The following is an edited extract from The Teal Revolution: Inside the Movement Changing Australian Politics by Margot Saville, our latest Crikey Read.
In an existential sense, what does the rise of the teals mean for the future of mainstream political parties? What could the federal Parliament look like in three or four elections’ time?
At this election, the Coalition suffered its worst result in 70 years, losing an unprecedented 18 seats. According to journalist George Megalogenis, the Liberals (plus the Queensland LNP), which had previously held 34 of the country’s 84 urban electorates, lost half of them. There is only one Liberal MP in Adelaide and Perth, and none in Hobart, Canberra and Darwin.
But the Labor Party can’t afford to look smug; it only picked up nine of them — two went to the Greens, and the historically Labor-held seat of Fowler went to independent Dai Le.
In fact, the two major parties recorded their lowest-ever share of the vote in 2022: just under 70%. If this trend continues, it may only be a few elections before minority or hung parliaments become the norm and our parliament starts to look more like Germany’s — a patchwork of small parties and alliances.
The Coalition, in particular the Liberal Party, has been fundamentally reshaped by the latest ballot. At the time of the 2011 census, the Liberals held 16 out of the top 20 seats by average household income, according to political scientist William Bowe. But since the last election, the urban conservative has gone on the endangered list. The Coalition has ended up with just four inner-metropolitan seats (as defined by the AEC): the south-western Sydney seat of Banks, Bradfield in Sydney’s upper North Shore, Scott Morrison’s seat of Cook in the southern suburbs of Sydney and the Adelaide seat of Sturt formerly held by Christopher Pyne.
There’s a strong correlation between education, income and living in the inner city; electorates like Wentworth and Kooyong are prime examples of this. Election analyst Ben Raue has been charting this group’s voting patterns for a long time. Before the last election, the Coalition held 15 of the most highly educated seats (more than 25% of the voting population with a bachelor’s degree or higher), a figure which fell to four after the ballot, he said. It also went from 24 of the richest electorates (median weekly income of $800 to $1249) to nine, and as above, lost 12 of their previous total of 16 inner-metropolitan seats (well-established, built-up suburbs in capital cities).
In contrast, the Coalition now holds all 10 of the bottom-ranked seats by household income, which was not the case 10 years ago.
Bowe said that there was a fundamental realignment going on in the politics of the two-party, centre-right and centre-left political systems of the English-speaking world. What was once a socio-economic class-based division is now harder to categorise.
Some observers call it the “Nowheres v the Somewheres”, he told me. “Namely the cosmopolitan globalised knowledge class versus the people who have a lower level of education, a stronger sense of patriotism and of place, of a kind of communal identity with their country and to a certain extent their race.”
At the moment, there’s a war going on within the Liberal Party about whether or not they embrace this new division, the analyst said. Election post-mortems have focused on the deliberate attempt by Morrison to sacrifice the teal electorates in order to try to win Labor’s outer-suburban seats.
“They were really making a pitch for the high-vis-vest-wearing vote, the mining industry vote, which had once upon a time been a Labor vote, and they imagined that they weren’t in trouble in the seats that they ended up losing,” he said.
The Liberal losses at the last election have also led to a shift inside the Coalition. Because the National Party and the Queensland LNP now hold 31 of the 58 seats, Queensland is the new centre of power, reflected in the election of party leaders Peter Dutton and David Littleproud. It’s hard to see how these two men, based in outer-suburban Brisbane and rural Queensland respectively, will inspire voters in Kooyong and Wentworth to return their votes to the fold.
It’s not just in the federal sphere that the Coalition vote has declined. Canberra-based psephologist Ian McAuley has been maintaining a table of the Coalition’s fortunes in state and federal elections, from the Victorian state election in November 2014 to the present. He says that the 2022 federal election was the “19th of those elections in which the Coalition’s primary vote has gone backwards”.
Around the country, there are only two conservative state governments, in NSW and Tasmania. The NSW Coalition government of Dominic Perrottet, currently in minority, is pursuing a progressive economic and social agenda in advance of an election in March 2023, while the Tasmanian Liberal government of Jeremy Rockliff governs with a one-seat majority.
These poor electoral showings have led to speculation about the future of the Liberal Party — has it reached an electoral tipping point? There’s an intense debate inside the party about its future direction.
Someone with a more than passing interest in the future of political parties is Malcolm Turnbull. The former PM said that “it was a long road back for the Liberal Party because politics is very unpredictable. If Scott Morrison was a turn-off, which he clearly was, Dutton is worse. Matt Kean is the only thing that they’ve got going for them at the moment”.
ANU professor Frank Bongiorno has speculated that Australia’s major political parties are “broken, possibly beyond repair”. He highlighted the irony of the major parties accusing community independent candidates of being, in essence, a political party.
A more justified accusation might be that in important ways the major parties themselves have ceased to be mass democratic parties, he said. “Today, the parties conform to what political scientists call the ‘electoral-professional’ model. This is a worldwide phenomenon, whereby mass parties of the traditional kind give way to organisations that consist largely of their parliamentary representatives and paid functionaries — a melting iceberg with a small tip and not much below the waterline.”
In addition, the major parties have failed “to conform to even the basic standards that most Australians would associate with democratic governance”, he wrote. “Factional warlords and party officers exercise overwhelming power.
“Still, the independents, and especially those generated by the ‘Voices Of’ movement that began with Cathy McGowan in the Victorian regional seat of Indi … are offering a form of public leadership that, with some exceptions, has not flourished recently in the major parties.
“It is notable that their favourite causes — climate change, political integrity, gender equity — are among those that the major parties have managed most poorly. These are issues where there has often been a radical mismatch between public opinion and party action.”
What lessons should the major parties take from the rise of the teals? Let us know your thoughts by writing to letters@crikey.com.au. Please include your full name to be considered for publication. We reserve the right to edit for length and clarity.
