Larissa Waters steps down as Greens leader due to health reasons

Greens leader Senator Larissa Waters has quit the party leadership in a surprise move due to ill health. Waters, who has been leader since former leader Adam Bandt was defeated at the 2025 election, is managing a “pre-existing kidney disease” that has “declined significantly” in recent months.

A Monday night statement said the prognosis for her recovery was “positive”, but she had decided the demands of the leadership, including extra travel, were incompatible with prioritising her health.

The Greens will determine “the next steps for the leadership this week”, the statement said. Waters was elected unopposed as leader in 2025.

Waters will take medical leave, but plans to return to parliament “as soon as she can”, it said.

Waters said she was “really sad that illness means my time as leader has been cut short”.

But our movement needs a leader in good health to lead us to success at the next election.

Passing the torch on to the next leader of the party will put them in the best position to take the Greens to the next election, fighting for people, not the corporate interests that run Labor, Liberals and One Nation.

Our fight is too important, and it needs more time and energy than I am able to give while I focus on my recovery.

The 2028 federal election looms as a complicated one in the Senate, with the surge in support for One Nation adding new pressures on both major parties and smaller players.

The statement said Waters had used the party’s balance of power in the Senate to deliver “sufficient outcomes”, including environmental law reform (where the Greens secured changes to the government’s legislation) and gun reform.

Waters won a Queensland seat at the 2010 election.

In 2017-18, she was caught up in the parliamentary eligibility crisis because she had been born in Canada, making her a dual citizen and thus ineligible for a seat in the federal parliament. The crisis ensnared multiple parliamentarians.