‘A leaf out of the Mamdani playbook’: Greens kick off campaign with public supermarket plan

Victorian Greens leader Ellen Sandell last month sat in the middle of a semi-forbidden Carlton median strip sipping a canned yuzu gin spritz when a resident walked past and shouted out.

“I’m voting Greens this time,” they said. “I’m a Labor voter [but] I’m so fed up with them.”

This voter was angry with Labor’s decision to knock down Melbourne’s public housing towers, and Sandell says she’s having this conversation with voters in unprecedented numbers.

Whether it’s about public housing, cost-of-living, corruption, climate action or Palestinian rights, Sandell said frustration with Labor after 12 years in government had hit boiling point. At November’s state election, the Greens hope to capitalise on that, with eight lower house seats in their sights.

But while Labor’s primary vote has gone backwards, support for the Greens in polls – including The Age’s Resolve Political Monitor – has remained stubbornly flat around 12 per cent. At the same time, One Nation has risen dramatically, raising questions about whether the Greens’ progressive policies will appeal to disaffected voters looking for an alternative to the major parties.

For her part, Sandell is confident the party can cut through, similarly to Zohran Mamdani’s striking win in the New York mayoral election and the widening appeal of the UK Greens under Zack Polanski’s leadership.

“We know that the Labor Party isn’t going to create the level of change that we need, and that’s why we’ve been saying all along we’re not here to just make them better; we’re here to replace them,” Sandell said.

“That’s why our policy platform this election is bold. It goes big. It talks about some of the really big issues that people are facing … and is really taking a leaf out of the Mamdani playbook and the Polanski playbook.”

The Greens will on Thursday unveil a policy pulled almost straight from the Mamdani playbook: $1 billion to trial 10 publicly owned supermarkets across Victoria, which would sell essentials for 30 per cent less than Coles and Woolworths.

“If publicly owned supermarkets can work in New York, they can work in Victoria. Zohran Mamdani has shown there’s nothing inevitable about giant corporations getting richer while ordinary people struggle to afford food – and we can change things,” Sandell said.

It echoes calls from the party’s think tank, The Green Institute, for the forced sale of 200 Coles and Woolworths supermarkets to be replaced with publicly owned grocers. The Victorian Greens policy – to be paid for by taxing the banking and gambling industries – claims the average household would save about $4274 a year on their grocery bill.

Allan Fels, the former chair of the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission, said the supermarket industry was too concentrated, but the Greens policy would be immensely challenging to realise given the need to develop supply chains, keep prices low, hire experienced management and operate at scale.

“The Greens have been good at publicising the problem … but their solution does not look very practical,” he said.

Beyond public supermarkets, the Greens are campaigning on a platform of affordable housing, free public transport, urgently transitioning to renewables, and placing a moratorium on data centres.

The rapid rollout of data centres near homes – which delivered $5.8 billion in capital expenditure to the Victorian economy last year – has become a political thorn in Labor’s side. The government last month announced that AI infrastructure must be at least 150 metres from homes, along with restrictions on water and electricity use, but angst remains for residents living across from existing data centres.

Nowhere is there more data centre-driven anger than in the electorate of Footscray, which Labor has held for 99 years and where NextDC’s sprawling data centre will eventually occupy about 10 hectares.

The Greens’ candidate for Footscray Elena Pereyra said data centres fed into a feeling that inner-west voters had been abandoned and taken for granted by Labor.

“When they open their eyes to the data centres, they start to notice other things as well, and ... [are] starting to recognise this would absolutely not be acceptable in other places in Melbourne,” Pereyra tells The Age over hibiscus tea at Khartoum cafe in Footscray.

The party’s door-knocking data indicates they’re expecting an 8.6 per cent swing which would overcome Labor’s 4.2 per cent margin. Although there was an 11.8 per cent swing away from Labor in 2022, support for the Greens picked up by just 2.2 per cent, while the Victorian Socialists attracted 9.3 per cent of the primary vote.

Jasmine Duff, the Victorian Socialists candidate for Footscray, said the party sat entirely outside the political establishment and, unlike the Greens, actively sought to end capitalism, which she blamed for homelessness and poverty in the area.

“The big reason that people are coming over to us is that they can see capitalism is broken. It is a system that is not built to meet the needs of the working class.”

Pereyra said she expected Labor’s vote to fracture in interesting ways, but that the Greens had upped their presence in Footscray significantly since 2022.

“The loyalty that people have shown to Labor, they’re really feeling like that hasn’t been rewarded after all of this time, and so I think it’s just an opportunity for them to have a voice.”

The Greens are hopeful this sentiment has carried into Melbourne’s inner north, too, and enable the party to hold Brunswick, and wrest Northcote, Preston and Pascoe Vale from Labor.

Greens candidate for Pascoe Vale Angelica Panopoulos said the once-heartland Labor seat had suffered from underinvestment by the government.

”People who have lived here for decades, people from all walks of life are fed up, and they’re looking for an alternative,” said Panopoulos, a former mayor of Merri-bek Council.

But Monash University political scientist Zareh Ghazarian said the rise of One Nation could harm the Greens in inner-city seats, like Pascoe Vale, because voters worried about far-right populism see Labor as a safe harbour for their vote.

Premier Ben Carroll is plotting a repeat of the federal election, where the Greens pinned losing key seats in part on voters trying to keep Peter Dutton and the Coalition in opposition.

“We are out there making sure we win Greens seats,” the Labor leader said this week.

“The Greens have the task of convincing voters as to why they should be supported this election,” Ghazarian said. “The toughest challenges will be in those inner-urban electorates where they’ve traditionally done well, but Labor is strengthened following on what happened in the 2025 election.”

This was most obvious in the seat of Melbourne, where then-leader Adam Bandt was turfed out by Labor’s Sarah Witty.

Sandell, who is the state MP for Melbourne, expressed confidence this would be a “fundamentally different election”.

“The Greens are here to provide a progressive, a bold, but a hopeful and positive alternative to those major parties, for people who are deeply fed up.”

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