Well, bugger.
Hanson-Young as replacement? Maybe I’m biased cause she’s from SA, but she has also represented the party at the federal level for by far the longest period (even longer than Bandt).
She’s also really strongly hated by a lot of the non-Greens population.
As a Queenslander, my support would be for Larissa Waters, partly because fuck yeah Qld, but also because her public image is much more positive.
Yes, but they are never voting for greens anyway. She is divisive, more because she’s ruffled feathers and had campaigns against her. She is competent and recognisable.
I think even some Greens voters dislike her, although maybe she plays better with younger voters now. I would like to see if her approach changes as leader, though.
Yeah I think she has that Greta thunberg divisive reaction.
I’m out of the loop on Greens party structure. The below is from Wikipedia:
On Saturday 12 November 2005 at the national conference in Hobart, the Australian Greens abandoned their long-standing tradition of having no official leader and approved a process whereby a parliamentary leader could be elected by the Greens Parliamentary Party Room.
Are there no other leadership structures?
Members get to vote for candidates in preselections and for the state council and other positions, but the MPs elect the leader.
What’s going on in this electorate?
He had a reasonable margin last go round?
A lot of that was eaten into by boundary changes. As I understand, Bandt lost the hipster suburbs of Fitzroy and Brunswick which are major Greens areas (reflected in the Greens great performance in Wills, which absorbed those areas) and his electorate gained some southern Labor booths. Combined with a smaller swing against him everywhere else, he was in trouble.
The Mrs says it’s not because of gerrymandering, but simple redistricting due to population changes, but surely whoever was in charge knew, right?
It only went from a 10.2% margin down to 6.5% with the redistribution, so it’s not like they turned it into a marginal seat or anything. Basically every time you have a group of people redrawing electorates, you’re going to have gerrymandering of some sort, but you can choose to regulate it in a number of ways. The AEC’s mandate is to try and reduce the incumbent’s margin where they can, rather than entrench them further, within the confines of averaging out the population with neighbouring electorates.
So, to answer your question, yes they absolutely knew what they were doing, but that wasn’t exactly a secret at all. Pushing seats to be as marginal as possible rather than favouring incumbents, giving opponents a fair go at winning it, is probably the best outcome we could ask from an independent redistribution committee in my opinion.
That’s correct, you can read about the process here. The AEC takes submissions from the public into account when making these changes, and it’s worth noting that The Greens did appear to support some of the changes that were made (moving parts of Brunswick and Fitzroy from Melbourne to Wills) although their suggestion to move Kensington and Flemington into Melbourne wasn’t acted on. Perhaps The Greens saw the boundary changes as potential to gain another seat, which is why they supported shifting some of their voters out of Melbourne and into Wills. I don’t think anyone went into this election thinking Bandt was under threat, the general vibe was that The Greens would continue to make gains based on the decline of the major parties.
2 Leaders in 1 election? Madre Mia!
Three if Jacqui loses her senate seat too.
