Samantha Ratnam, the march of the Greens and the unfulfilled promise of the ‘most progressive government’ ever

‘Everyone spoke about politics all the time. The difference between who was elected was literally life or death, war or peace,’ says Ratnam of her childhood in Sri Lanka. Photograph: Christopher Hopkins/The Guardian

A week before the 2018 state election the Victorian Greens leader, Samantha Ratnam, said her party would seize the balance of power and join Labor to form “the most progressive government this state has seen”.

It was an extraordinarily bold claim. Not least because Ratnam had been, just a year earlier, a suburban mayor whose council had been at war with both the state and federal governments.