richard di natale Greens

What had been a pretty ordinary year for the Greens appears to be resolving to a happy ending, after the party’s sweeping victory in Saturday’s byelection for the Victorian state seat of Northcote.

The party now has raised hopes not just for the Queensland election on Saturday, but also — if the grandiose projection of federal Greens leader Richard Di Natale is to be taken at face value — for an eventual target of 25 House of Representatives seats a quarter of a century from now.

Northcote had long been presumed to be one of four Victorian seats where the Greens posed a threat to Labor’s historic lock on the inner city, together with Melbourne, Richmond and Brunswick.

Thanks to the Victorian Liberals’ recently acquired habit of putting the party behind Labor on preferences, the breakthrough was a long time coming.

Not until the 2014 state election, when the Greens won Melbourne and made a further unheralded gain from the Liberals in Prahran, did the party gain state lower house trophies to place in the cabinet alongside Adam Bandt’s federal seat of Melbourne.

It had not been widely anticipated that the Northcote byelection would add to the tally, largely thanks to two privately conducted opinion polls — one for environmental groups, the other for the CFMEU — which credited Labor with a fairly handy lead.

So it came as something of a shock on Saturday when the Greens blew the hinges off the required 6% swing, recording big majorities not just in their hipsterish inner-city domain at the Northcote/Westgarth end of the electorate, but also further afield in Preston and Alphington.

With the benefit of hindsight, it now seems clear that Labor’s declining strength had been concealed by the popularity of former member Fiona Richardson, whose death in August precipitated the byelection.

This has been underscored by demographic trends evident throughout the band of suburbs around central Sydney and Melbourne, where immigrant populations that had sustained Labor against the mounting Greens challenge have increasingly been priced out of the market.

So while the Greens vote nationally has been fairly static over the past decade — a fact that suggests Di Natale might want to rein in his expectations, regardless of what time frame he puts on them — its support is becoming increasingly concentrated geographically, which greatly improves its prospects in the right type of lower house seat.

With the Greens now laying claim to three state lower house seats in both New South Wales and Victoria, the next question is whether they can gain a seat in the Queensland parliament on Saturday — something they have never previously achieved, thanks to the state’s lack of an upper house.

While the party holds some hope of a Prahran-style boil-over in the Liberal-National Party-held seat of Maiwar, its hottest prospect is Anna Bligh’s old seat of South Brisbane, which encompasses the southern bank of the Brisbane River opposite the central business district.

The seat scores almost identically to Northcote on the main demographic indicators, and corresponds almost exactly with the Brisbane City Council ward of The Gabba, which returned the council’s first ever Greens member at the election in March last year.

The Greens’ task in this case is rendered quite a bit more challenging by the fact that they must unseat a very substantial incumbent in Jackie Trad, the Deputy Premier and factional figurehead of the Left.

For what it’s worth, an opinion poll conducted by Galaxy Research last week called it a statistical dead heat, with Greens candidate Amy MacMahon leading Trad by 51-49 on two-party preferred.

However, this credits MacMahon with a stronger flow of LNP preferences than she is likely to receive, given that it has her last on its how-to-vote card.

The dilemma of preferencing in Labor-versus-Greens contests is one the Victorian Liberals are more than familiar with, and in the wake of Northcote, they appear to be edging towards a novel solution.

Speaking on the weekend, Victorian Opposition Leader Matthew Guy indicated the party may simply vacate the field in such seats in future, saying it was “no longer a preference machine for the Labor party in inner city seats”.

Such are the ways in which the Greens’ inner-urban insurgency stands to shake up the game of two-party politics, even if Di Natale’s dreams of dozens of seats in federal parliament are doomed to remain just that.