Signs in the window of an adventure tours store on Scotchmer Street in North Fitzroy urge passersby to do two things: climb Mount Everest, and put a member of the Greens in the House of Representatives.
In most electorates these tasks would be of roughly equal difficulty. But not here in the federal seat of Melbourne, where Greens candidate Adam Bandt is the firm bookies’ favourite to win on August 21. With a well-organised campaign and an established electorate profile, Bandt’s challenge looks less like climbing a mountain and more like a sprint down Swanston Street.
“Make history Melbourne” is the campaign slogan, with the general buzz being about making Bandt the first Green elected to the House of Representatives – which would be truly historic, except that it rests on the following qualifying technicality. He would only be the first Green to win in a general election.
The Greens have had an MP in the lower house before: Michael Organ won the NSW seat of Cunningham in a 2002 by-election – and he has noticed a lot of the commentary on Bandt’s campaign overlooks his breakthrough.
“He won’t be the first,” Organ said last week, adding he had noted the oversight of his success had even been reported on the ABC.
Organ, who now works at the University of Wollongong, is reconciled to this, though. “I was elected at a by-election. I made history in Cunningham - and I hope Adam Bandt makes history by being the first member elected in a general election,” he said.
To win, Bandt needs a strong first preference vote - Organ won 22% of the primary vote when he won Cunningham in 2002. The Greens primary vote can be overstated in the polls, and with students and middle-class inner-city folk traditionally making up the core of the Green vote, the question is whether Bandt can lock in a broad enough cross-section of voters to get him over the line.
He needs - and isn’t getting - some people like Liam Clancy, an IT worker who has voted Green before but intends to vote Labor this time.
The Punch found this classic Melbourne character in a black jacket and hat, enjoying a hand-rolled cigarette on a break from work in the city. “I’m a bit torn,” he said. “I would love to vote for the Greens but it would be a really bad move in a seat where your vote might make a difference.”
Why not Greens?
“If they were to win that might mean Tony Abbott would be in charge of the country. I will certainly be voting for the Greens in the Senate,” he said.
So, you’re voting very tactically then?
“F*** yeah.”
Or there’s people like Nathan (no surname provided), a city bike courier. With Bandt running hard on improving Melbourne’s transport system you’d think he would be plugged into the campaign, but despite not having much enthusiasm for politics in the first place, what’s motivating him is something else entirely.
“I have voted Greens in the past,” Nathan said, “but they don’t really seem to get anywhere. I normally vote for them because I don’t like the others… I think some Australians are a bit narrow-minded when it comes to change. I know a lot do prefer a man in power. I will vote for the ALP on the grounds that it’s a woman.”
This is something that the Labor campaign will be trying to use to stem the flow of the ALP’s progressive Melbourne supporters to the Greens. The replacement candidate for Tanner is Cath Bowtell, a former ACTU official, who was preselected early last month. When her candidacy was announced, the party said her preselection “gives the voters of Melbourne a chance to elect the first female member for Melbourne and elect the first female prime minister”. One of her slogans is “a progressive voice for Melbourne” and she has declared herself in favour of same-sex marriage.
Not much nuance in that positioning, is there? The Greens are also fighting a “Gillard factor”, with Newspoll showing Labor support in Victoria rising two points after the state’s adopted prodigal political daughter took the leadership from Kevin Rudd.
With the buzz around this campaign you might expect the student hangouts on Swanston Street to be teeming with Green supporters. But in what could be an alarming sign for Bandt The Punch had trouble finding any planning on voting Green in the seat of Melbourne – at all – after spending an hour talking to uni students in the area.
Three typical students I spoke to were Andrew Craig, Josh McLatchie and Natalie McDonald, found tucking into a parma after a hard day at the library. Andrew and Josh vote in the next door electorate of LaTrobe, and were both planning to vote Liberal on August 22. Natalie had considered voting Green but decided not to. “They campaign for teen rights,” she said. “I read something about it in the paper and disagreed with that – and I also realised they preferenced their votes to Labor.”
So why all the buzz around Bandt? He has several reasons to be hopeful. He ran in 2007 and finished second, after preferences, to Lindsay Tanner. Given Tanner has held the seat since 1993 and has been a high-profile minister in the Labor government, his decision to quit this year is an opportunity for the Greens to make up the 4.7 per cent margin needed to win.
The Liberal Party – whose candidate is small businessman Simon Olsen – has also decided to direct its preferences to the Greens. On top of this, Bandt’s campaign has been running hard for much longer than either of the two major party candidates. He says it is still gathering momentum: one night last week, 90 new people showed up to volunteer for his campaign.
In an interview with The Punch last week, Bandt spelled out where he thought the necessary support could come from to help him win.
“Because we have been campaigning for a while now, I’m noticing there are two groups of people,” Bandt said. “One group have been paying attention to the political situation for a while now and have made their decision to vote Green. The motivation has been climate change and the treatment of asylum seekers, and the word they use when talking about how these issues are treated is ‘disappointed’.
“There’s another group of people who are undecided. The retirement of Lindsay Tanner means these people are looking seriously at the Greens.”
Bandt, who previously worked as a partner at Slater and Gordon, Gillard’s old industrial law firm, understands some voters will be nervous about voting for him, especially as his opponents will attack him as being outside the mainstream.
“People are entitled to ask about our spending plans,” he said. “We are not sticking our hand up for the committee of the local tuck shop here. It’s not about being a protest movement that is able to call for all sorts of spending without looking at where that money is going to come from.”
Bandt says he would use his position in the lower house to put climate change and the treatment of refugees back on the national agenda, and work on a plan for transitioning Australia to a renewable energy economy. He points to research that claims the city could be running on renewable energy within a decade and also wants to fight for a high-speed rail link between Sydney and Melbourne.
He would also work with other Greens to introduce legislation to recognise same-sex marriages. This is something the party has tried before and failed to get a vote on, but if Bandt wins his seat and with the party likely to have the balance of power in the Senate after the election, the national debate would be set to reignite.
With the election looking like it could come down to a handful of seats, Bandt knows Labor will throw everything at him, including an advertising blitz. “What we’ve got that I think the Labor party doesn’t,” he said, “is people.”
Given my conversations with Melbourne voters I was somewhat sceptical that the Greens had the hundreds of people necessary to run a successful campaign and staff polling booths on election day – until Bandt’s campaign launch that night.
It was at The Tote, a legendary live music venue in Collingwood. The venue was close to full with at least 200 people who had turned up on a cold and wet Wednesday night. They weren’t just the unwashed hoodie-wearers other caricatures typically associated with Green activism; among them were disaffected Labor voters unhappy at the direction of the government. These are the people Bandt is counting on.
Typical of these was Michael Moran, a restaurant worker who signed up to get involved because he was “getting a bit fed up with Julia Gillard”.
“She thinks that by being strong on refugees people will come along with her,” Moran said.
Also there was Irene Morgan, who was equally disapproving of the Prime Minister. “It might be a bit harsh to judge so early on,” she said, “but I don’t like the way they have moved to the right on asylum seekers. I don’t like the way they compromised on the mining tax.”
When Bandt spoke he noted that the Greens were now the bookies’ favourites to win the seat. If he is elected, it will be a minor party breaking Labor’s 106-year grip on the seat.
It’s perhaps telling of the Greens’ progress that the only quote from a famous political figure on the night wasn’t from Che or Al Gore, but Bandt’s twist on Bob Hawke’s cheerleader-in-chief line after the 1983 America’s Cup win. Bandt finished his speech saying: “Any boss who sacks a Greens supporter for not turning up tomorrow is a bum”.
It might not be quite as historic as Australia II’s win, but the sprint down Swanston Street is on and the conditions are set for a close race.
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