Joe Hildebrand: Teal independents win a seat at the table without any power

The Climate 200 independents were massively influential during the 2022 election campaign, but now they head to parliament – where they will have no power at all, writes Joe Hildebrand.

British wartime Prime Minister Winston Churchill once neatly defined a zealot as someone who can’t change their mind and won’t change the subject.

A person, in other words, who is unable to comprehend the world beyond their narrow obsession.

Here in Australia we now have the most perfect example of that in the form of Simon Holmes a Court’s Climate 200 independents heading to Canberra.

Many have breathlessly called the election of so many teals a watershed moment that will transform Australian politics. It is and it will.

But it has nothing to do with anything the teals actually want to achieve.

Teal independents who have helped upset the government will be less influential in parliament.

Instead their greatest – probably only – contribution to Australian politics will be to hand the Liberal leadership to Peter Dutton and thus make him the nation’s alternative prime minister.

Meanwhile, they will have literally zero power to influence climate policy – or any policy for that matter – because Labor will command a majority in its own right. And the swing required to deliver this was the only scenario in which the teals could also get up.

This makes the so-called seismic impact of the teals less nail-chewing and more knuckle-dragging. If only someone could have predicted this insufferably idiotic own goal.

A Dutton-led Coalition with no touchy-feely-leafy seats to worry about could target working-class outer suburban and regional electorate with renewed vigour, hammering traditional values voters in the same way Trump and the Tea Party did in the US.

This is a threat to the Labor Party, lurking in plain sight, and the teals just turbocharged it.

Fortunately for the ALP it has already started to wrestle with this problem and came down firmly on the side of workers over wokeness.

The teals’ greatest achievement will likely be handing Peter Dutton the Liberal leadership. Picture: Zak Simmonds

This is why it too has haemorrhaged a couple of inner-city seats to the Greens yet looks set to come home with a solid majority.

In other words, the Greens are to Labor what the teals are to Liberal: their most intimate enemy; a deadly sleeper cell lying within.

So, as many Australians asked themselves on Saturday night, what the proverbial is going on?

Firstly, there is clearly a fracturing of the major party vote. Affluent progressive inner-city types are turning from Labor and Liberal to become Greens and teals while outer-suburban and regional working-class types are flirting with One Nation and the United Australia Party.

Some have suggested this could mark the demise of the two-party ­system – always a live fear, but the thing is this fracturing is far from organic.

Both the teal and UAP campaigns have been carefully orchestrated by two billionaires deliberately trying to disrupt electoral outcomes.

The former deployed a slick political template and the latter simply bought acres of ad space. This is not people power, it is plutocrat power.

There is not much that Simon Holmes a Court and Clive Palmer have in common politically but they are at least as bad as each other. Both have come as shamelessly close to buying votes as you would ever see in this country.

And so the notion the teals are a grassroots movement is as farcical as Palmer’s plans to build a second Titanic. Both are the pipe dreams of billionaires and their wishes will likewise go up in smoke.

Climate 200's Simon Holmes a Court. Picture: Josie Hayden

Fellow politically-motivated billionaire Clive Palmer. Picture: Scott Powick

Their greatest tangible impact will be a Liberal Party whose only road map for survival is to harness the populist right. It is worth noting the Nationals did not lose a single seat in this election.

It is also worth noting the once-unbackably Labor seat of Fowler fell to a former Liberal turned independent, and its voters are overwhelmingly socially conservative.

And so as inner-city seats fall to the teals and Greens, government will be entirely won and lost in the suburbs and regions.

Whichever party best reflects the spirit of mainstream, often small-c conservative, Australia will carry the day.

The good news is Labor has already embarked upon this journey.

It has moved firmly to the centre, abandoned its ideological and partisan rhetoric, and embraced the concerns of middle and working Australia.

And it has been rightly rewarded.

Anyone who thinks this election has been a failure for the ALP clearly can’t count past 75. Labor will get a well-deserved majority and the affluent activists will be relegated to the sidelines, impotent and pure.

So much for the revolution.

Indeed, the best part of a majority Labor government is that when the teals or the Greens ask for any kind of deal Anthony Albanese will be able to rummage around in his front pocket and produce an immaculately groomed middle finger.