Poll Bludger: are the Greens cooked?

After what has surely been the worst month in the national party’s history, there are suggestions emerging that the threat facing the Greens may have become existential.

Laura Tingle of the Financial Review and Chris Kenny of The Australian can hardly have been the only ones to have detected the scent of the Australian Democrats’ terminal decline a decade ago.

Andrew Bolt felt confident enough to proclaim not only that the local party was “dying”, but that the movement was declining internationally “as their global warming scare crumbles and the cost of their obsessions mounts”.

Certainly it’s within the realms of possibility the parliamentary party’s dispute with Lee Rhiannon and the New South Wales branch could ultimately tear it apart, if it gets far enough out of hand.

[Poll Bludger: section 44 is a sticky wicket in need of reform]

But conservative notions that electoral collapse looms as the party’s supporters finally wake up to themselves are quite another matter.

With the exception of the United Kingdom, where the Green Party has indeed suffered from Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn’s incursion on its ideological turf, the electoral and polling evidence invoked by Andrew Bolt is glaringly selective.

In the Australian case, the Greens’ failure to repeat their 13.1% Senate vote in 2010 is less reflective of a “trend” than of the one-off circumstances of that election, which came two months after Labor’s destructive leadership putsch.

The Greens performed well enough at their most recent electoral test in Western Australia, increasing their representation from two upper house seats to four, and opinion polls offer no real sign that their current troubles are impacting federally — so far, at least.

Last night’s Newspoll had the party down a point to 9%, but this is no great shock; every one of the 18 Newspolls since last year’s election has had it at either 9% or 10%.

Nonetheless, the Greens operate on tight margins electorally, and even a slight dip from last year’s 10.2% vote is enough to give their senators cause for sleepless nights.

This was illustrated by an internal party analysis revealed to David Crowe of The Australian last week, the author of which simply followed Newspoll’s slightly softer numbers to their logical conclusion.

The problem for the Greens is that they must match their 2010 performance at the next election simply to hold their ground, owing to the way their nine Senate seats were divided into long and short terms after last year’s double dissolution election.

Where the party won two seats — in Victoria, Western Australia and Tasmania — both long and short terms were allocated, but its solitary seats in New South Wales, Queensland and South Australia were all designated as short-term (it should be noted that they were stiffed on this score in New South Wales, due to an act of collusion between the major parties).

Barring further double dissolutions, this means the Greens will have six seats to defend at the next election, but only three at the one after.

In Queensland, an extension of Larissa Waters’ career beyond the next election was always a long shot, as they have only ever been successful there in 2010 and with the lower quota at the double dissolution.

The party has only had one more success than that in New South Wales, which came in 2001 when Kerry Nettle was the perverse beneficiary of One Nation’s decision to direct preferences against both major parties.

The chips are also stacked against Sarah Hanson-Young in South Australia, who has the Nick Xenophon Team to contend with, and was only re-elected in 2013 because Labor did so badly they suffered the unprecedented indignity of failing to win a second seat.

[Razer: oh dear God, I might actually have to vote for the Greens now]

The Greens have been successful at five elections on the trot in Western Australia, but their precariousness there was illustrated when Scott Ludlam was defeated the first time the votes were counted in 2013, which was ultimately overturned after the lost ballots saga and the re-run election the following April.

Only in Victoria and Tasmania — their two strongest states at every election since 2001 — does the party look to have its seats nailed down.

It may be that six or seven Senate seats will end up being the new normal for the Greens, as opposed to the nine or 10 they have probably been a bit lucky to have held throughout the present decade.

However, they can hope to balance this with lower house gains in inner-city Sydney and Melbourne, where demographic trends continue to favour them.

Where comparisons with the Australian Democrats ultimately fall down is in the strength of identification Greens voters have with the party, owing to its clearer ideological positioning and association with the environment, which provides a stronger basis for enduring the rough patches that are an inevitable feature of electoral politics.

Short of a total internal collapse, conservative pundits can probably rest easy — they are likely to have the Greens to kick around for some time to come.