As Labor and Coalition support has collapsed, the Greens have remained stuck around 12 per cent – constrained by geography, culture and a changing generational base.

The story of Australian politics over the past quarter century is a story of decay. Not the decay of democracy itself, but of the two great political machines that once dominated it. At the turn of the century, the combined primary vote for Labor and the Coalition sat close to 90 per cent. It was the natural order of things. You were born into one tribe or the other, and you stayed there or some chose to shop between the two offerings.

That world is gone. Today the combined major party vote averages around 50 per cent across all published polls. Half the country has walked away from the political duopoly that governed Australia for a hundred years in some form or another. The beneficiaries of this collapse are well documented. One Nation has surged into territory once considered impossible. Independents have carved out fortresses in seats the Coalition assumed they owned, whilst a constellation of minor parties now harvests votes across the outer suburbs and the regions.

And yet, amid all this churn, one party has barely moved. The Greens.

For two decades, the Greens have been the third force in Australian politics. On paper, they should have been the great winners of major party decline. They were there first to challenge the established political order. They built the infrastructure, the brand, the parliamentary presence, and a loyal base. When voters started abandoning the major parties in serious numbers, the Greens were the obvious destination – well, they should have been.

Instead, they have flatlined.

Consider the record. In 2001, the Greens polled 5 per cent of the national primary vote in the House of Representatives. Through the 2000s they climbed steadily, reaching 7.8 per cent in 2007 and peaking at 11.8 per cent in 2010, the Gillard minority parliament election. Then the ceiling appeared; they fell back to 8.7 per cent in 2013, recovered to just over 10 per cent in 2016 and 2019, and reached a shade over 12 per cent in 2022. They have hovered around that mark ever since, both at elections and in the published polling averages.

While the major party vote has shed close to 40 points, the Greens have added perhaps seven points across a quarter of a century, most of it before 2010. The great fragmentation of the Australian electorate has happened around them, and they have largely sat on the sidelines, as spectators. Why?

Culture and geography

The first part of the answer is cultural, and it’s geography, because in Australian politics those two things are now........

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