Do we like Adam Bandt?
Our score: 8 out of 10. Decades of votes and campaigning for trans rights, refugees and climate action, held back a notch by a couple of sloppy or combative moments.
Adam Bandt was born in Adelaide and raised in Perth, and joined Labor as a teenager before leaving over rising university costs. He studied arts and law at Murdoch, wrote a PhD on Marx's labour theory of value, then became an industrial lawyer acting for unions and public workers. That background explains him: a lawyer who found the major parties too cosy with big business.
He won Melbourne in 2010, the Greens' first lower house seat won at a general election, and became leader when Richard Di Natale quit in 2020. His pitch was a billionaires' tax to fund dental and mental health care through Medicare, free education and a ban on new coal, oil and gas. He lost the seat in May 2025 and handed over the leadership.
Now the bruises. In 2018 he suggested on TV that Liberal senator Jim Molan may have committed war crimes in Iraq. Molan threatened defamation action, Bandt's first apology was knocked back, and a stronger one saying he was wrong got Molan to drop it. In 2024 he said his lawyers had written to Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus over comments he called defamatory, after Dreyfus said he was concerned about the Greens' role in protests at MPs' offices.
He can be prickly and loose with a headline number. On the 2022 trail he told a journalist to 'Google it, mate' when asked for the wage price index, and AAP FactCheck rated his claim that minimum wage earners would pay the same tax rate as CEOs as misleading. He also pulled the Australian flag from a press conference backdrop, which Anthony Albanese publicly asked him to reconsider. Fans saw a conversation about colonial history, critics saw a stunt.
The good stuff is mostly the work. ACF's board unanimously picked him from more than 300 candidates, and he says he'll campaign for climate action rather than return to the Greens. Since January he has been calling on parliament to stop new coal and gas mines. The record also shows he voted with his party every time, so don't expect surprises.