Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has blamed the Greens' mounting election losses on their blocking tactics in parliament. Several high-profile greens MPs have lost their seats, with party leader Adam Bandt projected to lose Melbourne.
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00:00I understand that Adam Bandt and the party have not yet conceded,
00:06but it looks like he will lose his seat.
00:10That is a shock.
00:12Clearly, there's been an adverse redistribution in the seat of Melbourne,
00:16but I don't think anybody expected that he would lose.
00:21And so that will prompt some soul-searching,
00:25although he has been an incredibly successful leader of the party,
00:29taking it to the highest representation in both houses it's ever had.
00:34We have to kind of preface the remarks by saying the result is not yet declared.
00:38So I think there are some seat-specific things that have happened,
00:41like apparently there's a collapse in the primary vote for the Greens
00:46in four booths that is, I'm told, that is kind of inexplicable.
00:51But also, yeah, we just have some thousands of votes yet to count.
00:58But we did have some, you know, unique factors this time, this election.
01:03We had a campaign by, you know, an astroturfing group at Vance,
01:07specifically targeted against the Greens.
01:10And I think that's undoubtedly had an impact, not just in Melbourne,
01:14but around the country,
01:15on how the party has, you know, decided its strategic and policy decisions,
01:23how the parliamentary party has performed in the last three years.
01:27And clearly some of that is controversial.
01:30And so I think that you could have seen coming some kind of backlash
01:35against some of the more extreme positions that the party has taken
01:41over the last three years and its conduct in particular
01:44in kind of holding up, you know, some of the labour policy proposals,
01:49for example, on housing.