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April 16, 2026 — 5:00am
In the early 2010s, I was writing many articles about per and polyfluoroalkyl substances — you know them as PFAS, or “forever chemicals” — leaching out of a defence base and into the water in a place called Williamtown, north of Newcastle.
This was the first time the NSW Environment Protection Authority had ever really dealt with something like this — thanks to my colleague Carrie Fellner, they’ve dealt with it a lot more since — and they made quite a few errors, including drawing a big red line around the suburb, quickly dubbed a “red zone”, decimating the value of people’s homes and making some of them uninsurable.
During that time, one of the most persistent advocates for that community was federal Greens MP Lee Rhiannon, who helped the residents to organise and pushed the then-Labor government to provide a funding package.
At the subsequent election, in 2016, there was a big swing in the local electorate of Paterson, but not to the Greens. One Nation picked up 13 per cent of the vote – an 11-point swing. They won 14 per cent at the (admittedly small) booth in Williamtown. The Greens went backwards.
This week, the NSW Greens MP Sue Higginson, recently preselected at the top of the party’s ticket in the upper house, told me she is gearing up to take a “bolder and more radical vision” to voters at next year’s election in a bid to mount a left-wing counter to One Nation’s recent resurgence.
The party wants to be more populist, she says, and take on both Labor and One Nation on hip-pocket issues from the left. The Greens have yet to outline exactly what that looks like, but Higginson points to cost of living and renters rights as fertile ground for the party.
The reality, though, is that despite uneven gains in metropolitan cities over the past decade or so, the Greens, for a multitude of reasons, have never been able to appeal to communities outside the inner cities, or, in the context of regional NSW, the Northern Rivers. (The Greens hold three lower house seats: Balmain, Newtown and Ballina.)
That failure has basically left the right and centre-right to fight it out for the golden goose of Australian electoral politics: the suburbs.
It also means that, in the lower house, the Greens will be looking at seats such as Summer Hill in the inner west of Sydney, Newcastle, and perhaps Lismore. The party – which has four upper house members, two of whom are up for reelection this time – has ambitions of picking up a third seat for only the second time.
Labor doesn’t believe any of those lower house seats are really threatened. But this government is – or could be – vulnerable on its left flank. Anyone who pays attention to Premier Chris Minns – who continues to lead a minority government – knows he is acutely aware of the sentiment of the centre and centre right, and works hard to keep conservative media outlets such as 2GB onside.
Policing, protest laws, hate speech; there is a long list of issues on which the government is more concerned with nullifying criticism on its right than any notional ideological purity on its left.
This week provides a fairly good illustration of why Minns tends to hew pretty closely to the centre right on most issues.
On Tuesday, the government released a new electric vehicles strategy, which, among other things, included a small investment — about $40 million — to expand an existing initiative encouraging businesses to electrify their fleets to include heavy vehicles. The incentives help partially cover the cost for business owners who want to purchase EVs.
The incentives are limited to medium-size 23-tonne trucks, which are basically back-to-base type vehicles such as delivery trucks, not long-haul freight vehicles.
Hardly “end of the weekend” type stuff. But, lo, by Wednesday my esteemed friends at the Daily Telegraph had splashed their front page with furious truckies slamming “Labor’s obsession with electrifying their sector”.
Leave aside that the government was announcing an incentive, not a mandate (and a small one at that), and the Tele’s questionable logic of concluding the response to a global fuel shortage is greater reliance on fuel, the inanity of making electrification an either/or proposition is just the latest (re-)instalment in the universe’s most enduring culture war: energy policy.
Most of the actual substance of the complaints in the Telegraph came not from actual trucking companies – which presumably will make fairly unemotional financial decisions about how their vehicles are powered – but a few think tanks and interest groups who weren’t actually arguing against electrification but for domestic production and storage, a perfectly reasonable thing to be talking about.
The Tele’s real target is the federal government, which may be contemplating more significant moves on heavy-vehicle electrification in its upcoming budget. But the episode highlights in microcosm the basic arithmetic NSW Labor employs when deciding whether to stick their heads above the policy parapet.
Often, the conclusion is don’t win the fight, just don’t have the fight at all. If the Greens ever want to change that, they will need to figure out how to win over voters in Williamtown.
Michael McGowan is the state political editor.
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