do. They go off vibes.
And while our opponents were still shrieking about extremism, the Greens were increasingly giving establishment vibes.
When some jaded Greens supporters speak fondly of “returning to the Bob Brown days” I suspect that this is what they’re subconsciously reacting to, more-so than a frustration that we’re talking less about koalas and more about banning weapons exports.
I know some active Greens volunteers and staffers would feel differently, and might even resent this claim, but even though the policy platform is more progressive, to superficially-engaged outsiders, the Greens party machine simply doesn’t look or feel dramatically different from the major parties anymore.
In late 2024, when the Greens waived through Labor’s final housing bills without extracting further concessions, this decision was made by federal Greens politicians alone, without any transparent democratic process to include the party’s wider support base.
In that context, community BBQs and footage of Adam behind the DJ decks isn’t enough to prove that we’re “doing politics differently”.
The Greens inadvertently signalled to voters that they were an establishment party, both wielding and wrestling over structural parliamentary power. But if you step into that world of parliamentary deal-making and carefully staged press conferences, you need to consistently re-prosecute the case for deeper system change and explain why it’s impossible to negotiate in good faith with parties who’ve become mere puppets for big business. If you don’t, supporters can easily be turned against you.
The effectiveness of Labor’s attacks that the Greens were “obstructionist” and “playing political games” was of course in part due to the unbalanced platform sizes. A disingenuous narrative spread by the Prime Minister, 90+ federal Labor politicians, and dozens more Labor state MPs and sycophantic media commentators around the country, was inevitably going to cut through more than the counter-narrative from a far smaller group of Greens spokespeople. But the extra sting of the ‘obstructionist’ critique was the suggestion that the Greens were system insiders wielding structural power irresponsibly.
If you signal to voters that you now hold structural power – as the Greens essentially did – and after blocking for a while you still end up supporting the government’s agenda, all you really do is piss people off for holding things up.
This is the space where post-election reflections must dig deeper.
We can’t effectively push the major parties to deliver bigger changes unless we’re willing to block government bills in the senate more often. But to justify blocking the government’s agenda, we must first make clear that we exist in opposition to – not as an appendage of – the government and the wider capitalist establishment.
If you’ve routinely pushed a strong case for system change (not just within one policy portfolio area, but for wider cultural and socio-economic transformation), blocking is consistent with your broader stated purpose. But if you signal (intentionally or unintentionally) a desire to become part of the establishment, you’re expected to fall into line to help maintain – not undermine — the status quo.
It’s tricky territory, and anyone who professes to have definitive answers should be treated with scepticism.
None of this should be misconstrued as an argument against the party trying to win more seats in the federal lower house.
But we have to be real about what we’re up against.
The eye-watering sums deployed to attack and delegitimise the Greens this election are still only a tiny fraction of what billionaires and big corporations could spend on campaigns and lobbying if they really felt threatened.
But watering down our policy platform even further, self-censoring our criticism of genocide, or attending fewer protest marches won’t move society any closer towards the changes we’re seeking.
Each election, fewer people vote 1 for the two major parties. And the overall vote share among parties to the left of Labor is consistently trending upwards. But the Greens haven’t capitalised on these trends as much as they could and should have.
The party must find a new path now that’s more overtly and unapologetically anti-establishment, not just in terms of the policies we prioritise and the types of candidates we put forward, but in the effort we put towards talking about and practising systemic change. That means a greater emphasis on political education and mass participatory democracy within our movement, a renewed enthusiasm for grassroots activism tactics that directly challenge government power on the streets, and a willingness to subvert the various parliamentary conventions that constrain and neutralise us.
Whether that’s enough to actually win seats and help change systems remains an open question. Maybe it won’t be.
But if the alternative is that we keep doing what we’ve just done, compromising our message, tactics and identity a little more each election cycle in the vain hope of insulating against increasingly well-coordinated attacks from billionaires and their political puppets, I’d rather try something new.
Jonathan Sriranganathan is a writer, musician and community worker who was elected back in 2016 as Brisbane’s first ever Greens city councillor, representing the Gabba Ward on the city’s inner-south side. Jonno stepped down from the council in April 2023, after 7 years of service in that role. In March 2024 Jonno was the Greens candidate for Mayor of Brisbane in the local government elections. Jonathan Sriranganathan writes regularly about green politics at www.jonathansri.com
Image credit. Feature image artwork by Anna Carlson.
Love this. The Greens absolutely need to lean into being “too extreme” – can’t see how anything less works for society / the planet in the long run (or the long term electoral prospects of the Greens, for that matter).