He may have been excluded from the leaders’ debate but that hasn’t kept his party out of the media spotlight this election campaign – far from it

The third man: Greens leader Richard Di Natale campaigns his own way

Richard Di Natale was at home on his farm on Sunday night, watching Malcolm Turnbull and Bill Shorten on television.



His two rivals were taking part in the second “leaders’ debate” of the 2016 election campaign, without his participation.

The situation was the outcome of a perennial question in Australian politics: should the Greens’ leader be invited to debate the Liberal and Labor leaders during a live primetime TV broadcast when his party has just one seat in the House of Representatives?

The prevailing view is that the Greens aren’t powerful enough.

But there’s a common retort to that view: maybe the Greens would have more seats in parliament if more voters had the opportunity to hear what the party’s leader had to say?

Maybe next time.

The debate was appalling anyway. Both leaders spent an hour answering almost none of the questions.

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Voters who tuned in witnessed the same old sight: two major parties enjoying their duopolistic hold on the country’s political debate, much like the big banks and supermarkets enjoy their privileged status in the world of Australian business.

Di Natale made a similar point the next night on Q&A, which he was invited to.

“We would’ve really enjoyed the opportunity to put our vision to the Australian people, [but] the reason they don’t want us there is they’re the Coles and Woolies of politics,” he said. “Nothing brings the old parties closer together than a bit of friendly competition from the outside.”

Three weeks ago, on 8 May, as Malcolm Turnbull visited the governor general to ask for a double-dissolution election, Di Natale was in Newcastle taking part in a blockade of the city’s coal port.

Thousands of environmental activists had converged on the city as part of global anti-coal protests, called “Break Free” (from fossil fuels). It was the first protest Di Natale had taken part in since becoming Greens leader 12 months ago.

It was largely peaceful but police arrested 57 people for refusing to remove themselves from a coal train line, and a few others for abseiling off Stockton Bridge, and one woman for locking herself to the mooring line of a coal carrier.



“We are a party that is absolutely humming along,” he told the crowd at one stage. “The party’s never been in better shape for an election campaign.”

The Greens want to retain, at the very least, their 10 federal senators and one lower house seat in this election. And the party’s hierarchy seem genuinely proud of their campaign preparation.

There could be 50 Greens supporters on the phones in any electorate, keeping in touch with voters on the ground

Di Natale’s pitch to voters – to try to rid the country of its reliance on fossil fuels and push the country towards 90% renewable energy – has attracted a strong youth vote. The party is relying on that youthful support to bulldoze its way into stronghold Liberal and Labor seats, in the inner cities of Melbourne and Sydney, that are showing signs of going Green.

(Party membership has swelled by 40% since June 2014, from about 10,350 to 14,500, as the Greens won four lower house seats in two state elections.)

They’ve had young supporters campaigning on the ground for six months in some electorates. Di Natale says the key is field organising, “based a little bit on the Obama strategy”.

Their model works this way. They’ve divided their electorates into segments, and each segment has a door-knocking team and a “phone-banking” team. The door-knocking teams talk to as many people as possible, and keep records of what they talk about; the phone banking teams then use those records to call back everyone on the list who showed an interest in Greens policies or who needed help with a local issue.

There are four or five phone-banking teams in each electorate, so that means there could be 50 Greens supporters on the phones in any electorate, keeping in touch with voters on the ground.

The Greens say they don’t do robo-calls.

It’s a time consuming way to gather detailed data on each electorate. But it pays dividends. It gives the party a rich understanding of the tapestry of each seat, allowing it to keep tabs on all the potential voters it has identified.

The Greens have used such a system for about seven months in the Victorian seat of Higgins, held by the Liberal party’s assistant treasurer, Kelly O’Dwyer.



It’s a similar system to the one they used in Melbourne in 2010 to get Adam Bandt elected the first time, and to get Scott Ludlam re-elected to the Senate in 2014. But this time it’s on a much bigger scale.

When Di Natale spoke at the National Press Club four weeks ago, he described his vision of a future economy in which Australia is fuelled by 90% renewable energy rather than dirty coal. He quoted Niccolò Machiavelli in that speech to make a point:

There is nothing more difficult and dangerous, or more doubtful of success, than an attempt to introduce a new order of things in any state. For the innovator has for enemies all those who derived advantages from the old order of things, while those who expect to be benefited by the new institutions will be but lukewarm defenders.”

He then flew to Cairns to see first-hand the devastating coral bleaching that has hit the reef this year, along with his deputy Greens leader, Larissa Waters. Guardian Australia travelled with them.

The two of them used the occasion to announce a new Greens policy in Cairns: a seven-point plan to shift Australia away from fossil fuels, including a heavy tax on coalminers to pay for the revitalisation of the reef, and the reintroduction of a carbon price.

Not everyone was happy they were in town. Some local tourism operators had reportedly refused to ferry Di Natale and Waters out to the reef because they didn’t want them feeding hysteria about its poor condition for a publicity stunt.

The Courier-Mail and the Cairns Post – both News Corp Australia papers – had been stoking the anti-Greens hostility, running stories that week that Di Natale had been “barred” from the reef by Cairns’ “marine tourism industry”.

It seemed like a slight beatup. Most of the hostility appeared to be coming from one local man, a former Senate candidate for the Fishing and Lifestyle party, Daniel McCarthy, who is now the president of the Cairns Professional Game Fishing Association.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ProfJustin Marshall and Richard Di Natale after snorkelling at Michaelmas Cay. The scientist is explaining how coral has been bleached by climate change and what has to happen for it to be revitalised. Photograph: Gareth Hutchens/The Guardian

And the Greens easily found a local tourism operator who was happy to boat them out. He said he’d taken lots of celebrities out, “including Rex Hunt”.

The next day, as we were driving to an early morning radio interview on the Gold Coast, the Courier-Mail had run another piece about them, as a parting shot.

“The Greens party took a taxpayer-funded $6,000 charter boat and plane trip to the Great Barrier Reef yesterday only to declare Queensland’s biggest tourism asset dead,” it read.

“In what some local tour operators described as ‘scaremongering’, Greens leader Richard Di Natale and deputy Senator Larissa Waters said the ‘death’ of the reef was a ‘national catastrophe’.

“But the pair told of ‘sheer beauty’ as they snorkelled off a luxury game boat at a cost of $2,250-a-day, at Michaelmas Cay off Cairns yesterday.

“They later warned that global warming was seeing Australia lose ‘great swaths of the reef’.”

Di Natale read the story, then closed the paper.

That boat wasn’t particularly luxurious. It was a standard game boat used to ferry people 40km offshore, through two hours of ocean swell. And though the temperature was pleasant, there was little time for sunbathing.

There were eight people on board: two crew, Di Natale, Waters, a Greens staffer, a scientist, a journalist and a cameraman.

The scientist was Justin Marshall, the chief scientist for David Attenborough’s three-part documentary about the reef, who had come to explain to everyone what we were witnessing.

Before this election, who outside of Victoria had heard of the Melbourne seats of Batman and Wills?

Marshall had spent 30 years studying the reef and was adamant that the coral bleaching was Australia’s worst environmental crisis. He said he was angry with the federal government for trying to hide the reef’s deterioration.

He spent the boat trip, and the charter flight to Lizard Island 240km north, talking about the complex ways in which the reef has been damaged by the devastating bleaching.

He also talked about the scientific community’s strained relationship with the government, and the fact that colleagues of his were asking him why he was risking his career by speaking out.

Despite all that, the angle the Courier-Mail took was that the Greens were trashing-talking the reef and putting the tourism industry at risk. “It’s still good to be in there,” Di Natale said about the paper later. “That way we can still get our message out.”

A few weeks later, the Guardian reported that every reference to Australia had been scrubbed from the final version of a major UN report on climate change after the government objected that information about the poor condition of the reef could harm tourism.

One of the scientists who worked on the chapter that was scrubbed, Will Steffen, said the move was reminiscent of “the old Soviet Union”.

The Greens have always complained that they don’t get much media coverage. But this election’s been noticeably different for them. For the past three weeks, their media mentions have soared thanks to the Coalition and Labor trying to outdo each other with public displays of contempt for the party.

It’s mostly worked in Di Natale’s favour, he says. If one of the biggest hurdles the Greens face is that voters don’t know who they are or what they stand for, it’s beneficial to have both major parties complaining about them.

In some ways that’s true. Before this election, who outside of Victoria had heard of the Melbourne seats of Batman and Wills? And who outside New South Wales had heard of the Sydney seats of Grayndler and Sydney?

Those seats are better known nationally this year, thanks partly to the Liberal-Labor spat over preferences, in which the Greens have been portrayed variously as bogeymen or as the least-worst alternative, and partly to the concern that some candidates are showing about their upstart Green rivals.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Di Natale in a cafe in the Sydney seat of Grayndler, now held by Labor stalwart Anthony Albanese. Photograph: Paul Miller/AAP

Labor’s Anthony Albanese, for instance, issued a bizarre threat to the Liberal party on Sunday, saying if the party funnelled preferences to the Greens in his seat of Grayndler he’ll warn constituents that a vote for Turnbull will be a vote to abolish capitalism.

The Greens have their eyes on eight lower house seats, seven of which are held by Labor

Michael Kroger, the president of the Victorian Liberal party, has been constantly suggesting that the Libs should preference the Greens in key inner-city electorates, just like Albanese’s, because they’re “not the nutters they used to be”.



On Q&A on Monday night, Di Natale was quick to kill any suggestion that the Greens would be doing any preference “deal” with the Liberal party in this election.

“Let’s just be clear,” he told the audience. “We won’t be preferencing the Liberal party in any seat in the country. We’ve made that very clear.”

The Greens have their eyes on eight seats, seven of which are held by Labor.

There are four in Victoria, all inner-city seats: Batman (Labor), Wills (Labor), Melbourne Ports (Labor) and Higgins (Liberal). Then there are three in NSW, with two inner-city seats, Grayndler (Labor) and Sydney (Labor), and a third on the far north coast of the state, Richmond (Labor). Then there’s one in Western Australia, Fremantle (Labor).

According to the ABC’s resident election analyst, Antony Green – and the analyst Ben Raue, a former Greens candidate who writes for Guardian Australia – the seats most likely to the fall to the Greens, in this election, are Melbourne’s Batman and Wills. And even they will still depend on Liberal preferences.

But while media attention focuses on the battle for those lower house seats, the Senate voting reforms could lead to the Greens losing a couple of spots in the upper house this year.

The party’s strategists admit as much. But they also say they’re focusing on retaining as much support as possible in this election so they can be in a strong position to mount an even bigger challenge at the next election.

The day after Di Natale snorkelled on the Great Barrier Reef, he drove to Wategos beach in Byron Bay to meet the former NSW Greens MP Ian Cohen. They went for a quick surf in perfect autumn weather.

Cohen is a NSW Greens luminary. He retired from state parliament in 2011 after a 16-year career and his history of environmental activism stretches back much further.

He’s famous for an iconic image: in 1986 he was photographed lying on a surfboard, clinging to the moving bow of the destroyer USS Oldendorf. He was protesting against the entry of nuclear warships into Sydney Harbour.

Di Natale enjoyed Cohen’s company. They sat out the back of the surf, talking about Greens politics. A few people recognised Di Natale but more recognised Cohen. It was Cohen’s home turf.

That night Di Natale attended the campaign launch of Dawn Walker, the Greens candidate for the seat of Richmond in northern NSW. Walker is trying to win the seat for a second time, after collecting 17.69% of the first-preference votes in 2013.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The Greens leader on the campaign trail. The party’s strategists say they’re focusing on retaining as much support as possible in this election so they can be in a strong position to mount an even bigger challenge at the next one. Photograph: Julian Smith/AAP

The seat is an interesting one. It has a strong Nationals vote, with well-known farming families controlling much of the local power structure. But it has a large and growing contingent of Greens voters, given its catchment area takes in Byron Bay and Mullumbimby – the centre of the anti-vaccination movement.

The two camps share an uneasy peace. The Greens will find it difficult to win the seat but they’ve been encouraged to dedicate solid resources to it after winning the seat of Ballina at the 2015 NSW election and coming a close second in neighbouring Lismore.

We know that once people hear our policies they’re likely to vote for us Richard di Natale

It was a colourful night, with hundreds of supporters packed into a local hall in Mullumbimby, with freshly cooked food, alcohol and some dancing on stage. But Di Natale’s chief of staff and media adviser were worried about the event.

They’d heard there were some anti-vaxxers in the crowd who were preparing to heckle him when he got up to speak. Di Natale, a doctor, has publicly condemned the anti-vaxxer movement numerous times.

So they prepared him as best they could. They held their breath when he took the microphone. Then he stood up to speak. Nothing happened.

The crowd welcomed his calls for a future without coal, for more investment in health and education, for an increase in the foreign aid budget, and for heavier taxes on coal companies to revitalise the Great Barrier Reef. No one asked for him to explain how he would pay for those things.

And the anti-vaxxers kept quiet. His staff later wondered if they’d remained quiet because they felt the rest of the policies Di Natale had spoken about were still agreeable. Who knows?

The big strategy behind the Greens election push this year is a long-term one. Party strategists say they’re focusing on this election and the next.

They say they’re pouring resources into the fight to win eight lower house seats from Labor and the Libs – all of which will be impossible to win at once – because they want to win enough new voters this year who can be turned into a larger, more powerful voting base for the next election.

“We know that once people hear our policies they’re likely to vote for us,” Di Natale says.

And the party hopes that once someone votes Green for the first time they’ll be more likely to vote for them a second time.

But Machiavelli had a warning about that, too: