That’s completely the wrong takeaway for The Greens and sounds like the left-wing version of Jacinta Nampijinpa Price cope on ABC’s coverage last night, trying to blame everyone and everything except herself and her party. As a party they need to reassess what their goals are and whether their actions and their communication over the last term were effective in making progress towards those goals. Being super obstructionist on housing during a housing crisis, aggressively loud on Gaza during a period of rising antisemitism and hate in communities around Australia, publicly linking themselves to (and backing) unions with alleged links to criminal organisations are all things that may play well with their left-wing base but are not necessarily going to help them expand further.

A regular Greens voter like myself down in SA may appreciate and understand the nuances around some of these positions, but I seriously question whether the people who voted Green for the first time in Queensland at the last election were happy with the outcome. Don’t forget that action on climate change (and better relief for the disasters it causes) were massive issues at the last election, particularly in that region, and they were issues that the major parties were seen to be failing on. Those are mainstream issues that these Greens MPs were elected on, yet when they got into parliament they did not behave like a mainstream party and continued to play to their hardcore base. That is ultimately going to hurt them in a country where fringe politics is nowhere near as powerful due to compulsory voting.

It’s very important to remember that The Greens didn’t actually perform particularly poorly overall, this isn’t a total rejection from their existing supporters of their strategy and positioning within the system. It was only a failure to take their left-wing agenda any further. They need to decide whether they are willing to sacrifice some of that to manually peel off left-leaning Labor voters once again (rather than just automatically picking them up through disillusionment as they have been previously, that isn’t going to work after such a decisive result) or whether they are content to be a fringe party that plays an important role in the Senate but is mostly absent in the lower house.