‘Fixated on inner city’: Why the Victorian Greens have failed to exploit Labor’s collapse

Detailed summary

A former Greens state MP says her party has not managed to break through in the media. New data supports that opinion. The post ‘Fixated on inner city’: Why the Victorian Greens…

Victoria’s Labor and Coalition parties have both gone through a sustained period of instability during this past parliament, with multiple leadership changes in the years ahead of this month’s state election, not to mention the state government’s Big Build scandal.

Labor is now heading for what could be a historic defeat, having lost 14.9 percentage points since the last election according to a tracked run by election and polling website The Poll Bludger.

One might think this would be the perfect opportunity for the Greens to capture a sizable chunk of the voters lost by Labor. However, the party has picked up only 3.4 percentage points since the 2022 election, according to the same poll tracker.

Visually, this looks like a red Labor curve pointing downwards, with an almost flat Greens line underneath.

As always, there will be only one poll that matters: the final vote count on November 28.

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If, as projected by a new DemosAU/PremierNational poll on November 9, the Greens end up on 17%, with the Coalition winning 33%, One Nation 21% and Labor 18%, it will be a huge upset, the underlying causes and consequences of which will take time to unpack.

Greens leader Ellen Sandell, for her part, says that kind of Greens result would be a success.

“I think that there’s been a lot of talk about the rise of One Nation, and people have missed this other story about the rise of the Greens,” she told the ABC’s 7.30 this week. “The last election we polled 12% and now we’re polling 16%, 17%, 18%. That is a huge increase.”

Opening of the article, excerpted from Crikey. To read the rest, open the article on the publisher's site.