‘We are ready’: amid a sea of colour and triumphalism, the Victorian Greens launch an ambitious campaign

Perry’s: A Refreshment Club, an immaculate little venue in Collingwood with exposed brick and old-school carpeting, is the host of the Victorian Greens’ election launch and is as “home ground” as they could hope for. It’s surrounded by cafes called things like “Friend of the Earth”, sustainable wine bars, and quite a few posters for its Richmond candidate Gabrielle de Vietri.

The bathrooms make no reference to gender, simply detailing that one has a urinal and one doesn’t, and the food — sprawls of Instagram-ready charcuterie — looks as though it would fundamentally undermine my journalistic neutrality if I tried any. The crowd is a melange of multi-coloured glasses frames, side-shaved haircuts, and woolly jackets with scarves and attachments that defy physics.

If all that sounds like an out-of-touch warping of progressivism, well, let me thank you for your years of supporting Crikey. If it sounds fantastic, let me thank you for taking out this free trial, and please consider upgrading to a full subscription.

The place is bursting with positive energy, which you’d expect from a party launch, but coming off their best-ever federal election result, the Greens are really confident this time around. Leader Samantha Ratnam tells Crikey the party is hopeful of holding what it has in Melbourne, Brunswick and Prahan, adding Northcote and Richmond — as well as, on the outer of their ambition, Albert Park and Pascoe Vale, which they believe are in play.

“Obviously we’ll see what happens on election day,” she says, but she offers no such qualifiers when she hits the stage for her speech.

“We’re on track to win Richmond!” she tells the crowd to whoops and cheers. “We’re on track to win Northcote!” Even bigger cheers, Northcote being the seat Senator Lidia Thorpe briefly held after a byelection in 2017, before Labor clawed it back in 2018.

The fractious and ill-tempered 2017 byelection, which saw Thorpe’s past dragged into the papers, turned out to be a preview of the 2018 state election. A real “dirt unit” election, where a flurry of candidates had old social media activity brought to light. Everyone took a hit, but Greens figures were ruthlessly picked off, some over nothing much, some via astounding lapses from the party.

“We’ve certainly strengthened our preselection processes, but also been mindful that we want more young people getting into politics. And these young people are digital natives. They’ve engaged with social media from a very young age,” Ratnam tells Crikey. “So while we’ve strengthened our pre-selection process, we’ve also supported our candidates over where they might be attacked, and how to respond to that.”

The Liberals barely warrant a single mention in anyone’s speech. I almost feel bad for them — the most culture war-ready conservative party in the country and they can’t even get a rise out of the Greens election party. That’s how little threat they appear to pose.

Indeed, there was something very 2018 about the stories engulfing the Libs this week. Apart from the preferencing of a candidate who called for the execution of the premier, there was The Herald Sun story about the number of Liberal MPs following horny social media accounts. So profoundly amateurish, such an easily avoided embarrassment — one can’t escape the thought that if they were to control the arms of state, they’d simply use them to continue punching themselves in the face.

So the chief target at the launch is the Labor government. After a solemn and moving Welcome to Country from Wurunderji man Thane Garvey, Melbourne MP Ellen Sandell decries the levels of incarceration faced by First Nations peoples in Victoria, and there are plenty of jabs at privatisation, drilling for gas around the apostles, renters’ rights and more. Labor and the Greens have fought many bruising battles over inner-city territory both parties feel should be theirs, and it will be no different this time.

“I’m here to tell you: we are ready,” Ratnam says towards the end of her speech, to another flood of cheers and applause, “ready to work constructively and positively with the government.”

There’s a slight pause, a single “woo!” from the back, as the room falls about as quiet as it will all night.