Early in the vote count on election night, ABC host David Speers asked Queensland Liberal-National senator James McGrath for his take on the Greens’ campaign in Brisbane. The response was like an exclamation mark in an otherwise routine discussion.
“The Greens are horrible,” said McGrath. “A nasty, horrible, racist, antisemitic party and when you deal with them on pre-poll they are just horrible people… I will happily take the Labor Party and, with respect, union thugs any day of the week compared to the Greens.”
The “antisemitic” slur arose out of Green opposition to Israeli bombing in Gaza. More on that later, but the vehemence of McGrath’s outburst indicates a deep-seated antipathy towards the Greens, sometimes expressed in Labor ranks too, that goes far beyond idealistic young Greens being rude to poll workers.
Bandt put that aside in conceding defeat to Labor’s Sarah Witty on Friday. He spoke at length on the climate crisis – “the reason I got into politics”, rightly identifying the 2011 carbon price as “the only thing that really cut climate pollution in this country.” That moment of sanity lasted just two years, ending with the repeal of those laws by the Abbott government.
Bandt ended with a plea to journalists to stop reporting climate as a political issue and start thinking about it “as if there’s a war on”. Carbon emissions, he pointed out, were actually higher under the Albanese government than under the previous Coalition government.
In the 2025 campaign, he said, the Greens tried to draw attention to the threat posed by over 30 new coal and gas projects, but news media treated it as a political point. “Please start taking the climate crisis seriously… The climate crisis is only going to get worse unless we tackle it. And this movement of ours… is only going to get bigger and bigger.”
Like all politicians Bandt is pushing his own barrow, but he has never exaggerated our climate predicament. As he says, it will only worsen while politicians and the media continue to treat it as just another political issue while ignoring the impact of new extraction and processing projects.
As it unfolds over years and decades, this great climate crisis is moving at a pace too slow to feel in our day to day lives, and is expressed in a piecemeal manner, one weather event at a time. Between events, public attention turns to other things, overlooking the massive scale of change around us.
In federal parliament most independents, many in Labor and perhaps a handful in the Coalition are aware of this. But no-one has pursued the climate change issue so fiercely and persistently as the Greens. In doing so, the party has made enemies across the political spectrum, but especially among MPs of major parties.
The Greens can be exasperating when they hold up promising initiatives on pressing issues, but that is more than offset by the effort they have put in to give the climate crisis the public attention it deserves. Adam Bandt led that effort in the lower house where for over a decade he was the Greens’ sole voice.
The parliament is being bombarded daily by industry propaganda aimed at diverting attention from the massive climate threat presented by new extraction and processing projects. Those vested interests have used “net zero” policies to conceal the straightforward link between atmospheric heat and our use of petrol, diesel and gas.
At the same time they are seeking to exploit new carbon deposits far into the future. In Perth last week Woodside Energy’s annual general meeting was repeatedly disrupted by protesters determined to see an end to Woodside’s plans for a massive offshore gas scheme.
Adam Bandt “lost his way” during the last parliamentary term, prime minister Anthony Albanese told Sky News. He would have done better to apply his remark to himself. At the time he was ruminating on portfolios in a ministry without science minister Ed Husic and attorney-general Mark Dreyfus.
Those two ousted members of his former cabinet had been prominent in the public debate on the Gaza conflict. Drefus, who is Jewish, sided with Israel along with most of the parliament and virtually all the Coalition, but Husic put himself on the same side as the Greens by speaking out against the bombing of Gaza. That doesn’t make him (or Bandt) antisemitic.
Following a precedent set by former PM Kevin Rudd, Albanese could have made a captain’s pick and reinstalled the pair in his new cabinet. The departure of Husic, a practising Moslem, is especially troubling in light of the strong push from right-wing Israelis to end self-determination for the people of Gaza.