Greens leader Adam Bandt loses seat but refuses to concede until all votes are in

Adam Bandt’s pre-election cockiness had come back to haunt him after he spectacularly lost his seat of Melbourne.

Despite losing his seat, the Greens leader refused to concede, with deputy leader Mehreen Faruqi still predicting absentee votes in the seat would reveal a “very positive outcome for the Greens”. Mr Bandt declined to comment.

The Greens leader was vocal during the campaign about the demands the minor party would place on the Albanese Government, predicting a minority win.

Instead, Labor won in a landslide, leaving the Greens leaderless, in a shocking result for the minor party that is set to retain just one seat in the Lower House.

Mr Bandt is refusing to concede that Labor has won back his seat of Melbourne — previously a heartland seat for the major party — despite falling further behind in the count

The ousting of Mr Bandt would represent a second scalp for Labor in a landslide election victory in which it also managed to steal Peter Dutton’s Brisbane seat of Dickson. Both of Labor’s main opposition parties will now have to find new leaders.

The Greens are on track to lose three of its four lower house seats and made no further gains in the Senate.

Assistant Minister for Multicultural Affairs Julian Hill, who holds the nearby seat of Bruce, said Australians reject extremists and division on both ends of the political spectrum.

“All indications are that, absent a miracle, Adam Bandt is stuffed,” he told The West.

“It’s a moment of profound significance that the extreme populist left and the extreme reactionary right who have shamefully weaponised the Gaza conflict and every other issue they can find to divide society have paid the ultimate political price with the apparent defeat of the leaders responsible.

“The Australian people are clearly saying no to the toxic politics of division and mindless negativity.”

Multiple election analysts, including the ABC’s Antony Green and Sky’s Tom Connell, called the seat for Labor on Wednesday afternoon.

Mr Green said Mr Bandt needed 33 per cent of preferences coming his way to keep the seat.

“The AEC’s releases of official preference counts reveal flows of under 26 per cent, which means Labor still leads the projected two-candidate preferred count and remains with a chance of victory,” the election guru said.

However, Greens deputy leader Mehreen Faruqi said there were still 15,000 absentee votes to be counted, which she predicted would “have a very positive outcome for the Greens”.

“We can’t declare a position until every vote is counted,” she said.

Speaking to the ABC, she pointed to a number of seats that had been called and uncalled, decisions made and flipped in recent days, as she said Mr Bandt was still in a tight contest.

Senator Faruqi said she didn’t want to think about losing Mr Bandt as leader, after already losing first-term MPs Max Chandler-Mather and Stephen Bates.

“That loss comes with the issue of keeping Peter Dutton out, which is how the election panned out… That meant we lost those two MPs,” she said.

“We keep a close eye on Melbourne, Ryan and Wills which are still being counted. We cross those bridges when we have the final result.”

Mr Bandt declined to comment on the projections.

He suffered a 4.4 per cent drop in his primary vote while Labor’s Sarah Witty garnered a swing towards the party of more than 5.8 per cent.

Influencer Abbie Chatfield, a high-profile supporter of the Greens’ leader who had hosted a handful of Mr Bandt’s pre-election DJ sets, said she was “heartbroken” at the result.

Ms Chatfield, the former reality star turned podcast host, had interviewed Mr Bandt and Prime Minister Anthony Albanese on her show in the leadup to the election.

The electoral watchdog was also asked to review whether the PM and Mr Bandt’s collaborative posts with Ms Chatfield should be classified as political content. She was ultimately cleared of wrongdoing.

During the campaign, she visited Mr Bandt in his parliamentary office decked in green and posed for photos to show her support for the party.

The count in Melbourne has taken several days because the Australian Electoral Commission initially counted the Greens v Liberal for its two-party preferred allocations, based on the last election’s results.

But a stronger Labor primary vote put Ms Witty in pole position to repaint the seat red after 15 years, with preferences flowing from the Liberals to her.

Mr Bandt was first elected in 2010, when he became the first of his party to win a seat in the lower house at a full federal election, taking the Labor stronghold after senior minister Lindsay Tanner retired.

The win put Mr Bandt in a box seat during the Gillard minority government.

He became deputy leader of the minor party two years later and has led the Greens since 2020.

The Greens ballooned in size in 2022, when three Brisbane MPs joined Mr Bandt in the lower house.

But while the Greens secured their biggest national vote in history in the 2025 election, they have failed to retain at least three of those seats or pick up any new ones.

In the lead up to the election, the minor party had claimed they wouldn’t just hold on to their four seats, they would also pick up a handful of others like Wills, Macnamara and Richmond. None has come to pass.

Mr Albanese on Monday suggested the reason the Greens’ housing spokesman Max Chandler-Mather lost his seat of Griffith was because of the role he played in blocking Labor’s first-term agenda.

He warned if the Senate got in the way of Labor’s second-term agenda, “they’ll receive the same response that (Mr Chandler-Mather) got on Saturday”.

Ms Witty is a housing advocate and chief executive of The Nappy Collective, which provides free nappies to families in crisis.