The Greens get a new leadership team, and the old bruises are still visible

The Greens have done what parties so often call a transition and what everyone else would recognise as a controlled argument. Sarah Hanson-Young, who was eliminated in the first ballot with just two votes, has now publicly backed David Shoebridge after a contest that also elevated Mehreen Faruqi to deputy leader and left the room visibly frayed.

In a video posted on Thursday after a bush walk with her husband, the South Australian senator said politics can be brutal. She spoke of friendships made and lost, then added that all involved care deeply about the future of the country and the planet. Hanson-Young also said it would take a huge effort to defeat One Nation and Pauline Hanson, warning that the radical right would wreck the country if it won power.

The timing of the ballot did not help the appearance of calm. Larissa Waters resigned on Monday over serious health concerns, and the leadership vote followed on Wednesday. Hanson-Young finished behind Shoebridge and Faruqi, while the party’s new leadership arrangement was still settling in when the first complaints began to surface.

Faruqi made those tensions harder to ignore. A day after the ballot, she criticised colleagues for choosing Shoebridge and called for rank-and-file members to have a say in future leadership elections. Greens sources say the working relationship between Shoebridge and Faruqi is seriously strained, which is party-speak for a problem that has already moved well past the polite stage.

Shoebridge, though, has tried to lower the temperature. In an interview with Guardian Australia’s Australian Politics podcast on Thursday, he said he and the newly elected deputy, Victorian senator Steph Hodgins-May, had received strong backing from colleagues. He also said he respected Faruqi, praised her work with communities and said he wanted her to keep engaging with voters and Greens members.

He went further, saying he supported Faruqi’s view that she can best contribute outside the constraints of the leadership team. That may sound generous, and perhaps it is. It also has the useful side effect of keeping a potentially awkward internal dispute from becoming an open feud in public.

The broader issue is hardly new. In 2020, a party plebiscite found 62 per cent of Greens members supported a party-wide vote for leader, but the proposal fell short of the required two-thirds majority. Shoebridge has now committed to giving ordinary members that vote in time for the next scheduled contest, due immediately after the next federal election.

So the Greens have a leader, a deputy and a promise of more democracy later. For now, they also have the familiar problem of a movement that likes to talk about unity while its own ranks are busy debating who should steer it. Hanson-Young has accepted the result and urged the party onward; the harder task is turning that into something more convincing than a temporary truce.

Written by Freya Stensrud freya.stensrud@alpineweekly.com