Ilandar

Austria's Eurovision winner JJ says it's "disappointing" that Israel continues to participate in the song contest.

"I would like Eurovision to be held in Vienna next year and without Israel. But the ball is in the EBU's court. We, the artists, can only raise our voices on the matter," the 24-year-old singer told Spanish daily El Pais.

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In the El Pais interview, JJ agreed there should be "greater transparency on the issue of televoting."

"This year it was all very strange", the classically trained opera singer said. He also backed comments made by last year's winner, Switzerland's Nemo, who has repeatedly called for Israel's expulsion.

"Especially, [Eurovision] needs to make changes in terms of the voting system and who participates in the festival," JJ told El Pais.

Looks like it's shaping up to be a very interesting contest between Hanson-Young and Faruqi over the direction of the party. When she was younger Hanson-Young was always quite widely disliked (relative to other Greens senators) because people saw her as too divisive, a reputation which has stuck, yet she now appears to be the one in the party room who wants to pursue a more collaborative relationship with Labor. Given that I haven't seen any indication from her colleagues that they believe The Greens need a course correction, it would seem she is heading for a third defeat in a leadership contest.

Sarah Hanson-Young and Mehreen Faruqi are firming as frontrunners for the Greens leadership, as the party debates whether to shift in a more moderate direction or maintain Adam Bandt’s confrontational approach for the next term of parliament.

Greens insiders said the party was bracing for its first genuinely competitive leadership ballot after the shock loss of Bandt’s seat of Melbourne left the party unprepared for a leadership transition.

None of the Greens MPs have declared their candidacy for the vacant leadership position, but allies of Faruqi and Hanson-Young are canvassing colleagues to gauge levels of support.

Queensland senator Larissa Waters is also being urged by many grassroots members to run for the leadership, but it is unclear if she is willing to contest a ballot because of family commitments.

Faruqi showed she had support in the party room when she was elected Bandt’s deputy in 2022, in contrast with Hanson-Young, who has run several times for the deputy position but never received the support of colleagues.

Hanson-Young, however, is seen as representing a clear break with the Bandt era and more likely to pursue a pragmatic approach of working with the Labor government where the parties have common ground.

“The question is: do we want to be Labor’s little brother or a party in our own right?” a Greens source said.

Faruqi would probably position herself as a progressive champion seeking to first and foremost lead for the 1.65 million Australians who gave the Greens their first preference vote at the election.

”We will sit down and talk to our colleagues, our members and our supporters, and we will think about a strategy,” Faruqi told The Project on Thursday night.

“I don’t accept that the people of Australia don’t want us in the lower house. We have many seats in state parliaments, and we still have one in federal parliament.”

She is associated with the activist wing of the party and played a prominent role in attacking the government over its response to Israel’s war in Gaza.

Faruqi led her Greens colleagues in a Senate walkout in November 2023 over the government’s reluctance to call for a ceasefire, labelling her Labor opponents “gutless, heartless cowards”.

She (Faruqi) would probably have a contentious relationship with leading pro-Israel groups if elected leader.

Following the death of Queen Elizabeth II, Faruqi said: “I cannot mourn the leader of a racist empire built on stolen lives, land and wealth of colonised peoples.”

Some within the party have defended her record as an environmentalist, pointing out she has a PhD in environmental engineering and spent much of the election campaigning in the regional NSW seat of Richmond, which the Greens almost won from Labor.

Hanson-Young, who rose to prominence as an asylum seeker advocate, controversially challenged Milne for the party’s deputy position in 2010 and again missed out on a co-deputy position in 2020.

She is now the party’s longest-serving member of parliament.

It’s a shame that Adam Bandt looks likely to cling to his seat after a 3%+ swing against the Greens leader in Melbourne. His removal would — as with the ousting of Peter Dutton — solve a major problem for his party: what to do with a discredited leader.

After successive elections since 2010 expanded the Greens’ Senate representation and then began making serious inroads into Labor’s urban heartland in the lower house, 2025 marks the first major reverse for the Greens in a political generation, with two seats, and possibly all four, lost in the House of Representatives.

Greens supporters are clinging on to the party’s Senate representation and a relatively stable primary vote (down just 0.39% across the country) as evidence that it’s only a flesh wound. Failed MPs like Max Chandler-Mather are bravely declaring that losing his seat is just another step in the long march to victory.

In fact, this is only the latest setback under Bandt’s leadership. He rapidly lost Victorian Senator Lydia Thorpe from his ranks. The Greens copped a flogging in Brisbane in the Queensland state election last year after talking up their chances of seizing Labor seats (and they ended up going backwards by 1.39% on the weekend). The Queensland election forced Bandt to end the 2024 parliamentary year with a humiliating reversal of his long-term obstructionism in the Senate, allowing Labor to claim total victory for its legislative agenda.

Bandt went into the federal election proclaiming that the Greens were the party of renters and that his aim was to stop Peter Dutton. But the targeting of Dutton was cosplay — the Greens’ focus was, as always, taking seats off Labor, which is exactly what the party is best placed to achieve. Instead, Labor took seats off him, despite a housing crisis that should have made the Greens’ anti-landlord, anti-investor pro-renter pitch unusually appealing.

As leader of the Greens, Bandt — a former industrial relations lawyer — has aimed to reshape the Greens as a party of the hard left economically and socially, with its traditional environmental focus a secondary issue to heavily redistributionist taxation policies, reflexive support for the corrupt CFMEU (which may well have cost Chandler-Mathers his seat) and massive welfare spending. This was coupled with relentless criticism of Labor over its failure to speak out more on the Palestinian genocide — another issue that failed to shift votes the party’s way.

In doing so, Bandt was abandoning the Greens’ traditional constituency of old, white, affluent voters with the time and income to worry about environmental issues, for a younger, poorer, more economically marginal demographic worried about whether they can ever afford a home. It also meant switching from being an issue-based party to a Nationals-style sectional interest party. If you were a landlord, or planned to buy an investment property as part of your income strategy in coming years, “the party of renters” was clearly not for you, even if you were a dedicated environmentalist.

The other problem with such a strategy is that while Labor — a party that feigns commitment to climate action while enabling ever more fossil fuel exports, and which has little interest in genuinely effective environmental regulation — will always be vulnerable on environmental issues, economic issues, especially for working class people, are its forté. Bandt could talk about rent freezes (anathema to traditional Greens voters who might own rental properties) and more housing, but Labor could deliver wage rises for caring sector workers, tax cuts for the low-paid and an end to mortgage insurance for first home buyers.

And Bandt’s obstructionist tactics through most of the most recent parliamentary term seemed to signal to voters that the Greens were more interested in virtue-signalling than in getting results — allowing Labor to hold the Greens up as the impediments to progressive outcomes, not the enablers. It was telling that it was veteran Senator Sarah Hanson-Young to whom Bandt turned to break the impasse in late 2024 with Labor in the Senate.

And looking back, what message would voters have taken from the Greens’ strategy over Labor’s first term? That giving the crossbenches power in Parliament delivers better outcomes, or simply results in politicians making it all about themselves? For many voters who pay little attention to politics, the Greens would have simply seemed like blockers rather than a party genuinely committed to using its power to deliver for them.

It’s likely coincidence that we’re now further away from minority government than at any time since the 2013 election. But if voters had been thinking about the virtues of ending the tyranny of the major parties, the last three years wouldn’t have been a good advertisement.

What do you think is in store for this game in 2025? How much more work does the general gameplay need, what new additions will we receive and how far away is the full release?