Sarah Witty v Adam Bandt: how an unlikely Labor champion took down a Greens giant
On 28 March, when Anthony Albanese called an election date for May, Melbourne appeared on no one's list as a battle to watch.
Just five months before the campaign began, Labor's candidate against Bandt, Sarah Witty, had unsuccessfully run for a seat on Yarra city council. She came third behind independent and Greens candidates.
By February, less than two months from polling day, Witty was Labor's choice to run in Melbourne against the long-serving Greens MP.
From the outset, the seat wasn't on federal Labor's radar. 'I don't think we even had it in the winnable column,' a Victorian Labor source said.
A Greens insider said there had been no indication Melbourne was in trouble, noting the party didn't have the resources for single-seat polling in the way the major parties do.
Both the Greens and Labor will reflect on the unexpected result in the coming weeks to figure out what happened.
For the Greens, it will be a sobering look at how Bandt, regarded as a unifying leader within the party, lost the seat he had held for so long.
Local Labor volunteers from the Melbourne and Richmond branches were out on the hustings daily. Even Witty's social media was run by a volunteer, who updated the page in their free time.
How-to-vote cards were supplied by the national campaign but rank-and-file members had to fundraise through raffles and auctions to pay for campaign shirts and corflutes.
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A senior Victorian Labor source, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, described Witty's campaign as 'run on the smell of an oily rag', with donations from the active Melbourne and Richmond branches.
Another Labor source, who helped the campaign, said: 'It was a very, very sparsely funded campaign, all raised from locals. It wasn't like there were massive amounts of money coming from a national office.'
The idea of Labor as David in a battle against the Greens Goliath doesn't sit well with the Greens camp. They argue that Labor's federal megaphone gives even the most under-resourced campaigns a big chance.
While the 'people-powered' campaign is credited by Labor sources as the reason Witty ousted Bandt, a 'perfect storm' had also hit.
The Greens leader's chance of winning a sixth term in office was dampened by three key factors, the electoral analyst Kevin Bonham said.
The electoral boundaries for the seat shifted before the election, lowering Bandt's primary vote from 49.6% in 2022 to 44.7%. On a two-candidate preferred basis, it had dropped from 60.2% to 56.5%.
After days of tense post-election vote counting, Bandt on Thursday conceded to Witty, saying a Greens win in Melbourne was like 'climbing Everest'.
'We needed to overcome Liberal, Labor and One Nation combined, and it's an Everest that we've climbed a few times now, but this time we fell just short,' he said.
Bonham said preference flows had not favoured the Greens this time around.
More Liberal and One Nation votes went to Labor than previously.
The rightwing activist group Advance ran a campaign against the Greens to reduce its vote in both houses, claiming Bandt's defeat as a win.
Social media advertising analysis showed the group had spent no money on targeted ads in the seat during the campaign.
A source inside Bandt's camp said a post-election review would look at third-party campaigns against the party to understand their impact on the inner-city seat.
Bonham said another factor against Bandt couldn't be written off as easily: the Greens leader's primary vote dipped just enough, even after the boundary redistribution, to set the wheels in motion for his loss.
'It's a perfect storm,' he said. 'He had a lower baseline, he had a swing against him on the primary vote, and he had a swing against him on preferences.
'Those three things combined have got rid of him.'
Swings against Bandt in progressive booths, including Fitzroy and Collingwood, will require further analysis to determine how the Greens came undone in the lower house.
A Victorian Labor source from the left faction hoped the Greens 'looked critically' at their failings.
'I really do see the value of having strong leftwing crossbenchers in the parliament,' they said. 'I think it's good for democracy, and I think it's really good for the Labor party when we do have a viable leftwing minor party.
'So I really hope that they take some time to critically look at their failings.'
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Jackson, then 18, made several trips to the territory with some of its other supporters. 'We were bringing in tree surgeons. We were doing a lot of cadastral [surveying] work. We camped there for quite a long time if you put all the trips together,' he says. 'I thought: let's make it a reality.' While I can just about get my head around the idea of a hare-brained teenage scheme that got out of hand, I am finding it difficult to understand why Jackson is still pouring so many resources into a project that is a constant struggle – spending hours learning Serbian and Croatian (Verdis's two other official languages, as well as English), constantly raising awareness, and creating passports that you can't even use to travel. (You can, at least, use them as ID in bars, which Jackson says he has done 'many times'.) 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It's possible that part of the reason for this is my gender – just as it tends to be the male halves of Grand Designs couples who have a stronger desire to build themselves a palace, whatever the cost, it seems that men are more inclined to start a new country: 70% of Verdis's citizens, and all seven of its government ministers, are men. This is not because of any kind of meninist agenda, Jackson assures me, and it is something he would like to address, but 'it's a lot harder to find women who are interested in getting involved'. While he awaits the day he can attempt to turn these plans for a settlement into reality, Jackson has been spreading the word about Verdis in his local area: he loves a kebab, and his loyal patronage has got the staff at Dover Kebab posting stories about Verdis on Instagram. Jackson moved to Dover after dropping out of school at 17. Australia's 'quite severe' lockdown during the Covid-19 pandemic 'killed a lot of my motivation to continue to attend school', he says. He wanted a 'fresh start', and had 'always preferred being in the UK' to Australia, having visited many times throughout his childhood to see family. He initially secured a job with ferry company DFDS, on the Dover to Dunkirk route. Though freelance work suits him much better these days, given his frequent trips to south-east Europe, he still loves the ferries, and plans to treat himself to a short trip to Calais soon. He's had a 'full-on July' travelling to Serbia to raise awareness about Verdis, and briefly to Verdis itself, where he was once again chased off the land by Croatian police. Jackson says he has been assured that the territory is rightfully his under international law, but 'it's hard for us to take legal action against Croatia when they're not allowing us to access their legal system', he says. He tells me about a recent instance when citizens of Liberland tried to take a Croatian police officer to court after he injured one of them, and 'the judge threw the case out because it didn't happen in Croatian territory'. Any attempts by Verdisians to make similar cases would probably be discarded in the same way, he thinks. 'And in order to take a case to the European court of human rights, 'we have to exhaust all resources in Croatia, which is hard for us to do'. The Croatian authorities were approached but have made no comment on Jackson's case. Resuming a settlement on the land is Jackson's primary goal – a presence there will release funding that has been agreed with an NGO (he can't tell me which one, as he has been made to sign an NDA), and will vastly improve Verdis's chances of becoming an officially recognised state. But he says Croatia has 'now installed cameras all along Verdis's coastline, so if you even hover your boat for 10 minutes in the territorial waters, a Croatian police boat will be on its way very quickly'. And Jackson and his affiliates have to be careful – after the 2023 deportation, some of Verdis's boats went missing – he suspects they were taken by the Croatian authorities. He is remarkably hopeful, however. 'Croatia still insists Verdis is not part of Croatia,' he says. 'So we believe it's a matter of when, not if, we're back on the land.' He hopes that with enough pressure from publicity, or perhaps a change of Croatian government, the country will come to recognise Verdis – and even become open to working together. 'Even though we're not happy with what Croatia's done, especially their violation of international law and the way they've treated our citizens, we still want good relations with them in the future,' Jackson says. I'm not sure if his relentless optimism is simply due to his age or rooted more deeply in his character, but Jackson seems convinced that he will one day live in Verdis, and has plenty of dreams for what the country might eventually look like. Though the original environmental focus has taken a back seat ('We still want to be environmentally conscious … but as Verdis's population builds up we will have to relocate a lot of wildlife'), he envisions the country as a neutral state; 'a middleground between other countries' and 'a good hub for NGOs'. Humanitarianism is a priority for Verdis's government. Most of its cabinet members have previously undertaken aid work – Bowles, for example, set up the Dover-based charity DIY Ukraine in 2022, delivering supplies to Ukrainians, and Verdis previously ran its own Ukrainian aid programme via this charity. Though Jackson says Verdis 'would want to be part of the eurozone', EU membership is not a goal: 'I am a very pro-EU person, but the EU is not designed for small countries.' A Eurovision song contest entry, on the other hand, very much is. 'We would love to, honestly,' Jackson says, adding that Verdis has 'quite a good few connections with Eurovision contestants anyway' – namely Luke Black, Serbia's 2023 entry, who Jackson has met and says is 'quite a big supporter' of Verdis. When approached by the Guardian, the singer said he had found Jackson's vision for Verdis 'interesting, especially given he's in his early 20s and leading such an initiative'. Though he is 'not affiliated with Verdis in any way', the singer added: 'I wish them well in their efforts.' Astonishingly, given all the time he has dedicated to Verdis's creation and his hopes for its future, Jackson plans to step down from the presidency the moment the country becomes an established state. 'I just want to be a normal citizen by then,' he says. His own politics are 'centrist', but he would accept the result of an election. 'Even if I don't agree with the next president's views, that's up to the Verdisians to decide, which I would always respect.' Some of his cabinet members may be interested in running for president, he thinks; but others, like him, have already become 'exhausted' by the workload involved. 'It would be nice to have a break,' he says. 'But we won't give up.' I can't help but wonder again why he is bothering to go through all of this when it's such an uphill battle, and the reward – a sliver of land that is currently uninhabitable – seems so small. 'You have to be nuts to start something like this, of course,' he concedes. 'But the world is boring without trying something crazy.'
