Peter van Onselen: Australia can breathe easy after Greens go for the blandest option in Larissa ‘Still’ Waters

By PETER VAN ONSELEN, POLITICAL EDITOR FOR DAILY MAIL AUSTRALIA

Published: 06:49 BST, 15 May 2025 | Updated: 06:52 BST, 15 May 2025

The country has dodged a bullet, thanks to the Greens. While that’s not a sentence you’ll hear very often, this week it’s true.

The party room of 12 wise disciples representing the minor party in federal parliament has shunned the firebrand deputy leader Mehreen Faruqi.

Instead, they favoured Queensland Senator Larissa Waters as its new leader, to replace Adam Bandt who lost his seat of Melbourne at the election.

While the Greens would have been wiser to pick Sarah Hanson Young for the role, Waters is a comfortable lesser of evils compared with Faruqi who as deputy leader was in the box seat to take over from Bandt.

She’s a radical who would have dragged the activist minor party even further to the left, taking it further away from its environmental roots to advocate for issues appealing to only a very narrow band of the Australian population.

Prior to Thursday’s partyroom decision on its new leader, I flagged the litany of the extreme policy positions Faruqi has spruiked over the years.

She’s backed everything from refusing to agree terrorist group Hamas should be disbanded, to claiming in 2024 that the Labor government was ‘complicit in Israel’s genocide’, to wanting the Lord’s Prayer removed from parliamentary proceedings.

When the Queen passed away she even pointedly noted: ‘I cannot mourn the leader of a racist empire built on stolen lives, land and wealth of colonised peoples’.

The Green favoured Queensland Senator Larissa Waters as its new leader, to replace Adam Bandt who lost his seat of Melbourne at the election

The party room of 12 wise disciples representing the minor party in federal parliament has shunned the firebrand deputy leader Mehreen Faruqi

Now that the Greens hold the balance of power in the senate all in their own right, a period of Faruqi leading the minor party would have made it near impossible for Labor to govern from the centre.

Waters is unlikely to follow a similar path. She’s shown a willingness during her career to negotiate with colleagues from the major parties. Just as importantly she’s been prepared to enter those negotiations with an air of civility.

She’s a former environmental lawyer as proof positive that the environment is her number one priority.

But the fact that the Greens partyroom struggled to build consensus around its choice of a new leader speaks to how divisive Faruqi can be. 

Even her own partyroom was divided about her penchant for extremism and what it might do to the Greens’ brand after an election result which saw its primary vote slip and a host of lower house seats be lost.

And that was under Bandt’s leadership – a less radical version of Faruqi.

The challenge for Waters will now be to keep her partyroom together and avoid Faruqi and her supporters going rouge. 

The minor party encourages free votes from time to time and its entirely possible defections follow Thursday’s announcement.

But for now Australians can breathe a collective sigh of relief.

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Peter van Onselen: Australia can breathe easy after Greens go for the blandest option in Larissa ‘Still’ Waters

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