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Sue Higginson has been a lawyer and an environmental campaigner, and now she wants to lead the Greens in NSW into a new era by launching a populist left-wing alternative to the surging One Nation vote.
Fresh off a thumping preselection victory in which the sitting upper house MP won a full half of the membership vote, Higginson, the former chief executive of the NSW Environmental Defenders Office who entered parliament in 2019, says the party is gearing up to present a “bolder and more radical vision” at next year’s state election.
“I intend to lead a super-charged campaign because in no uncertain terms that is what the party has determined,” she said.
“The party knows who I am. I’m a worker and a fighter. I have fought all my life on forest frontlines, in courts, in corridors, in boardrooms and on our streets. I know what it is to fight against injustice and win, and that’s what I intend to bring to this election.”
The Greens have been called many things: tree Tories, watermelons (green on the outside, red on the inside). Paul Keating once derided them as “a bunch of opportunistic Trots hiding behind a gum tree”. Sky News pundits tend to view them as an existential threat to Australia.
Whatever you think of them, they don’t appear to be going anywhere.
Despite the recent upheaval within the Australian electorate – the rise of the teal movement, One Nation’s resurgence, and the decline of both major parties’ primary votes – the Greens have remained remarkably static.
At the 2023 state election, the Greens polled at just under 10 per cent, an almost identical result to four years earlier. At the federal election last May, the party gained 11 per cent of the NSW vote. The most recent Resolve Political Monitor, published by this masthead in March, also had the party sitting at 10 per cent.
That can be read as a success or a failure, depending on who you’re asking. At the federal election in 2022, the party picked up three seats in Brisbane, then lost two of them, and the seat of Melbourne, last year.
But there’s no question the party has not been able to capitalise on the broader discontent within the electorate in the same way One Nation has on the right, or the teal movement has among socially progressive, climate-conscious Liberals.
Higginson wants to change that, and feels she has a mandate from the party’s base to lead the progressive party into next year’s NSW election. At the Greens’ upper house preselection ballot on the weekend, Higginson picked up 51 per cent of the vote for the upper house ticket, ahead of her parliamentary colleague, Abigail Boyd, who won 24 per cent. Indigenous activist and academic Lynda-June Coe was third with 13 per cent.
The Greens’ two other upper house MP positions – held by Cate Faehrmann and Amanda Cohn – are not up for re-election.
She said the margin of her victory was licence to take the Greens into an election she described as “a choice between the billionaire-backed politics of hate and division and the politics of love, hope and justice and our vision to make people’s lives cheaper, fairer and easier”.
Though the party has not formally adopted its policy platform, she said cost of living, including renters’ rights, would be at the centre of its pitch to voters, as would the environment and opposition to new anti-protest laws passed under Labor.
Politics as usual was not working, she said, and the party had to work hard to be a left-wing counter to One Nation.
“As capitalism starts to disintegrate before our very eyes, so too does the era of major party politics,” she said.
The Labor government, for its part, does not appear too concerned about the threat from the Greens. Senior party figures believe they have as good a chance of winning back lower house seats from the Greens as the minor party does of picking up electorates.
However, the Greens tend to do better when Labor is in power, or on the nose with its progressive wing. In 2011, when the last Labor government was unceremoniously turfed out, the Greens saw three MPs elected to the upper house for the first time.
Labor knows this, and is working to convince what strategists insist is a “soft” Greens vote to stay with the government.
But Higginson said voters would punish the government’s rightward drift on issues such as protest laws, and in particular its response to the Palestinian protest movement, as well as law enforcement policies including the new rapid response police unit.
“Minns’ law and order agenda is not just disappointing, it’s hellishly dangerous and grossly populist, but it is the wrong form of populism,” she said.
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