Adam who? :D
Many Greens voters don't know who their leader Adam Bandt is, but that might not be a problemBy Annabel Crabb
Topic:Elections
5h ago
https://i.imgur.com/S9Dhkbu.jpgTwenty-five per cent of respondents — when asked their opinions of Adam Bandt — said they'd never heard of him. (ABC News: David Sciasci)
Last month, the research firm Redbridge asked voters in 20 key federal seats for their broad views on party leaders Anthony Albanese, Peter Dutton and Adam Bandt.
As you would expect in the nation's current cheesed-off state of mind, all three men enjoyed sub-zero popularity among respondents. Everyone hates everything right now, especially if it's anywhere near politics. The PM's net approval rating was minus 16, Dutton's minus 11, and the Greens leader was minus 23.
None of this is particularly surprising.
But here's something that might surprise you.
Twenty-five per cent of respondents — when asked their opinions of Adam Bandt — said they'd never heard of him.
And — stranger still — this rate of non-recognition was highest among respondents planning to vote Green.
Thirty-one per cent of Greens voters had never heard of the Melbourne MP who has led their preferred party for five years, compared with just 23 per cent of Labor voters and 22 per cent of Coalition voters for whom Bandt's name did not ring a bell.
In fact, Adam Bandt's name recognition was strongest among the people least likely to vote for him, and weakest among the voters most firmly in his party's sights.
He's best-known among the over-65s, among people who own their houses outright and among those who describe themselves as being under no financial stress.
But Bandt draws the biggest blank among renters (33 per cent), young people (39 per cent), and people describing themselves as under a "great deal" of financial stress.
That doesn't mean these voters aren't planning to vote Green. They are: The very same research confirms that approval of the Greens remains strongest among those who rent, are aged between 18 and 24, and/or live in households earning less than $1,000 a week.
Two modern realitiesWhat can be made of these baffling results?
Basically, it's a clear (and possibly, for Bandt, bordering-on-brutal) demonstration of two modern realities.
The first is that the success of the Greens has very little to do with who the leader is, and everything to do with brand identification. Unlike the major parties, where leadership challenges can engender rapid reversals of direction, the Greens tend to chug along fairly consistently regardless of who's "in charge" of their party room, which in any event makes decisions "by consensus", which is Greenspeak for "meetings that are courteous and go for longer than the average carbon-based-life-form's tolerance for being in a meeting stocked only with wholegrain snacks".
In fact, after the 2010 election, when South Australian Greens senator Sarah Hanson Young mounted a challenge to the party's then-deputy Christine Milne, nobody found out about it for several weeks, and even then the story only emerged because Bob Brown casually mentioned the incident during a press conference about something else.
The Greens are a party whose purpose is written on the tin. It's branding genius, actually: If you care about the environment, vote Green. The colour of trees. Simple!
Greens voters aren't tuning inThe second take-out from the Redbridge research is that — among younger voters especially — disengagement from the details of politics is incredibly high.
The 2025 election — as the ABC's Patricia Karvelas wrote last year — will be the first at which Millennial and Generation Z voters outnumber Baby Boomers.
Redbridge principal Tony Barry says that among younger voters, media consumption patterns are highly fragmented, and disengagement from politics is common.
"This is underpinned by their assessment that political parties are no longer personally relevant to them because they are perceived not to be offering any solutions to salient issues," he says.
"The media diets of older voters continue to be over-indexed by legacy media."
Why are older, wealthier, home-owning, major-party-supporting people simultaneously more likely to have heard of Adam Bandt, and less likely to vote for him?
Because they're also more likely to watch the news on TV or read newspapers, or follow politics in some kind of linear way, which younger voters most certainly do not.
And Bandt — whose party plagues both Albanese and Dutton, but usually for different reasons — has the distinction of regular name-checks on both Sky News and The Guardian, two outlets whose only common feature is their membership of a legacy media contingent whose rusted-on consumers skew older.
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https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-03-19/adam-bandt-greens-vote-federal-election/105067990
