It’s the Monday after the next federal election. Labor has fallen short of holding on to its narrow lower house majority but has more seats than the Liberal and National parties. This means the ALP is entitled to take the first crack at forming a minority government. Anthony Albanese must make the biggest decision of his political life: should he call Greens leader Adam Bandt and ask for talks about entering a formal alliance so that he can remain prime minister?
The prospect of minority government has been routinely raised in recent opinion poll reports as support for the ALP has fallen back to – or in some cases below – the vote it attracted at the 2022 election, which gave it just a two-seat majority. Every first-term government in the past 50 years has suffered a swing against it when seeking re-election, and the Albanese government, which boosted its majority to three at a byelection last year, doesn’t have much of a margin to begin with.
Illustration: Dionne Gain
With the next federal election as soon as late this year, what would minority government mean for Albanese, the Labor caucus and the broader labour movement?
The crossbench has exploded lately. That’s mostly thanks to the emergence of the teal movement in Victoria, NSW and Western Australia. At the last election there was no teal movement to speak of in Queensland, so the Greens prospered from the rising dissatisfaction with the major parties there, taking three seats in Brisbane – two from the Liberals and one from the ALP. Voters in Kevin Rudd’s former seat of Griffith elected Max Chandler-Mather, now the Greens’ housing spokesman.
If the Greens hold all four of their lower house seats, including Bandt’s safe seat of Melbourne, at the next election, they would be the natural first option for a partnership with a Labor government rather than the teals, most of whom belong in the disaffected Liberal camp. Labor-voting readers who can recall the last time their party had to rely on the Greens to hold on to office, under Julia Gillard, may be feeling a shudder of apprehension at this point. Yes, the Gillard government passed a record amount of legislation, but the majority of voters had already lost faith in it.
In the past few days, Bandt has offered a useful example of what to expect with his threat to refuse to back Labor’s new vehicle emissions policy – which the Greens actually support – in the Senate unless the government withdraws separate legislation that would simplify the approvals process for new gas projects.
It’s not hard to see why the Greens feel the need to assert themselves. From the 2022 election until a few weeks ago, things had been going well. Off the back of a best-ever national primary vote of 12.25 per cent at the election, they came away with four lower house members and 12 senators. All the way through last year, Chandler-Mather made the running on the housing debate, highlighting the dire situation for renters and aspiring homebuyers – a key cost-of-living constituency that the party looked to be making its own.
But then came the Dunkley byelection, where the Greens’ vote fell from 10.3 per cent in 2022 to 6.3 per cent, while primary votes for the Labor and Liberal candidates went up. Here was an opportunity to expand its base in a classic outer-suburban area, and the Greens flubbed it.
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