The Greens didn't lose because of Gaza — they evolved because of it
In a campaign dominated by cost-of-living fears, the Greens’ Gaza stance didn’t repel voters — it redefined who their voters could be.
There's no sugarcoating it. The Greens suffered a major electoral setback at the 2025 federal election. Early calls that the Greens received their highest primary vote – to mask the shock loss of three seats, including leader Adam Bandt's seat of Melbourne – proved inaccurate ... but only just. As of writing, the AEC's tally count has the Greens primary vote in the House of Representatives falling by -0.05%.
The Greens' Senate vote also declined by -0.95%. Despite this, ironically, the Greens now sit with the balance of power should Labor opt for an alternative to dealing with fractured conservatives.
But to claim the Greens' poor performance was a result of the party's position on Gaza, or because they diverged from their traditional focus on the climate crisis misses the mark.
The Greens showed maturity in the 2025 election campaign and grew out of their climate comfort zone, and as a result, won votes in areas beyond the party's inner-city bubbles. It would be a mistake for the party to look at surface-level headlines and retreat into a privileged shell.
The election had two key pressure points that were unique in an Australian electoral context – the first being the cost of living, which effectively dislodged the climate crisis after dominating election discourse for more than a decade, and the second being, as I wrote in my post-election analysis, Donald Trump and surging authoritarianism in the United States.
This wasn't a climate election
Polls consistently showed that cost-of-living was top of mind for Australians throughout 2024 and in the months leading up to the May 3 election. Internal Greens polling that I viewed during my time as a staffer in 2024 validated the external polls. The test of the domestic landscape required the Greens to mature beyond simply being a protest party on climate. And it shifted gears as a result, developing thorough policies, all costed, that branched the party outside of its climate comfort zone and into issues that were typically the domain of the two major parties – economy, housing, education, health and, yes, foreign policy.
The political and media establishment weren't particularly keen on the Greens wading into issues that were beyond a climate scope, as made evident by the relentless attacks from a multi-million dollar anti-Greens advertising blitz by the right-wing outfit Advance Australia, to offensive billboards, and persistent smears in mainstream media. When the status quo is truly challenged the establishment kicks into gear. And no one who reads through the Greens' 2025 election platform can argue the party did not offer credible solutions to the financial ailments Australians face. Fears of a minority government and the potential for the Greens to break the Labor-Coalition stranglehold on decision-making in this country sent the two-party and media establishment into a frenzy.
And yet, despite the fierce campaign targeting the Greens, the party managed to roughly hold its primary vote.
Palestine opens doors
A routine critique of the Greens over the years is that it is confined to inner-city, mostly white progressives and are entirely detached from the more working-class, culturally diverse outer suburbs.
Rather than costing the Greens an election, its moral position on Gaza opened doors for the first time to such suburbs in Sydney and Melbourne. In Blaxland and Watson – the two western Sydney seats where The Muslim Vote endorsed independent candidates with a strong Palestine message – the Greens picked up large swings in the Senate. The Greens' only candidate of Palestinian origin in the Sydney metropolitan area, Manal Bahsa, captured almost 16% of the primary vote in Barton.
And these gains occurred despite the Greens pouring significantly more campaign resources into marginal seats like Richmond in northern New South Wales, effectively leaving many of the western Sydney lower house campaigns on a shoestring budget.
Similarly in Melbourne, while all the noise has understandably been about Adam Bandt's defeat, the party saw growth in the multicultural and working-class west.
Huong Truong, the Greens candidate for the western Melbourne seat of Fraser, achieved a remarkable result in the culturally diverse seat with Palestine prominent in her campaign messaging, powering into second place with more than 25% of the primary vote. Again, many of the western Melbourne races ran on tight budgets with the Greens throwing their finite resources behind Wills and Macnamara.
Drops in more affluent suburbs
Where the Greens grew in culturally-diverse outer suburbs, it saw its vote fall in more white and affluent areas of Sydney and Melbourne. This is significant because the main drivers of the Greens vote, particularly in the Senate, have traditionally come from such electorates.
Sydney and Grayndler, for example, have historically been the top electorates for the Greens Senate vote in New South Wales, as have Melbourne, Wills and Macnamara in Victoria. Teal seats – formerly blue-ribbon Liberal electorates – also drive a considerable amount of the Senate vote in both cities. Across the board, however, the Greens saw swings against them in their traditional bases, culminating in a statewide -0.25% swing against them in NSW and a swing of -1.42% in Victoria.
The perfect storm that ended Adam Bandt
Contrary to the established wisdom, it wasn't Palestine that brought down Adam Bandt. (Interestingly, no one in mainstream media is making the same case about Peter Dutton. His shocking endorsement of the Netanyahu government as it commits a livestreamed genocide gained him no votes, not even in Wentworth where the Liberals suffered a swing against them.)
Rather it was a perfect storm of numerous factors. There was the fear of Dutton, and by extension Donald Trump, which shocked Australians into voting overwhelmingly for what they know – mediocrity with no change as represented by the Labor Party. Many Australians, at this pivotal juncture in global affairs, were fearful of change, be it negative (the Coalition) or positive (the Greens).
The significance of the cost of living crisis also required Greens to present economy-centred policy solutions that may not have glued with many of its traditional, climate-focused voters. And lastly, Adam's honeymoon period as the face of the Greens since 2020 appeared to have run its course. Few political leaders last beyond the five-year mark, and Anthony Albanese will now have that rare privilege, but it is rare nonetheless.
A maturing party in an uncertain world
Australians are looking with great unease at the global uncertainty swirling around them (and occasionally hitting them with tariffs). Between the time Adam Bandt took office in 2010 and today, the living standards of many Australians have fallen, and there's no clear reversal of this trend on the horizon. Climate is no longer a sole issue occupying a single policy platform, but is now embedded among numerous challenges.
The Greens ought to look beneath the surface to see the seeds they have planted – seeds of broader engagement across diverse issues and communities the party has historically overlooked. As the world shifts, so too must the party, and with that comes the need for a new face and a vision to take it forward.
*Disclaimer: Antoun was chief of staff for Greens Senator Mehreen Faruqi in 2024.
Things that caught my eye in West Asia this week:
Following the landmark Trump-Sharaa meeting in Riyadh last week, it was revealed, and confirmed by Israeli sources, that Syria's new extremist government held direct talks with Israel in Azerbaijan. It also sent to Israel the remains of a missing Israeli spy killed in clashes with Syrian forces in Lebanon in 1982 as a goodwill gesture.
Despite Syria's overtures to Israel and the Riyadh meeting, the Trump administration has doubts Sharaa can hold onto power. "It is our assessment that, frankly, the transitional authority, given the challenges they're facing, are maybe weeks – not many months – away from potential collapse and a full-scale civil war of epic proportions, basically the country splitting up," Secretary of State Marco Rubio told a US Senate hearing yesterday.
Context: The new regime's security forces is made up of an assortment of ill-disciplined, radical groups that fought former dictator Bashar al-Assad, and occasionally each other. Its hold on the country is fragile, and any hope of gleaning support from Syria's sizable minorities was ruined when the new regime's forces massacred thousands of Alawites and Christians on the coast in March, and attacked the Druze in Damascus and the country's south last month.
US intelligence suggests Israel is planning a unilateral strike on Iran's nuclear facilities. Israel fears, as CNN reports, that Trump may settle for a "bad deal" with Iran. It comes as talks between the US and Iran have hit a snag. The sticking point appears to be uranium enrichment – the US doesn't want Iran to enrich uranium, Iran says it has every right to. Ayatollah Khamenei's response yesterday was that "the Americans should stop talking nonsense", and expressed pessimism that the negotiations "will yield any results".
My take: It's difficult to read at the moment whether the US dropped this piece of intel to CNN to coerce Iran to accede to its terms, or if it is part of what appears to be a growing coldness between Trump and Netanyahu.
That the UK, France and Canada have, after 18 months of mass slaughter, finally uttered the word "sanctions" suggests that Netanyahu is becoming increasingly isolated. The western colonial club is not merely Israel's only ally – it is the source of its power. Alienate them and Netanyahu's tenure becomes precarious.
Netanyahu is determined to stay in power at any cost, and that blind pursuit has transformed him into a madman—so unhinged that even his closest allies can no longer stomach it. It also reflects a growing contest within western political spaces: powerful pro-Israel lobbies deeply embedded in the political, media and corporate institutions on one side, and rising popular movements increasingly mobilised to pressure governments to halt the carnage on the other.
Why West Asia and not Middle East?
"Middle East" is a Eurocentric and colonial way of looking at the region, as it was a term first coined by the British in the 19th century and deployed by the US in the early 20th century.
West Asia positions the region in its geographical setting, within its continent.