Queensland senator Larissa Waters has been chosen to lead the federal Greens, replacing Adam Bandt.

Waters was selected at a party meeting in Melbourne this afternoon, ahead of fellow senators Sarah Hanson-Young and Mehreen Faruqi.

The decision comes after Bandt lost his seat of Melbourne, becoming the second leader to be voted out of parliament at the election following Peter Dutton’s loss in Dickson.

Waters will now be faced with leading the Greens after the minor party retained all its Senate seats during this month’s election but saw its presence in the House of Representatives gutted from four to just one seat.

Alongside Bandt, prominent housing spokesperson Max Chandler-Mather was voted out of Griffith, while fellow first-term MP Stephen Bates lost his neighbouring electorate of Brisbane. 

Born in Canada, Waters was first elected to the Senate in 2010.

She became Greens deputy co-leader in 2015, but resigned as one of the more than a dozen MPs and senators who were found ineligible to sit in parliament during the dual citizenship saga in 2017.

She returned to the Senate a year after having renounced her Canadian citizenship, and was re-elected in 2019 and at this month’s federal election.

In 2017, Waters made history when she became the first person to breastfeed on the floor of Australian parliament, having taken her two-month-old daughter Alia into the chamber.