The event’s lineup was formidable and the audience at the 2021 Sydney writers’ festival was expectant: Cathy McGowan, Annabel Crabb, Kate Ellis and Mehreen Faruqi in a discussion on “women in politics” chaired by Clare Wright. It was a lively session, if also depressing, traversing the discrimination Faruqi and Ellis faced from opponents in the parliament, and in Kate’s case, from within her own party.
Faruqi described how difficult she found it to even enter Parliament House since it had been revealed as a house of harassment, bullying and assault. She told the audience that, despite her previous career in the highly masculine profession of engineering, she had “never felt more marginalised and sidelined” than as a politician. For Faruqi, as a migrant brown woman, the parliament was a “very lonely place”.
Ellis described the “unspoken code of not acknowledging the sexist and unfair treatment that has long bubbled away in the background of parliament”. She told the shocking story of a Liberal staffer, now a member of parliament, introducing himself by asking how many men she had fucked to get elected. Steeped in the post-production of her immensely enjoyable series Ms Represented, Crabb provided a historical perspective on women’s quest for electoral representation.
But it was McGowan who stole the show with her rallying cry for more women to get involved in politics as independents, to follow in the footsteps of Zali Steggall, Rebekha Sharkie, Kerryn Phelps, Helen Haines and McGowan herself – to accept their voice, grasp their collective power, and get out there with courage and capacity to “do the work that needs to be done for the country”. She advocated for a strong, independent and female crossbench. “It can be done,” she said, exhorting the overwhelmingly female audience at Carriageworks to share her vision of an Australia whose citizenry, rejecting the status quo, got themselves elected to parliament to change it. She believed it possible. She had done it.
“This could change things overnight,” she said emphatically, gesturing at the despicable anecdotes that hung in the air. “For too long, we have underplayed the power of our vote. We haven’t been strategic.” She challenged the audience to be brave, “to be the change you want to see”. If we do, she assured us, we can have “women of quality and courage and capacity and principle holding the balance of power”. Politics is a numbers game, she said, and we needed to be deliberate and strategic and go out and get those damn numbers.
It was inspiring stuff from McGowan, delivered in a brisk, firm way, accompanied by invitations to get involved, to attend workshops coordinated by Women for Election Australia. Community-based politics runs somewhat in McGowan’s family, with her sister Ruth a principal in the Women for Election organisation, and her brother-in-law Denis Ginnivan, niece Leah Ginnivan and nephew Ben McGowan all instrumental in her first campaign for Indi. Denis subsequently founded Voices for AU, which seeks to inspire grassroots involvement in democracy across the nation, and he travels the country tirelessly, through Covid lockdowns by Zoom and now in person, to share his experience of the success of the Indi campaign, offering it up as a model for people to get involved in their community and consider backing – or being – candidates for election.
The story of McGowan’s success in Indi is well known. After frustration at the neglect of the seat by the unlikeable incumbent Sophie Mirabella, in September 2012 a group of locals formed the community organisation Voices for Indi. Supported by Melbourne-based group Indi Expats, they created a community-focused strategy to shake things up, with the aim of turning Indi into a marginal seat at the September 2013 election. With a commitment to ensuring Indi’s “electoral voice is heard and represented at the national level”, they developed what became known as Kitchen Table Conversations. Interested individuals were trained to facilitate discussion between small groups in their networks, serving both to provide Voices for Indi with insight into the issues important to locals, and to seed the idea of the community supporting a grassroots independent candidate at the next election.
Initially reluctant to stand herself, after urging from others, McGowan accepted she would be a competitive contender and “began the process of reconciling [her]self to six months of campaigning”. Although the initial objective had merely been to shock the Liberal party out of complacency by dramatically reducing its margin, McGowan invested all that she could on the campaign trail and was rewarded by the narrowest of victories 11 days after election night, when final prepoll and postal votes were counted. Against the odds, McGowan had defeated Mirabella by 439 votes and was going to Canberra.
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At Al Gore’s Asia-Pacific training for climate change advocacy, organisers promoted the idea of “lighthouse projects”. Said one attendee, Jane, who went on to work on Zali Steggall’s 2019 campaign, “It is something new that then acts as a lighthouse for everyone else. There is something that is now possible that wasn’t possible before.” McGowan’s victories in 2013 and 2016 became lighthouse projects for other electorates and community-based independents disgusted by the state of federal politics, particularly those frightened or ashamed of our inaction on the existential question of climate change.
They inspired Kerryn Phelps to run as an independent in the Wentworth byelection in October 2018 triggered by the resignation of Malcolm Turnbull after his ousting from the prime ministership. Phelps’s strong victory saw a swing of 20% against the government, giving her 57% of the two-party-preferred vote, and it marked the first time in the seat’s 117-year history that it had been surrendered by the Liberal party. It forced Morrison into minority government, with six crossbenchers holding the balance of power.
With the exception of long-term maverick conservative Bob Katter, the parliament’s crossbenchers rallied to support Phelps’s first foray into the legislative arena, the migration amendment (urgent medical treatment) bill 2018, the so-called medevac bill that provided critically sick refugees and people seeking asylum who were held in offshore detention with a pathway to be transferred to Australia for urgent medical treatment. Phelps worked on the bill with McGowan and Rebekha Sharkie of the Centre Alliance, the remnant of the Nick Xenophon Team that had also delivered Stirling Griff and now independents Rex Patrick and Tim Storer to the Senate – albeit in a convoluted way after Xenophon’s resignation from running for the South Australian parliament in October 2017, and Skye Kakoschke-Moore’s forced resignation in November 2017 after falling foul of the dual citizen crisis that engulfed federal parliament. Liberal defector and now independent Julia Banks was also an important supporter of the bill following her resignation from the Liberal party in November 2018 in the aftermath of the coup against Turnbull.
With Andrew Wilkie, the Greens’ Adam Bandt and the Labor party also on board, Phelps succeeded in passing amendments to a government migration bill, the first time a government had lost a vote on its own legislation in almost 80 years. It was also the first positive measure taken in the field of refugee law since the early days of Rudd’s administration.
Morrison was apoplectic and the government immediately sought to gain political mileage from the bill’s passage. “Australia is back on the map for people smugglers,” said Peter Dutton on 7.30. As a result of the bill, he said, there are people in detention “that can come to our country from Manus or Nauru. People that have been charged with child sex offences or have allegations around serious offences including murder.” When pressed by host Leigh Sales as to how many people in offshore detention were accused or suspected of such crimes, Dutton refused to answer.
The passage of the amendments was a clear demonstration of the impact a committed and cohesive crossbench could have. While they could not form government, they showed that they could influence the national and legislative agenda. They could get things done.
The euphoria was short-lived. At the 2019 election, Kerryn Phelps narrowly lost her seat to Dave Sharma, a former ambassador to Israel who had run again after losing to Phelps at the byelection. It was a blow to the independents’ movement. Standing as an independent in Flinders against Greg Hunt, Julia Banks also failed in her bid to return to parliament. On the plus side, McGowan, after serving the two terms to which she’d earlier committed, had retired and been replaced by Helen Haines, marking the first time that a seat had passed from one independent to another. Haines was joined on the crossbench by impressive newcomer Zali Steggall, the Abbott slayer, but the independents no longer held the balance of power. The government repealed the medevac bill on 4 December 2019 after securing the support of independent senator Jacqui Lambie in a secret deal, the terms of which remain unknown to this day beyond the fact that the government has failed to deliver on them.
Initially, each of the successful independent candidates elected in this new modern era also had a rallying local issue on which to campaign. Cathy McGowan ran strongly on the idea that Indi had been neglected by a complacent Liberal party. She campaigned on the need for greater investment in infrastructure in the rural Victorian seat, particularly around the lack of rail services and track maintenance, and poor internet connections and mobile phone coverage. The personal unpopularity of Mirabella, who was nominated by Tony Windsor for the “nasty prize” as the person he’d miss least in politics, was also considered a factor in her defeat.
Kerryn Phelps’s byelection victory was a protest vote against the deposing of Turnbull, while her loss at the general election reflected the abatement of the electorate’s fury. An articulate barrister and former Olympian, Zali Steggall may have been a candidate from Central Casting, but people in Warringah also voted for her because of who she was not – namely Tony Abbott, considered by many of his constituents to hold embarrassing and unrepresentative antediluvian views, and, as a failed prime minister, to have outstayed his welcome in the seat.
Now, as disillusionment with the Morrison government grows in Coalition-held seats across the country, a new generation of independents is emerging. These candidates are typically newcomers to political activism and never anticipated they would be involved in electoral politics. “I had no intention of entering politics until I was approached by Voices,” said Zoe Daniel, former ABC foreign correspondent and independent candidate for the seat of Goldstein, whose declaration and launch event on the weekend of 27 November 2021 was greeted with a wild enthusiasm that sent sitting member Tim Wilson into a blind panic. “It’s time to step up to the table,” said Daniel.
Allegra Spender, a businesswoman and daughter of Liberal party scion John Spender and the late fashion icon Carla Zampatti, announced her candidacy in Wentworth on the same weekend. Other candidates who had already declared included businesswoman Kylea Tink in North Sydney, architectural consultant Linda Seymour in Hughes and former teacher Penny Ackery in Hume. I have announced my own candidacy for the South Australian seat of Boothby.
Rather than running specifically on local issues, this new set of candidates is running against the system itself, a system that delivered all the dispiriting, defining moments of the pandemic explored earlier. Our failure to grapple with climate change. The lack of integrity in politics. The loss of our moral compass on refugees. Our criminal complacency around gendered violence and inequity.
Ackery’s opponent in Hume is the perennially unpopular scandal magnet and fossil fuel enthusiast Angus Taylor, who holds his seat by a margin of 13%. “Can we win?” says Ackery, contemplating the challenge. “We can win because there’s a wonderful growing independents movement that has paved the way, so that we know how to act, and what things need to be done.”
So far, the tactics of the so-called moderate Liberals have been to paint these fiercely independent and mostly formerly apolitical women as Labor or Green stooges. Tim Wilson described Daniel as a “puppet whose strings they’re yanking to dance to their Labor and Greens tune”, someone who was “backed by Big Tech climate activists who want to rig laws so they can increase their profits from higher energy costs to businesses and households”.
While stating he respected everyone’s right to run, Angus Taylor said the independents’ movement was “just another front for green activists to play dress up as independents”.
Dismissing these centrist candidates, many of whom would have sat comfortably in the previously broad church of the Liberal party, as radical activists or stooges seems a risky tactic. Speaking at her campaign launch in Wentworth, where she was introduced by chair of the Clean Energy Finance Corporation and former Reserve Bank director Jillian Broadbent, Allegra Spender noted: “Today’s Liberal party is not the same party as that of my father and grandfather.” She called out the attempts to undermine her independent credentials: “Wentworth is not radical and I am not a radical at all. But there are those who are trying to paint me and this wave of independents as such.”
They do so at their peril.
This is an edited extract from Jo Dyer’s Burning Down the House: Reconstructing Modern Politics to be released on Tuesday as part of Monash University Publishing’s In the National Interest series
This article was amended on 15 February to correct the name and profession of architectural consultant Linda Seymour
