The following is an edited extract from The Teal Revolution: Inside the Movement Changing Australian Politics by Margot Saville, our latest Crikey Read.
Saturday, May 21 2022 in Melbourne and Sydney was horrendous. Torrential rain and freezing winds swept both cities; jumpers, rain jackets and umbrellas were essential as people lined up to vote.
Two women in these cities had not met, but they had much in common. They were running as community independents in largely similar electorates — Dr Monique Ryan in the inner-eastern Melbourne electorate of Kooyong and Allegra Spender in Wentworth in Sydney’s eastern suburbs. The voters of both electorates were well educated and wealthy; they cared about climate change, political integrity and equality for women.
As the winds dropped and the day darkened, both women, who had been standing and talking to voters for almost 10 hours in their respective seats, started to pack up. There was nothing more they could do.
At about 5.30pm, Monique Ryan drove home from the polling booth with campaign chair Ann Capling, crying. Both women were devastated; they thought they’d lost. But Ryan knew she’d run the best possible campaign. “And I thought it was just a bit unfair that I had the tough one,” she told me later. “I thought if I had Tim Wilson or Jason Falinski [instead of treasurer Josh Frydenberg as sitting member], I could have taken them down, but Josh was just a bridge too far.”
Ryan went home and tried to focus on her speech. “But I couldn’t write it because I was too upset. I just couldn’t … and so I had a good old howl.”
At this point her husband Peter Jordan came home and gave her the sort of “pull yourself together” pep talk that spouses excel at. He told her there were 1200 people at the Auburn Hotel in Hawthorn waiting for her to arrive and she had to turn up and thank them. The paediatric neurologist took a deep breath, had a shower and got ready to go out.
As they arrived at the pub around 7pm, the scrutineers were phoning in the first results and told her it was 50/50 on first preferences. Ryan dismissed this news as some sort of statistical anomaly.
Later in the evening she did a live cross to the Nine Network’s election coverage, where former deputy Liberal leader Julie Bishop told her she would probably win the seat. Ryan refused to believe it, telling supporters she would wait until more votes had been counted.
Finally, at about 9.30pm, the ABC’s election expert Antony Green said Frydenberg was not going to get above 43% of the vote. At this point, everyone in the Auburn Hotel started screaming their lungs out. It was pandemonium.
The long-time Kooyong resident said she was so stressed during the night that she had chest pains, plus a sore head from the deafening noise levels. “No one anticipated it was going to turn out as well as it did; we thought that might be a hung Parliament, and hopefully there’d be three independents with the balance of power. You know, we didn’t think it was going to be a change of government and almost all the indies would get in … I couldn’t quite believe it.”
It’s an Australian tradition that an incoming politician can’t claim victory until the loser has conceded. So Ryan waited for days for Frydenberg to concede. Finally, he rang. As Ryan tells it, the now-former treasurer was struggling with what to say.
“He basically said, ‘My team thinks I should call you and obviously the numbers aren’t good.’ And then he just stopped, and I said, ‘Well, obviously it’s a tough call for you to make Josh and thank you. Thank you for your 12 years of service and many people feel that you’ve done a great job as a local member’ … And then he said, ‘Well, I’m glad you said that because I felt that your campaign was not really run in the right spirit.'”
The defeated member for Kooyong never uttered the words “you won” or “congratulations”. Frydenberg, a former tennis champ, was offering no polite handshake over the net.
In Wentworth, an exhausted Allegra Spender visited around 10 election booths on election day. She was wearing her favourite jacket, a pale blue blazer that had been designed and owned by her late mother, Carla Zampatti. Every time Spender put it on, she looked at the tiny pinhole in the lapel where Carla had placed her Order of Australia; wearing it gave her confidence.
At around 8.30pm, she made her way to the Bondi Bowling Club, where her team’s party was underway. The former chief executive knew she would have to have three forms of words ready: for victory, defeat or uncertainty.
“The speeches were very similar. Because the whole point of this was about the community, and regardless of what the actual outcome was, we knew we’ve made enough noise in the community, we had already made a difference.”
Spender told the 600 volunteers at the party that it had been “a victory for the community movement around the country. We stand for the future, not for the past. You’ve given up shouting at the television, the negativity and the spin. You’ve all invested in the democracy of the country.”
She and husband Mark Capps left the party at midnight and made their way home, just in time to hear Antony Green call the seat in her favour.
With three young children, there was no sleep-in the next morning; instead she let them colour in the picture of “Mummy” on a corflute, before heading out to a media conference on Bondi Beach. Later that afternoon, Dave Sharma called to graciously concede defeat and congratulate her on her victory.
On election night, Monique Ryan made her way home via campaign HQ, where there was a deafening dance party in progress. The next morning, she was back outside the office at 6.30am doing a TV interview. When the journalist suggested they go inside, she politely refused: “God knows what’s behind those doors.”
