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Earlier this year, as the Victorian Greens mapped out their election strategy, a video from New York caught party leader Ellen Sandell’s eye.

In it, Zohran Mamdani, the city’s new mayor, announced he was making good on his plan to “tax the rich” through a new levy on second properties worth more than $5m.

Sandell says a similar idea had already been “tossing around” inside the party. On Monday, the Victorian Greens will unveil their own version: a new land tax bracket on investment property holdings worth more than $5m, with the proceeds helping fund a doubling of public housing and the scrapping of stamp duty for first home buyers.

The proposal is the latest example of the Victorian Greens borrowing ideas from the new generation of progressive politicians gaining traction overseas. Last month, the Green party of England and Wales leader, Zack Polanski, addressed the party’s campaign conference, urging them to directly take One Nation on as he had with Reform.

Sandell says by following their example, the Greens can present voters with a “genuinely progressive, hopeful and bold” alternative to the major parties.

But with the populist right on the rise in the form of One Nation, some political observers remain sceptical the party will be able to lift its vote high enough to achieve its goals.

Changing mood

Victoria has long been considered a stronghold for the Greens, but the party’s fortunes have turned in recent years.

In 2025, the state party lost Prahran to the Liberals at a February byelection, and three months later, federal leader Adam Bandt was ousted from Melbourne, the seat he had held since 2010, whenhe became the first Green to win a seat in the lower house at a general election.

But Sandell says “a lot has changed” in the past year, particularly in Victoria.

“The mood in Victoria is so different to six months ago or a year ago,” she says. “People are genuinely fed up with Labor, but they know the Liberals will be worse, and One Nation will be disastrous.”

But not everyone is convinced voters dissatisfied with the major parties will turn to the Greens. Damon Alexander, a senior lecturer in politics and public policy at Swinburne University, says minor party support is likely to rise at the November election, but it won’t necessarily benefit progressives.

“There might be a small cohort of Labor voters who shift to the Greens in those inner-city seats, but a lot of that group already jumped ship quite some time ago,” Alexander said.

Instead, he expects much of the protest vote to flow toward “populist right-wing parties”, particularly in outer suburban areas where he says the “the Greens are really on the nose”.

Even if the party’s economic message resonates in these areas, Alexander says perceptions of the Greens as “too progressive, too ‘woke’, too supportive of immigration” may outweigh it.

Benjamin Moffitt, a senior lecturer in politics and international relations at Monash University, agrees. He says the Greens here are a “relatively established player with a consistent share of the vote”.

“They are a victim of their success in a way, because they look like a polished political outfit, which limits their ability to present themselves as an anti-establishment or an insurgent populist party,” he says.

Sandell, however, rejects the Greens are stagnating, citing a Demos poll released in June showing the party recorded a 15% share of the vote – compared with 11.5% at the 2022 state election.

“We are up – the latest polls had us up four points since the last election,” Sandell says.

The Demos poll, which had a margin of error of 3.8%, also showed Labor’s primary vote at just 21% – a drop of 13.6 percentage points since the 2022 election and the Liberals on 30% (down 4.5 percentage points). One Nation, by comparison, polled at 23% – well above the 0.22% or 8,077 primary votes it received in 2022.

Sandell says “with Labor being so unpopular”, seats beyond Northcote and Prahran, which the Greens are confident in picking up, are also firmly in their sights, with Albert Park, Pascoe Vale and Footscray among them.

Even further into the middle-ring suburbs, she says there’s been increased support – the campaign launch for Box Hill candidate, Aaron Qin, attracted more than 400 people.

“That’s not traditionally a Greens area,” she says.

Grassroots activity is also increasing. More than 700 people have signed up to volunteer in the past three weeks, and internal figures seen by Guardian Australia show the party has knocked on 4,575 doors and held 1,379 conversations with voters across key seats between 8 and 22 June – well above Labor.

The Greens are hoping bold economic policies will help convert support into seats. The party will be campaigning hard on its “ultra wealth tax” on residential land-holdings worth more than $5m, excluding owner-occupied homes.

Under the plan, from 1 January 2027, affected properties would face a base charge of $100,000 plus a 5.3% rate on land value above the threshold. The policy, costed by the Victorian Parliamentary Budget Office, would raise about $1.46bn by 2028/29 or $6.4bn over a decade.

“People who have more than $5m in investment homes that they don’t even live in can afford to pay a little bit extra so that everyone can afford a home,” Sandell says.

She predicts commentators will be “surprised” by the Greens’ performance in November, despite its lack of “big corporate donors” and “Sky News putting us on every single night, like they do with Pauline Hanson”.

“What we do have is hundreds of people door knocking every single weekend, right across the state,” she says.

Whether that grassroots momentum is enough to counter the rise of right-wing populism – and match the success of progressives overseas – remains to be seen.