Everyone’s missed the most shocking thing about the Greens’ top job vote

It was almost 10 years ago that Mehreen Faruqi, federal Greens senator from NSW and recently defeated party leadership contender, sat on the balcony of the Federal Hotel in Bellingen as the results of a divisive party preselection rolled in.

Faruqi had just vanquished Lee Rhiannon, the hard-left warrior who is perhaps the most significant – and controversial – Greens MP in NSW history.

On the day of the vote, Faruqi was with Jeremy Buckingham, then a NSW state upper house MP for the Greens, along with a small group of other party members. A notable Tree Tory – the pejorative term for the “right”, or more environmental, faction of the Greens – Buckingham had long been at war with the Eastern Bloc, or Watermelon (green on the outside, red on the inside) faction, which Rhiannon led along with David Shoebridge.

In their quest to oust Rhiannon from the party, Buckingham and his faction had decided not to run a candidate to help get Faruqi across the line. He wasn’t alone. There had been a concerted attempt by senior figures from across the party institution to get rid of Rhiannon, part of a long-running putsch by the more environmentally focused Australian Greens against the reds in NSW.

Faruqi was the perfect candidate. Though she was affiliated with the same inner-city, social-justice Greens who – like Shoebridge – were mentored by former upper house MP John Kaye, she did not carry the same internal baggage and was seen as having appeal to a wider constituency.

Whether it swayed the vote is a contested point, but it certainly didn’t hurt. Faruqi topped the count, beating Rhiannon with 60 per cent of the vote.

After the vote in 2017, Hall Greenland, a former NSW Greens convenor, wrote that Faruqi had been “favoured by that more moderate bloc” of the party linked to founder, Bob Brown, against the “red Greens”.

“This result will be seen as a victory for the current MPs and the party’s present establishment and their political strategy,” he wrote, identifying it as “mainstream progressive”.

The vote – the only time a sitting Greens MP has been rolled – was clearly a point of tension between the pair. At the time, The Sydney Morning Herald reported Faruqi joined fellow Greens MP Jenny Leong in walking out of a party room meeting after an argument with Shoebridge.

Whether it was the harbinger of a longer-running feud, it is interesting historical context given the way the party’s federal leadership spill played out last week.

After the vote, Faruqi said she would be free to campaign “outside the constraints of the leadership team”, calling for “bold politics and radical action”.

That framing makes sense in the current political environment. In some ways, their roles basically switched from 2017. Shoebridge this time clearly won the support of more moderate Greens inside the federal party room, including outgoing leader Larissa Waters. His choice of Steph Hodgins-May – a more moderate Victorian senator – as a running mate is perhaps evidence of an attempt to be seen, internally at least, as a consensus candidate.

What’s perhaps most shocking about the Greens federal leadership vote, though, is that the party was (besides Sarah Hanson-Young) essentially choosing between two members of the once-hated NSW Eastern Bloc to be their federal leader.

Though Faruqi and Shoebridge have both traded places as the choice of the establishment, the idea, even a few years ago, of putting the NSW Greens in charge would have been anathema to the rest of the partyroom. As recently as 2018, Brown was holding talks with more moderate MPs in NSW about forming a new breakaway party, such was the animosity directed at figures such as Shoebridge.

In the context of the delayed rise of the populist right in Australia via One Nation, such a dramatic shift is a clear indication the Greens are rethinking their tactics.

Though they have largely maintained their primary vote, the party has been unable to capitalise on the broad public dissatisfaction with the major parties and the wider hard-left resurgence beginning to emerge in some Western countries.

Whether Shoebridge, 55, is the right person to broaden their appeal is another question, though. Widely acknowledged as the party’s most effective parliamentarian, he has gained prominence since entering federal parliament in 2022 for his opposition to the AUKUS treaty. Long before that, though, during his long stint in the NSW upper house, he was jokingly referred to by some dissatisfied Labor MPs as “the real opposition leader of NSW” because of his ability to prosecute issues against the then-Coalition government.

But as a bushwalking former barrister from Sydney’s east, Shoebridge is not obviously the maverick-style outsider politician who might capture the popular support of, particularly, younger voters, in the same way as left-wing politicians such as Zohran Mamdani in the US or Zack Polanski in the UK.

Nor, to be fair, is Faruqi, a 63-year-old former engineer who, like Shoebridge, has faced criticism for owning investment properties despite the party’s left-wing credo on housing. Faruqi has been more vocally aligned with the pro-Palestinian protest movement, though, and ironically, given Shoebridge’s public comments since the vote, has also been more forceful arguing internally that the Greens should be less willing to cut deals with the Labor Party on legislation.

Only last month Nick McKim, Faruqi’s deputy on the leadership ticket, was one of three Greens MPs who defied the party by voting against Labor’s controversial native forest carbon credit plan, at the behest of Brown.

In any case, after decades on the outer, the Trots are in charge.

Michael McGowan is NSW state political editor.

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