As One Nation surges in the polls, why are the Greens being left behind?

The UK Greens leader, Zack Polanski, had a simple message for his Australian counterparts: connect with people’s anger.

“I think sometimes we rush to hope, we rush to solutions, so we don’t quite connect in the same way,” Polanski told the Victorian Greens campaign conference in May.

Anger – or frustration – with the political establishment has been steadily growing within Australia, as it has in the UK, generating an appetite for alternatives. In the UK, Polanski’s messages have tripled the party’s membership, nearly doubled its vote, and wrested electoral victories off Nigel Farage’s Reform in just 10 months.

But Polanski’s warning that progressives elsewhere are failing to connect with voters and capitalise on their frustration appears to be borne out.

In the 12 months since the last federal election, Pauline Hanson and her brand of rightwing populism have successfully tapped into that discontent, surging in the polls at the expense of the Coalition and Labor.

Meanwhile, support for Australia’s other big anti-establishment party – the Greens – has flatlined in the polls.

And after a sobering 2025 election result that wiped out its leader and its rising star, the Greens are now fighting for relevance in a rapidly shifting political landscape.

Weeks after Polanski’s speech, Larissa Waters told her party that “tinkering around the edges” was not the pathway to government.

“We’re not a pressure group, we’re a political party,” the Greens leader told the party’s national conference said. “And the aim of a political party is to win government.”

In a nod to the popular 2011 Occupy Wall Street movement, Waters also declared the Greens would represent the 99% by taking on the 1%.

“If we want to win, we need to meet people where they’re at,” the Queenslander said last month.

“We need to hear their anger, then direct it at the real cause of their pain – the big corporations and billionaires, and the political parties that work for that 1%.”

But within the party, some remain unconvinced the Greens are on the right track.

“We don’t cut through,” one frustrated insider tells Guardian Australia. “We have a good message, but we don’t have good messengers.”

So how can the Greens win their fight for relevance?

‘None of this is easy’

Publicly, the party is positive about the 2025 election result. The primary vote remained in line with their historic 2022 results. About 12% of Australian voters put a Greens candidate first.

Yet its then leader, Adam Bandt, and youthful MPs Max Chandler-Mather and Stephen Bates all lost their seats – leaving them with just one member in the lower house.

In the party’s brief post-election autopsy, some hard truths were accepted. When the Greens used “keep Dutton out” messaging, voters felt choosing Labor was the safer choice. It also noted its policies – like including dental and mental healthcare in Medicare and outlawing price gouging – were strongly supported, yet voters weren’t aware they were Greens policies.

But missing are solutions on how to sell those messages effectively in a way that Pauline Hanson has in recent months. The review pointed to “minimal media oxygen” and a fragmented audience as barriers to getting their message across.

According to Essential Media pollster Peter Lewis, differentiation from Labor was key for the Greens. It could also put the minor party back in the sights of their political foes and under more scrutiny.

Associate professor Jill Sheppard, a political expert at the Australian National University, says that’s a good thing.

“The Greens will be – and always have been – on stronger ground when they’re criticising mainstream politics in the country,” she says.

Sheppard says the persistent political issues over consecutive federal elections have centred around economic management, immigration, health and education.

“For the Greens to make any real headway into this sort of anti-system mood that is emerging in Australia, they have to talk about one of those issues,” she says.

“None of this is easy, you know. If there was a quick solution, the Greens obviously would have taken it already.”

Lewis agreed the Greens were “just as well equipped” as One Nation to “tap into dissatisfaction with the status quo”.

“I think you’d find Greens voters and One Nation voters have similar concerns, but very different policy prognoses,” he said.

‘Preaching to the converted’

Under the condition of anonymity, Greens insiders speak candidly about what needs to change to capture the support of anti-establishment voters.

Some say now is the time for bold ideas. The party needs to “unapologetically” break with neoliberalism and embrace democratic socialist ideas, one says.

Some point to Polanski’s focus on bringing utilities back under public ownership. In New York City, the popular mayor, Zohran Mamdani, proposed the creation of public grocery stores.

“We set small targets and achieve small targets,” another staffer says. “The membership is tired of small wins.”

Redirecting the anger and frustration felt around the country toward progressive change will take a new approach – one where the ideas matter as much as the way they are sold.

Senator Lidia Thorpe, who dramatically quit the Greens in 2023, says Australia needed the leftwing minor party to first learn how to speak to all kinds of demographics.

The outspoken Victorian said while she was grateful for time with the party, she sometimes found the experience alienating, as she felt the messaging targeted educated, privileged voters.

“They’re preaching to the converted, and they’ll always stay at that 10% because they just talk to themselves,” Thorpe said.

“Let’s face it, the Greens are very white privilege.

“I always also had this argument with the climate movement, that ‘youse are just talking to yourselves and you’re talking big language that I don’t even understand’.”

And while the Greens have always positioned themselves as an outside political force, decades of success in electing MPs and senators – and influencing policy – have made them part of the system.

Waters herself has held on to the lower house seat for nearly 15 years – minus a brief break during parliament’s constitutional crisis.

Other Greens sources describe Waters as the “reluctant” but well-liked leader, who was asked to unite the parliamentary party ahead of more contentious aspirants. Behind her, however, is a “risk-averse” team.

Green shoots ahead?

Behind the scenes, Chandler-Mather – who entered parliament in an upset win in 2022 but lost his seat in similarly spectacular fashion last year – wants to reset the party’s thinking.

Adored by some and loathed by others, the 34-year-old is one of the Greens’ highest profile members. He has reemerged in the public sphere with a reboot of the Greens’ political thinktank, the Greens Institute.

While the leader’s office is not bound by any of his proposals, Chandler-Mather is undertaking research to better understand how everyday Australians are experiencing politics and how it affects their lives.

Chandler-Mather says the party could use the findings to convert widespread political disillusionment into action.

At one public forum in June, Chandler-Mather made a pitch to grassroots supporters to bringing people together and find ways to get them invested in policy ideas and politics again. For example, using data from the Scanlon Foundation Research Institute, he pointed to a correlation between voters under financial stress and anti-political feelings.

His institute is looking at redefining how it groups occupations into class. The early results mean working-class Labor seats, with higher percentages of middle-class renters, could result in a new potential target seat list for the Greens, if his proposals are adopted.

The if is important. While Chandler-Mather garnered a high-profile in just three years, and invigorated the membership’s more “bolshie” and socialist supporters, some theorise that the spotlight on his activism hurt the party’s image.

While his allies say the loss of Chandler-Mather and Bandt at the last federal election was a “tragedy”, some others dismissed his contribution as being part of the “outrage machine” that hurt the party’s image.

But Sheppard says the Greens could use Chandler-Mather, or another charismatic spokesperson not in parliament, to strengthen its outsider status.

For example, Polanski doesn’t hold a seat in the UK parliament: he leads the federal party as a London Assembly member.

The challenge is to convince voters to genuinely believe the message the party’s selling, not just see it as noise.

“The Greens are a bit stuck because they have had so long around parliament that you start becoming like parliament,” Sheppard said. “Almost by osmosis.”

“I think the Greens will do well to listen to [Chandler-Mather’s] advice from outside the parliament.

“The major parties use their thinktanks to float ideas that they don’t necessarily want to be associated with, but they want to test in a public forum.

“That’s real, low-hanging fruit for the Greens.”