Don't settle for spin: Initial reflections after the 2024 Queensland state election

Ok so this piece turned into an absolute monster. I'm sorry about that, but there was a lot to cover. Don't try to read it all in one go unless you've got a cuppa and a comfy couch. I'll share some more succinct pieces in the coming days.

In the aftermath of Queensland's state election, lots of people are rushing to churn out authoritative-sounding commentary about the Greens’ fortunes, even though it takes time to analyse results and find out what was actually on people's minds when they finally cast their votes.

I’d prefer to wait and reflect before drawing definitive conclusions, but in the absence of any alternative narratives, the conservative media and major parties are filling the vacuum with self-serving, over-simplistic explanations.

So I thought I'd share some initial thoughts, with the very strong caveat that we should be sceptical of anyone who pontificates too confidently about the Greens’ performance before all the early votes have even been counted.

I’m not making too many definitive statements in this piece – instead I want to pose questions that prompt deeper investigation and inquiry. I’m sure there’ll be other, more official post-election analyses and reports produced by the various Greens campaigns over the coming weeks, and I hope my ideas here are taken into account.

I should start by giving a shout-out to all the candidates, volunteers and staffers who’ve put so much effort into this state election campaign and did such a phenomenal job under rough circumstances. There are definitely some silver linings to feel good about (50 cent public transport fares aren’t going anywhere in a hurry!). The Greens run tiny campaign budgets compared to the major parties, and are increasingly under direct attack from a range of powerful interest groups with lots of money – winning votes is always going to be an uphill battle for us. So in unpacking the results, let’s not be too hard on ourselves.

I should also note that I have slightly less inside knowledge about this Greens campaign compared to the past couple elections. After 7 years as a city councillor followed by a very intense mayoral election campaign, I’ve been holidaying out of town for the past few months, and only got back to SEQ two weeks ago.

So while I’ve been closely following the state election, and having some interesting conversations in towns and cities up and down the Queensland coast, I wasn’t on any of the key Greens campaign committees this time around. This means I wasn’t privy to any of the difficult strategic decisions the party was no doubt grappling with behind the scenes. In fact, I was so out of the loop about what was happening on the ground in Brisbane that the swing against the Greens in some inner-city seats took me by surprise. Even a few days ago, I would’ve predicted that Amy MacMahon’s primary vote in South Brisbane was going to rise significantly, particularly given the benefits of incumbency and her amazing work on campaigns such as the struggle to stop the Gabba Olympics and save East Brisbane State School. After the council election results from earlier this year, I was optimistic the Greens could hit a primary vote of 40% or 45% in South Brisbane. It really sucks to be wrong about that one.

Stories of a ‘shocking result for the Greens’ are way over-cooked

First though, let’s briefly reality-check Labor’s post-election narrative. At the time of writing, with a few postal and absentee votes left to count, the Greens seem to have suffered a statewide swing against us of… zero percent. Basically, our vote increased in some areas and decreased in others.

Interestingly, we had extremely good results in several booths in Brisbane’s outer-southern suburbs. Most notably, at the Kuraby booth in Stretton, the Greens vote rose from 9.7% in 2020 to a massive 41% in 2024. This bodes very well for Remah Naji’s campaign for the federal seat of Moreton (I’ll write a separate article about this phenomenon when I get the chance).

In inner-city electorates where Labor felt threatened and responded accordingly, we either had modest swings against us, or we still had swings towards us, but not quite enough to win the seat.

Take Greenslopes, in the middle of Griffith: 5.9% swing against Labor, 3.1% swing to the Greens. This is the first state election since Max Chandler-Mather became the federal MP for the Greenslopes area. Labor party claims that he is 'costing us votes' seem more like wishful thinking than anything else.

I’m not saying that the Greens did well. We didn’t.

We had swings against us in several of our strongest seats including South Brisbane, which most people have now called as a victory for Labor. Overall it's a disappointing result for the Greens, and there’s a lot to reflect on. But compared to Labor losing at least 13 seats and suffering a negative statewide swing of almost 7%, we’ve come out ok.

So what did happen?

A simple narrative explaining the overall state election result could go as follows:

When people are feeling increasingly insecure and financially precarious, they can become more fearful and conservative in general. This election, the LNP easily capitalised on that insecurity by conjuring simplistic scapegoats, particularly ‘youth criminals.’ Meanwhile, Labor’s rhetoric and policy announcements shifted just far enough towards the Greens that the perceived distinction between the two parties wasn’t as strong (even though the overall policy platforms remain quite different). When presented with a choice between two seemingly similar parties, progressive voters who were worried about the rise of the LNP and concerned about regression on issues like abortion leaned towards the party that they felt was more powerful (i.e. Labor).

At this stage (noting that I haven’t yet spoken to many swing voters post-election) I think this summary is broadly correct. But it highlights a few problems for the Greens...

The first is that Labor did not copy or adopt lots of Greens policies. I'd be much happier if they had. They copied some Greens messaging, and announced three or four policies that seem similar to Greens proposals at a glance. But on the whole, their policy platform and vision for society remains very different to the Greens, falling well short of the biggest, most urgently-needed changes in terms of climate action, housing justice etc.

The second concern is that a key justification for the Queensland Greens’ current strategic approach of focusing on policies that speak directly to people’s financial precarity, is that it’s supposed to guard against voters lurching to the right. The hope is that if we argue strongly for taxing big corporations and putting the money into better public services, financially precarious people who are frustrated with the political establishment and could be seduced by xenophobia and ‘tough on crime’ rhetoric will have an alternative diagnosis and response available, and might swing to the Greens instead of parties like One Nation. But while that’s probably working for some individuals, it’s not working at the electorate level, even in seats like Clayfield and Moggill (which overlap with Greens-held federal electorates) where we had more capacity to reach people with our message than we do in most parts of the state.

If we can't win over disillusioned conservative voters, and Labor is also able to defend against us simply by adopting some of our messaging and a few minor progressive reforms, the Greens probably need to rethink multiple aspects of our strategy.

So, acknowledging that there’s still a lot more to learn and discern over the coming weeks, what do we know, and what questions should the Greens be asking ourselves?

Too radical and extreme?

It’s funny how whenever the Greens win seats, the default media establishment explanation is that we’ve successfully ‘mainstreamed’ our party and ‘grown beyond our activist roots’ but when we don’t win seats, it’s supposedly because we’re ‘too extreme.’

I remember when Max Chandler-Mather won Griffith in 2022, several commentators simplistically juxtaposed him as a clean-shaven, business shirt-wearing type against me as the more stereotypical radical activist, explaining our federal success as the result of the Greens 'shifting towards the mainstream.' Two years later, Max is apparently also now ‘too radical.’

Several commentators are now claiming that the Greens position on overseas wars cost us votes, or that Greens ‘obstructionism’ on federal housing policy turned voters away, all of which are elements of this broad, vague, 'too extreme' narrative.

If there is any truth to those claims, what it really means is that those attack lines from Labor, the LNP and other conservative political forces might be cutting through. Disengaged swing voters don’t decide in a vacuum what to think about different political parties. They're influenced by the messages that other political actors (including journalists) keep repeating. Far right groups ran a lot of advertising telling Queenslanders that the Greens have become radical extremists.

The reality is that the party’s platform and overarching ideology in Queensland hasn’t shifted significantly over the past few election cycles. There was a big shift from around 2016 onwards, which has contributed to the recent growth of the Queensland Greens. But the actual messaging and policy platform the party ran on this time wasn’t very different from 2022 or 2020. Objectively speaking, it’s not very radical at all – publicly-owned energy infrastructure, free healthcare, building more public housing, increasing mining royalties. None of those ideas represent dramatic, ‘radical’ transformations of society. Considered in a broader global political context, they're relatively unambitious social democracy reforms that don’t fundamentally challenge capitalist colonialism, and in my view fall far short of the deeper changes the world needs if we are to meaningfully address the overlapping crises we’re all facing.

The biggest change for the Greens in Queensland has been that previously the major parties ignored us, whereas now they (and other conservative lobby groups) spend a lot of money attacking us.

So when people say “the Greens didn’t win votes because they’ve become too extreme” what that really means is that the Greens’ current overall approach – including the election campaign strategy, how elected Greens reps use their roles, how the party builds grassroots power and what kind of political ideologies and theories of change we advocate – may not be successfully resisting major party attack lines about us being too extreme.

But I’m not even convinced yet that “Greens are too radical” was a key reason more people didn’t vote for us. I think there are lots of other factors to unpack.

Not enough media attention and socials reach?

The more I think about it, the more convinced I am that a weak social media effort and mediocre levels of media coverage really hurt the Greens, especially in inner-city areas full of high-density apartments that are hard to doorknock.

Mainstream media coverage doesn’t impact voting intentions as much as it did a decade or two, but it did feel limiting that the Greens didn’t get quite as big a media platform as we did for the 2024 city council elections. Back in March, no-one thought I had any real chance of winning the mayoralty, but I was still invited to participate in the leaders debate, and there was a lot of print, radio and TV coverage of our key policy announcements, which helped raise public literacy about our policies, and the differences from the major parties.

Conversely, in campaigns where the media isn’t talking about us as much, it can be harder to convince people that the Greens are a serious force with a chance of winning, meaning that voters who don’t really understand how preferential voting works and who really want to back a winner might drift back to the major parties. We should be cautious about drawing too many direct comparisons with the March council election, because the local context was very different to state. But media coverage undeniably still shapes election outcomes, and we simply weren’t the centre of the conversation this time around.

Similarly, it felt like our social media game for the state election wasn’t strong enough relative to the major parties. We were always going to be outgunned in terms of paid online advertising, but we also didn’t get anywhere near as much organic online reach as Labor or LNP spokespeople did.

Neither Amy MacMahon nor Michael Berkman have particularly strong individual social media presences. I don't think Berko even has a Tiktok account, even though that's where many younger adults who would potentially swing Greens are most active. In fact, none of our Queensland Greens candidates made particularly good use of newer social media platforms like Tiktok, or forum platforms like Reddit. The Greens state campaign seems to have neglected digital discourse spaces at a time when Steven Miles in particular was making good use of them.

Social media and mainstream media reach often reinforce each other. Candidates and parties who are getting lots of attention on social media also tend to attract more interest from journalists, and similarly, politicians who are well-recognised from traditional media can build up bigger socials followings.

Greens campaign budgets are always far smaller than the major parties, and we have to make tough decisions about where we prioritise spending. In keeping with our pattern from other recent elections, the Greens put relatively little resourcing towards churning out socials content, and put most of our campaign staffing capacity towards field organiser roles who were responsible for mobilising and training doorknockers. This meant we had a big ground game in our target seats, but much less of an air game.

The difficulty for smaller parties chasing media coverage (or indeed social media users) is that you have to be interesting. Greens reps can (and do) churn out media releases and call press conferences, but if the content doesn’t feel new or spicy, and there’s nothing novel about the messenger or the medium, it’s hard to get traction. Even throwing more resources into these spaces isn’t guaranteed to yield results if you don’t have something provocative or sensational to offer. Having said that, Steven Miles built up quite a big Tiktok following without doing anything particularly creative. His team just kept churning out content.

Should the Greens have put more resources and time towards building a bigger social media presence? Did weaker socials reach and mainstream media coverage hurt our result? Perhaps we need more post-election analysis of our media and online reach, but my gut says ‘yes.’

A fairly narrow campaign strategy, which lacked the element of surprise

Back in March, in my initial post-election analysis of the city council campaign, I wrote:

“When residents are used to being overlooked and taken for granted, the first campaigner who knocks on their door and connects with them personally has a pretty good chance of swinging their vote.

But when residents are being campaigned to relentlessly through a wide range of channels — including being doorknocked by two or even three different political parties’ campaigns — the novelty starts to wear off. Doorknocking definitely still swings votes in electorates that are accustomed to doorknocking-focussed field campaigns (e.g. on Brisbane’s inner-south side), but it gets harder over time. […]

I’ve been saying this — usually just in internal campaign meetings — for several years now, but after this 2024 council election result I feel confident asserting it much more definitively: We have to stop acting like we can win seats simply by saturating neighbourhoods with doorknockers — our campaigns need to embrace a more diverse range of tactics.

Yes, we still need to doorknock and keep finding other opportunities to have one-on-one meaningful political conversations with voters, but simply having one or two 10-minute chats with a voter over the course of an election campaign is not necessarily going to be enough to swing their vote when they’re receiving so much contradictory messaging from our political opponents.”

I’m not quoting that article here as an ‘I told you so,’ but simply as a prompt to reflect on whether our campaign strategy is as multi-faceted as we need it to be. Big Greens campaigns certainly do a lot more than just doorknocking – we run forums, organise BBQs and community meals, deliver written materials, hold social events to bring supporters together etc. But a significant proportion of volunteer time and staffing capacity does go towards doorknocking.

This election, the Greens knocked on 28 000 doors in Cooper and 29 000 in Greenslopes (that means we were going back to households multiple times for repeat conversations). But we only managed a 3% swing in Greenslopes, reaching a primary of 26.5% (postal votes are still being counted at the time of writing) and in Cooper we had a swing against us of 4.8% (but note that this time around, sitting Labor MP Jonty Bush also had the benefit of 4 years of incumbency).

All up in our key seats we doorknocked approximately 125 000 households. So we reached a lot of people via field campaigning, but it wasn’t enough to counteract major party campaign efforts including some quite concerted anti-Greens attacks.

Most Greens victories in Queensland have benefited from the element of surprise. Incumbents like Terri Butler in Griffith assumed they were safe. The situation changed when we challenged incumbent LNP councillors in the 2024 council campaign, and again with incumbent Labor MPs in this state election. They didn’t ignore us. They actively campaigned against us. And although they couldn’t mobilise anywhere near as many doorknocking volunteers, their choice of messaging and big advertising spends evidently worked.

This does not necessarily mean doorknocking isn't effective at swinging votes – we have heaps of evidence suggesting it is. But it does increasingly seem as though the return on effort invested may not be as strong in contexts where the major parties are deploying their own resources to counteract our field campaigning efforts.

Are we focusing too much on doorknocking and not enough on other forms of community organising and political education? Or is the message we’re offering people at the door simply not compelling enough to counteract the various lines other political actors are deploying against us?

Did the Greens attack Labor too much?

I’ve seen a few people suggest that Greens campaigners and candidates attacking the Labor party actually hurt the Greens, so I thought I should address this one too.

Right now, my answer is that I think it depends a lot on the political context, but that there might be some truth to it. If anything, it’s good for democracy and progressive politics overall when the Greens criticise crappy Labor decisions and policies, but potentially bad for the Greens’ short-term electoral fortunes in certain Labor-Greens swing seats.

Criticising bigger political parties when they advocate crappy policies is an important way of holding them accountable and broadening the parameters of debate. Labor these days is essentially a centre-right political party (yes, yes, I can hear the outraged howls from Labor hacks even from my houseboat, but it’s pretty clear when you look at Labor’s record in government – they're conservatives who think they're progressive). If the Greens don’t criticise Labor and apply pressure from the left, Labor will continue chasing the conservative vote further to the right. Frankly I’d start to wonder what the point of the Greens is if we never publicly criticised the Labor party.

But here’s the problem: When someone has been loyal to a particular party for a long time, and you attack that party stridently, that individual can sometimes experience it as a personal attack. This can be the case even if the criticism is accurate, and even if they’re also feeling privately concerned about their chosen party’s actions.

In an era where political party membership has collapsed and more people swing regularly between parties, campaigners don’t always understand how important party affiliation can be to a person’s sense of identity. It’s a little different with people who you’re already in community with and know personally, but telling a stranger that the party they’ve spent their life supporting is evil or corrupt can sometimes backfire. It depends a lot on the individual and where they’re at in their political journey.

Beyond this, for progressive Labor voters to switch to voting 1 Greens, they need to feel confident that the Greens will stand strongly against the LNP. One of the best ways for the Greens to demonstrate this is to vocally criticise the LNP, and to directly contest LNP narratives (see my section below on ‘youth crime’).

At the risk of drawing too many direct comparisons with the recent council election, my mayoral election campaign rarely criticised Labor directly – we either framed critiques at ‘the political establishment’ or ‘the major parties’ and sometimes specifically at ‘the LNP’ but rarely mentioned Labor by name. I believe that avoiding too many direct attacks on Labor gave more Labor supporters the confidence to switch from 1 Labor, 2 Greens to 1 Greens, 2 Labor. This approach perhaps becomes even more important in a state election where the Greens are primarily targeting Labor-held seats.

The other reason that attacking Labor might have hurt us a little is that it could feed into federal Labor criticisms about the Greens being ‘obstructionist’ and ‘holding up progress.’ I think such criticisms are stupid and ill-informed, but Labor is repeating them a lot, and when Greens campaign materials regularly attack Labor, that can be used as an evidence base to back up those claims, even though they’re not really the same thing at all.

None of this should be misconstrued as an argument against the Greens running strong campaigns in Labor seats. We definitely should. But when Labor is telling people that voting Labor is the best way to keep the LNP out, and voters are also seeing Greens candidates and campaigns spend a lot of time attacking Labor, the annoying reality is that the Labor lines can take on a ring of truth (no matter how many times you explain how preferential voting works). This is awkward for the Greens in contexts where Labor holds government. But in progressive seats where the majority of voters have strong anti-LNP leanings, they want to see that the potential Greens MPs they’re considering will also be strong crusaders against the hard-right. Focusing attacks on the LNP rather than Labor is perhaps a better way to show this.

Right now, we don’t really know how much of an issue this was for voters. I think if you looked at all the Greens’ materials and public comms you’d find that most of the time, the Greens were criticising both Labor and the LNP simultaneously, but there was certainly some messaging and materials specifically focussing on Labor, and we shouldn’t altogether discount the possibility that progressive voters’ discomfort about this was part of the mix. It’s an open question that requires further reflection.

Did the Greens campaign pick the wrong approach on youth crime?

We live in a strange time where public concern about youth crime has been rising, even while actual youth crime rates have been falling consistently.

Over the past few months, I spoke to a couple of Greens supporters (including active members) in different cities and towns in central and north Queensland who were craving more messaging and a clearer line from the party on youth crime. They were picking up that crime concerns were resonating not just with hardcore conservatives, but also among swing voters.

I wasn’t involved in the Greens’ Queensland Campaign Committee discussions about this (the committee is quite secretive), but based on the public comms, I infer that the party leadership decided to avoid talking explicitly about youth crime too much, because they didn’t want to dignify or legitimise the scare campaign by giving it more oxygen. It wasn’t even acknowledged as a key issue in our campaign platform.

Personally I don’t even like the term ‘youth crime.’ I definitely don’t want to spend election campaigns talking about something that objectively isn’t anywhere near as important as renters rights or climate action or healthcare. The reality though, was that it had become a major campaign issue even before Steven Miles became premier. And it probably did partly explain the swing to the LNP, even in Greens-held urban electorates like Maiwar.

The Greens actually had a really compelling narrative to offer in this space. Our policies on housing, healthcare, education etc. directly addressed many of the factors behind young people getting into trouble. But the party didn’t explicitly draw those connections very often. As far as I’m aware, there weren’t many Greens posts or materials that clearly explained how youth crime would be reduced by ensuring every child can access free and frequent public transport, secure housing, nutritious meals, free club sport, mental health support, and so on. The party seemingly took it for granted that voters would make those connections themselves.

Broadly speaking, it seems like the Greens vacated the debate on youth crime. Maybe that wasn’t the intention, but I didn’t see key party spokespeople making effective attempts to intervene on this topic. That reduced the party’s relevance in mainstream election coverage, and potentially deprived progressive voters of much-needed rhetorical ammunition when talking to more conservative friends about their youth crime fears.

There were ways we could have addressed the issue more directly without legitimising the scare campaign. Talking openly about our preferred responses to the issue, and about the way the LNP were cherrypicking stats to promote fear, would’ve been useful interventions into public debate.

These days, a lot of progressive people around Queensland take their lead from the Greens about how to respond to mainstream political currents. If Greens politicians had pushed back harder and insisted on a broader, more nuanced discussion about youth crime, this could well have led to more ordinary voters taking up the debate across Queensland, helping dampen the swing to the right.

Certainly, on the occasions that I posted publicly about youth crime, my commentary got a lot of positive traction. People seemed to appreciate being offered an alternative lens. I can’t help but wonder if the Greens had presented a stronger left-wing response to ‘youth crime’ concerns early on, this would have created more pressure on the Labor party not to legitimise the fear campaign and shift further to the right.

Perhaps the Greens should have spent more energy talking about how youth crime was a media beat-up, or about how we did have a plan to address it via the combined effect of all our other policies. Or maybe we should have just continually elevated the voices of policy experts and frontline workers explaining how carceral responses to crime don’t work. I don’t know for sure. But I think we need to at least ask ourselves whether not talking enough about youth crime hurt us. If the party did make the wrong call here, we also need to ask whether there were any deficiencies in campaign decision-making structures or information-sharing channels that meant feedback from supporters about the need for a stronger position on this issue wasn’t acted on.

The limits of orthodox approaches to electoralism

Fair warning: I’m about to get a little more philosophical and theoretical. I’ll be writing a separate article about this, but basically I'm wondering if the Queensland Greens' theory of change and how the party contests elections and builds power might be inherently limited and in need of transformation.

Ten days before the election, I published an article about Labor copying Greens messaging and half-copying our policies, the final paragraphs of which now feel even more relevant. I wrote:

The deeper question I'm mulling over is whether the conventional Greens approach of contesting elections via specific policy announcements that illustrate a broader vision for society could ultimately be counter-productive. Extracting policy concessions from the major parties is great – it's part of why the Greens run candidates even though we're a long way off winning government. But a preoccupation with individual policy wins and losses – and what policies we should or shouldn't lead with at election time – can also distract us from pushing for more fundamental, revolutionary transformation.

The Greens vision for society should not be misconstrued as a shopping list of siloed changes that can be compared or interchanged with the other parties' lists. The policies do have standalone value, but they're also meant to be discussion prompts that exemplify deeper cultural shifts and a fundamentally different way of thinking about the world.

If the political establishment can cherrypick and incorporate discrete elements of the Greens policy platform, while sidelining more urgent conversations about systemic change, the party risks being drawn into a web of endless struggles for incremental reform. If we're not careful, we'll spend too much time debating what songs the musicians on the Titanic should be playing while their ship sinks beneath the waves.

When I wrote that, I was thinking more about the medium-term future, but this election result suggests the challenge is already upon us.

In short, when a minor party like the Greens is small, the major parties ignore them, which means we fly under the radar and win a couple of seats without being targeted by attack campaigns. But as we grow and the establishment starts taking us more seriously, they deploy more resources to attack us, incorporate our rhetoric to neutralise us, or both.

Refraction

This election, Labor adopted a few of our simpler, less transformative ideas – e.g. free school lunches – and some of our messaging – “make mining companies pay their fair share” – which meant that for the majority of voters who weren’t paying much attention, the key policy differences between the two parties weren’t so obvious.

The political context felt very different at the Kuraby polling booth, where I was handing out flyers on election day. Heaps of voters understood very clearly where the Greens stood on Palestine in comparison to the major parties. We had a strong point of difference. Because voters were so highly engaged and motivated on this issue, Labor campaigners’ attempts to claim that Labor MP James Martin was also an ally in the Palestinian cause simply didn’t cut through.

But elsewhere in the city, the differences between Labor and the Greens weren’t as clear to less engaged voters.

I remember while I was handing out at city hall during prepolling, I noticed one of Labor’s flyers said something like “tackle the cost of living with new GP clinics and free school lunches.” Meanwhile Greens materials also talked about tackling the cost of living with new GP clinics and free school meals.

The policy details were different. The Greens wanted free lunches and breakfasts for primary and high school student, whereas Labor only wanted free lunches for primary schoolers. The Greens’ were calling for 200 publicly-funded GP clinics that included other health specialists onsite, whereas Labor was only promising 50 new clinics without allied health professionals.

But very few voters are paying enough attention to notice and understand such differences. And in a context where Labor is also reaching way more people via social and mainstream media, even if the Greens are promising slightly better policies, the narrative that Labor’s promises are more ‘reasonable’ and ‘practical’ and that Labor actually has the ‘power to deliver’ does cut through a bit.

Perhaps there’s a useful contrast to be drawn with the 2024 Brisbane City Council campaign, where the Greens did win a lot of votes off Labor both in the inner-city and the outer suburbs. Unlike us, Labor's council campaign wasn’t calling for a vacancy levy on empty homes or converting the Eagle Farm racecourse into parkland and public housing. There were more obvious distinctions and a clearer choice between the parties’ platforms.

But it’s also likely that in a future council campaign, Labor could adopt Greens rhetoric about filling empty investment properties or ‘making developers pay their fair share’ alongside policies that sound similar to what the Greens are calling for but are actually weaker or qualitatively different (they’ve certainly done this regarding public transport affordability). A disengaged electorate is easily seduced by spin, and doesn’t have time for substantive, nuanced policy debates.

The Queensland Greens are essentially doing what most political parties do: Present a simplified list of priority policies to the electorate and say, “Our list is better than the other parties’ lists, so put us in charge.”

I'm not sure if this approach really speaks to rising distrust of government and frustrations with the political status quo.

At the moment, we’re not directly saying to voters: “the entire system is broken and needs to change – the Greens want to fundamentally transform how governments make decisions and deliver services.”

Unless we explicitly state otherwise, the impression many voters get is simply “the Greens want to run the current system.”

Maybe if the Greens took an even bolder policy platform to the electorate, the difference from Labor would be more obvious. We’ve shifted Queensland’s Overton window a long way in recent years with the current platform, so perhaps now it’s time to go further. But if our underlying message is just “we will run the current system better” while the wider-reaching major parties’ message about us is “they are too radical and obstructionist to run the system,” we could still struggle to make headway.

Reorientation

An alternative framing and political posture is still available to the Greens – offer a more rounded and robust critique of colonial capitalism and bureaucratised, hierarchical, top-down governance that steps outside the ordinary terrain of electoral contests: “Yes, what our opponents say about us is kinda true: we do want radical change, because the entire system is failing us all... Here’s why it’s broken... Here are our core values and goals... Yes, we do have detailed policies on our website but this isn’t just about policies, it’s about system change – here’s how we want to redistribute political power to ordinary people...”

That kind of narrative might be less appealing to some centrist, upper-middeclass progressives who are actually doing ok out of the current system and don’t want deeper change. But from my own experiences as a candidate, I know it’s very effective at winning over disillusioned and disengaged voters, who are probably more numerous, and often more open to voting for minor parties.

If voters seeking change feel like their choice is effectively between a larger establishmentarian Labor party offering incremental reforms, and a smaller establishmentarian Greens party offering slightly bolder incremental reforms, many will just stick with Labor (this is relevant to the Greens elsewhere in Australia too).

If you ask experienced Greens campaigners, they’ll acknowledge that they often find it easier to swing votes by taking a more anti-establishment angle, talking about how big corporations have too much influence over political parties, and offering some version of the above-mentioned structural critique, rather than by focusing the conversation too narrowly on individual Greens policies. But we don’t really equip our volunteers to have these kinds of conversations. We train volunteers to say “the Greens don’t accept corporate donations, so we’ll listen to you” without properly unpacking all the other problems of representative democracy and centralised, top-down bureaucracy.

Of course, this isn’t just about messaging. The medium matters too. If we want to win over more people who are sceptical of major political parties, looking and acting like the major parties doesn’t help. There are good reasons why Greens doorknockers in Brisbane no longer wear Greens-branded shirts when we go doorknocking – the visible trappings of a political machine can be a barrier to meaningful human engagement.

As the Greens win more seats, and conservative spinsters talk more about a Labor-Greens alliance, the Greens will have to work harder to convince justifiably-cynical voters that we aren’t like those other parties, and we aren’t part of the political establishment.

We can’t just say we want system change. Our campaigns have to reflect that both aesthetically and structurally.

I’m honestly not sure how this kind of approach would be received by Queensland voters. It certainly served me well during my initial election campaigns and my first years in the Gabba Ward (later on, as the Queensland Greens grew, this distinctively system-outsider approach I took was overshadowed by more orthodox state and federal Greens campaigns).

The major parties (and the Courier Mail) attacked me relentlessly for being ‘too radical’ in my first term as councillor. Rather than pretending otherwise, my response was to double down on activism, offering more nuanced explanations of why I protested on the street and consistently voted against pissweak incremental reforms in the council chamber. My vote grew significantly at the next election despite the attacks.

We can’t know how this approach would work elsewhere in Queensland unless we try it, but it’s not something that can be trialled just within a single electorate campaign. It would require a broader reorientation of how the Queensland Greens operate and portray themselves. I have more thoughts on this, but I should probably save them for a separate article.

The important point is simply that within a constraining framework of orthodox electioneering, the path to winning without getting co-opted is extremely narrow – perhaps too narrow for mere mortals.

Asking to be administrators of the current, broken system while advancing bolder policies that are easily critiqued as 'too extreme' for the system can seem contradictory and unconvincing to some voters. On the other hand, if our list of policy priorities isn't ambitious enough, Labor can just half-copy some of them, adopt our messaging, and neutralise our political relevance.

So I'm wondering if we have to at least be open to very different strategies that ignore and subvert orthodox modes of contesting elections altogether? That's a much bigger conversation, but perhaps now would be a good time for Greens members to begin it.

Conclusion

If you’ve skipped ahead to read this conclusion because you didn’t want to wade through the previous 6500 words, and just want a handy “what’s Jonno’s take?” summary, I can empathise completely. But sorry, you’re not getting one. Elections are complex. There are heaps of different elements that impact the results, and while there are clearly some broad trends the Greens need to consider and reflect upon, reaching for over-simplified, one-line narratives does everyone a disservice.

I hope this hastily-written brain dump of my initial reactions has identified some of the most important questions the Greens should be thinking about (not just in Queensland, but across the country). I’m hoping to also write a few shorter, more conclusive articles about the election in the next few weeks, so if you’re interested in those, make sure you’re subscribed via this link.

Thanks again for reading! It takes a while to churn out pieces like this, so if you appreciate me sharing reflections on Greens election strategy publicly, rather than just in private conversations that most people won't get to hear, please consider signing up for a $1/week subscription to cover my web platform costs and support me to write more often.