At a park in Logan, more than 20km from Brisbane’s city centre, two dozen Greens volunteers stop to take a photograph before heading out to knock on doors.
These are the sorts of intensive “social work”-style campaigning efforts that have been responsible for the leftwing party’s growth in the Queensland capital’s inner suburbs, culminating in the capture of three federal seats in 2022.
But this is also something new. This is well past the boundary of Brisbane’s imaginary “latte line” that divides the comfortable inner suburbs – the sorts of middle-class progressive areas that might be considered within grasp of the Greens – and the less-affluent places out on the fringe.
For this campaign is being waged in Labor’s safest seat, Woodridge, where in 2020 the deputy premier and treasurer, Cameron Dick, won 67% of the primary vote. The Greens won 7%.
“Spending time and effort out there is very strange,” a Labor MP says of the Greens’ strategy.
But for the Greens, success at the 26 October state election is about more than winning seats.
One clear aim is laying the groundwork to defend the party’s 2022 federal election breakthrough, which upended notions of “conservative Queensland” and has – partly via the MP Max Chandler-Mather, an architect of the strategy – placed the Greens at the centre of the national housing debate.
Another is broadening the Green movement from the inner suburbs to the outer fringe.
The Greens have quietly built bridges to Brisbane’s multicultural communities, including by backing candidates looked upon as local leaders. The process is like a cheat code for a movement whose growth relies upon shoe leather and door-to-door campaigning.
In Inala, the Greens have preselected Linh Nguyen, a Vietnamese-Australian community worker, who ran as an independent at the March byelection and will combine her personal vote (9%) with the 10% won by the Greens.
The candidate in Woodridge, Ansary Muhammed, has run a local charity for 14 years. He committed to run only a week before the campaign began; since then he has brought in about 150 volunteers, donations from the community, endorsements from local leaders and assistance from mosques and churches who have supported his outreach work.
“I never planned to be a politician,” Muhammed tells community members in the meeting room at the Rochedale mosque. “I’ve never seen people struggling so much.”
Last week Dick said Greens candidates “have turned up at five minutes to midnight, like they have in Woodridge, pretending they’re representing the community”.
Greens sources say the campaign in there has “exceeded all expectations”.
Diversity looking for an alternative
In Queensland and across the country, some of Labor’s safest seats are in multicultural areas.
Kos Samaras, a former Labor strategist and now the director of strategy and analytics at RedBridge Group, says Labor has done “a pretty appalling job” of preselecting diverse candidates to represent those seats.
He says younger generations, particularly in multicultural areas, “are a lot more ruthless” about their political affiliations.
“There is an appetite in these outer-suburban diverse constituencies for an alternative,” he said. “They don’t want to vote Liberal or LNP but they are looking for an alternative.
“There is a genuine level of hunger out these by these communities for something different and Labor would be foolish to assume these diverse … communities would be not voting for the Greens.”
In the seat of Moreton – the Greens’ next federal target in Queensland – the party has preselected a former Labor member, Palestinian Australian Remah Naji.
“The message is they can no longer take our communities for granted,” she says. “They can no longer take our votes for granted.”
The Greens believe they can win Moreton, where the Labor left warrior Graham Perrett is retiring – it has a large percentage of renters, a northern side of suburbs where locals have been priced out of the inner city, as well as ethnic-minority communities in the south.
Naji says issues including Palestine – which have exposed a chasm between Labor and its traditional base – and others have triggered people to reconsider their support for Labor.
“It’s because they’ve seen how the Labor party have betrayed them,” she says.
“These [are] not just people in the Palestine solidarity movement, these are people who are active in the climate action movement, people who are active in their own diverse communities ...
“Everyday people want to be able to pay the bill when they go to the doctor. They want to be able to go to the dentist without having to skip meals. These are the things that matter to everyday people.
“Within the Greens, these are the people we’re reaching out to and want to build coalitions with.”
Growing enmity
Two weeks before polling day, Young Labor members were sent a call to arms to volunteer for a door-knocking blitz of four seats considered at risk to the Greens.
“We all know the greens are fuck heads and we don’t want them winning any more seats,” the message said.
Asked about a Greens comment at a press conference, Dick gave another indication of growing enmity between Labor and the Greens: “I don’t take political advice from the Queensland Greens political party,” he said. “I never have and I never will.”
Labor has now recommended its voters put Legalise Cannabis Queensland second in all but one of the seats that the minor party is running in.
The ALP has put LCQ ahead of the Greens in 28 of the 29 seats LCQ is contesting, including the electorates of the premier, Steven Miles, the police minister, Mark Ryan, and the health minister, Shannon Fentiman.
As the Greens target wins in four state seats – Cooper, McConnel, Greenslopes and Miller – there are signs that Labor has pivoted, both in its campaigning and its policies, to meet the threat posed by the leftwing party.
Labor MPs say they have been told to door knock more extensively in this campaign, partly as a response to the effectiveness of the Greens’ tactics.
The government has also been accused of aping Greens’ policies. Last week Labor promised a free school lunch program – a plan promoted by the Greens in 2021, and rubbished at the time by government MPs.
Other Labor policies – re-establishing a publicly owned power retailer, building state-owned petrol stations and cheap public transport fares – while not necessarily designed to counter the Greens, are pivots towards the minor party’s long-held policy positions.
Amy MacMahon, the Greens MP for South Brisbane, said the shifts were “a demonstration that the Greens are effective”.
“Just weeks out from an election, and when Labor know they’re likely to lose seats to the Greens, all of a sudden they’re picking up policies they know are popular, they know are effective, and they know are helping people,” she said.
McMahon said the biggest challenge for the Greens had been trying to convince voters that its candidates could win. “The conversation has completely changed now,” she said.
“We have a much better connection to what’s actually going on on the ground as opposed to Labor and the LNP, who have become very disconnected from what’s going on in the lives of everyday people.
“Now we are able to spread out further from … core seats to neighbouring areas where we know the Greens message will resonate very strongly if we can just go out and talk to people.”
