Looks like it's shaping up to be a very interesting contest between Hanson-Young and Faruqi over the direction of the party. When she was younger Hanson-Young was always quite widely disliked (relative to other Greens senators) because people saw her as too divisive, a reputation which has stuck, yet she now appears to be the one in the party room who wants to pursue a more collaborative relationship with Labor. Given that I haven't seen any indication from her colleagues that they believe The Greens need a course correction, it would seem she is heading for a third defeat in a leadership contest.
Sarah Hanson-Young and Mehreen Faruqi are firming as frontrunners for the Greens leadership, as the party debates whether to shift in a more moderate direction or maintain Adam Bandt’s confrontational approach for the next term of parliament.
Greens insiders said the party was bracing for its first genuinely competitive leadership ballot after the shock loss of Bandt’s seat of Melbourne left the party unprepared for a leadership transition.
None of the Greens MPs have declared their candidacy for the vacant leadership position, but allies of Faruqi and Hanson-Young are canvassing colleagues to gauge levels of support.
Queensland senator Larissa Waters is also being urged by many grassroots members to run for the leadership, but it is unclear if she is willing to contest a ballot because of family commitments.
Faruqi showed she had support in the party room when she was elected Bandt’s deputy in 2022, in contrast with Hanson-Young, who has run several times for the deputy position but never received the support of colleagues.
Hanson-Young, however, is seen as representing a clear break with the Bandt era and more likely to pursue a pragmatic approach of working with the Labor government where the parties have common ground.
“The question is: do we want to be Labor’s little brother or a party in our own right?” a Greens source said.
Faruqi would probably position herself as a progressive champion seeking to first and foremost lead for the 1.65 million Australians who gave the Greens their first preference vote at the election.
”We will sit down and talk to our colleagues, our members and our supporters, and we will think about a strategy,” Faruqi told The Project on Thursday night.
“I don’t accept that the people of Australia don’t want us in the lower house. We have many seats in state parliaments, and we still have one in federal parliament.”
She is associated with the activist wing of the party and played a prominent role in attacking the government over its response to Israel’s war in Gaza.
Faruqi led her Greens colleagues in a Senate walkout in November 2023 over the government’s reluctance to call for a ceasefire, labelling her Labor opponents “gutless, heartless cowards”.
She (Faruqi) would probably have a contentious relationship with leading pro-Israel groups if elected leader.
Following the death of Queen Elizabeth II, Faruqi said: “I cannot mourn the leader of a racist empire built on stolen lives, land and wealth of colonised peoples.”
Some within the party have defended her record as an environmentalist, pointing out she has a PhD in environmental engineering and spent much of the election campaigning in the regional NSW seat of Richmond, which the Greens almost won from Labor.
Hanson-Young, who rose to prominence as an asylum seeker advocate, controversially challenged Milne for the party’s deputy position in 2010 and again missed out on a co-deputy position in 2020.
She is now the party’s longest-serving member of parliament.