How 20,000 people changed politics: Behind the scenes of the teal wave

This story is part of the November 12 edition of Good Weekend.See all 14 stories.

Newly elected federal MPs on their first day, from left: Monique Ryan, Zoe Daniel, Kate Chaney, Kylea Tink, Dai Le, Elizabeth Watson-Brown, Sophie Scamps and Allegra Spender. Credit: James Brickwood

It’s March 8, 2022 and Lyndell Droga is perched on a sofa in the living room of her house in the Sydney suburb of Woollahra. It’s after 8pm but the makings of dinner for Droga and her fund-manager husband, Daniel, still languish in butcher’s paper by the sink. After 11 hours at the office, the new chair of the Allegra Spender campaign for the federal Sydney seat of Wentworth is tucking in one last interview before calling it quits for the day.

A glass of wine – a pleasure she and the candidate are yet to share – sits untouched on the table in front of her. Serious art covers the walls: Michael Cook’s glowering post-colonial pastiche Civilized #13 is by the door; a vast Imants Tillers, a disintegrating surface of symbols and auguries, blankets the main wall. The art is of a piece with the house. A classical Mediterranean villa from inter-war Sydney, it’s of a similar vintage to the 1920s mansion where Spender’s mother, the late fashion designer Carla Zampatti, lived – just a stone’s throw up the hill on Edgecliff Road.

Throw that stone a little further and you’d hit where Edgecliff Road meets the suburb’s main drag, New South Head Road. The red-brick, 1940s façade that occupies that corner has housed the electoral office of Wentworth’s two most recent Liberal representatives, Malcolm Turnbull and Dave Sharma. Diagonally opposite, Spender’s new campaign headquarters occupy an art deco bank that once housed the local Video Ezy.

A golden mile of entrenched Liberal privilege, you’d think. Except that Droga – like Spender, whose late father was a shadow minister under opposition leaders Andrew Peacock and John Howard, and whose grandfather was a minister under prime minister Robert Menzies – is hell-bent on revolution.

Lyndell Droga, former philanthropist and chair of Allegra Spender’s election campaign, says there is a “massive appetite” for change, especially among young women.

It’s a year since Droga, a former philanthropy manager, devoted herself to trying to find a candidate to unseat Sharma, after spotting her local member handing out flowers at Edgecliff railway station on International Women’s Day. Chanel Contos’ online sexual consent education petition had been making headlines. The 2021 Women’s March 4 Justice was a week away.

“We were like, ‘What’s happening?’ ” Droga recalls of her reaction to a scene reminiscent of a 1980s Impulse commercial. “I’m the mother of two daughters. Chanel Contos is actually from this electorate. There are women and men marching on Canberra, the government won’t even leave the building to come and meet them, and Dave Sharma’s in Sydney handing out flowers.”

“There are women and men marching on Canberra, the government won’t even leave the building to come and meet them.”

Woollahra’s built infrastructure is testament to how furiously times change in one of Australia’s wealthiest electorates. What Droga and others are looking to do is usher in a new era: the age of the non-aligned, socially progressive, economically responsible, centrist independent.

We’ve just spent an hour discussing the twists and turns along that road since that moment when we arrive at the million-dollar question: what chance a campaign, into which Droga and her husband have already sunk $50,000, with a promise to double that if needed, actually stands come election day? “Oh, who knows? I don’t know!” she exclaims with mock exasperation, sitting back in her chair, eyes to the ceiling.

By her own admission someone who tends to see the glass as not so much half-empty as smashed, Droga is encouraged by the insurrectionary energy within the campaign. Buoyed, too, by the shock 19 per cent swing secured by independent Larissa Penn in the byelection the previous month in the Sydney state seat of Willoughby vacated by former NSW premier Gladys Berejiklian.

But she’s also acutely aware of the received wisdom that independents stand a snowflake’s chance on their march to Canberra. “I do know there’s a massive appetite for change, particularly among women,” she says. “Standing at Edgecliff station at 7am last Thursday, handing out flyers, these young professional women heading for town, they’re saying, ‘Don’t worry, she’s already got my vote.’ ”

As for the broader movement: “Campaigns are springing up like weeds all around the country, but the movement’s in its infancy,” she says. “It’ll be very hard to go to Canberra, given the margins. Yes, the response is phenomenal, and yes, we all get on board. But we are living in our little echo chambers. We don’t know what’s going to hit us when the election is called; we don’t know what they’ve got in store for us.”

The scale of political disruption that took place on May 21 this year tends to lend an inevitability to the independent campaigns that triumphed that night. To former Grattan Institute chief executive John Daley, now a professorial fellow at Melbourne University, the election marked quite simply “the biggest shift in our political party alignment since the 1950s”, after which the lower house came to be dominated by the Coalition and the ALP. “We’ve had significant new groupings in the Senate but this is the first time since the ’50s that we’ve had a significant new group of largely aligned members in the lower house,” says Daley.

To former Kevin Rudd staffer Lachlan Harris, the 2022 election was the moment the “big flashing light on the dashboard of democracy” – the growing vote for independents and minor parties at successive elections – finally hit home, not just changing the government but ushering in the biggest crossbench and most diverse parliament in Australia’s history.

In the weeks leading up to the election, however, a time at which two parallel universes seemed to co-exist in Australia, that result seemed anything but assured. On one side was politics as usual, exemplified by the Coalition government, which characterised the community-backed candidates as “so-called independents”; a Palmeresque quasi party that was not only partially funded but effectively co-ordinated by Climate 200 founder Simon Holmes à Court.

According to that logic, the almost exclusively female candidates fronting independent campaigns became a chorus of Trilbys to Holmes à Court’s Svengali. Or as former prime minister John Howard put it in April: “a bunch of anti-Liberal groupies” looking to “hurt the Liberal Party” rather than “represent the middle ground”.

On the other was the roiling energy within the community-backed movement itself, a multi-fronted maelstrom of volunteers, candidates and campaign people. By early February 2022, they were working around the clock, seven days a week, improvising as they went.

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Their inspiration was a clutch of independent victories over the previous decade: Cathy McGowan and Helen Haines in the rural Victorian seat of Indi from 2013 to 2019; Kerryn Phelps in Wentworth in a 2018 by-election; and Zali Steggall’s celebrated 2019 victory over Tony Abbott in Warringah.

Trailblazing independent MPs, from left: Helen Haines, Cathy McGowan, Kerryn Phelps and Zali Steggall.Credit: Alex Ellinghausen; James Alcock; Renee Nowytarger

Key strategists, organisers and logisticians were veterans of these earlier campaigns. Sitting at the centre of the Venn diagram that made up the independents movement, they had been there before, had a clearer view of the path ahead. For the most part, however, the participants were political novices, working on instinct, word-of-mouth, hardly daring to believe that what they were doing might work.

And what they lacked in experience, they made up for in number. Climate 200 calculates 20,000 Australians participated in the 23 community-backed independent campaigns to which it contributed, not counting the largely non-urban campaigns to which it did not.

Linked by networks of trust – social, familial, digital – they constituted the nine-tenths of the iceberg lurking beneath the surface of the community-backed independents movement. And they would prove every bit as fatal for the Coalition ship of state.

Because while the $13 million raised by Climate 200 played a central and critical role in the success of such campaigns, their real secret weapon was social capital, without which actual capital could only achieve so much. As proved by Clive Palmer’s United Australia Party, which managed just one senate seat and less than 4.2 per cent of the vote on a reported $100 million spend.

Crossing party lines, those networks were as deep as they were extensive. And almost impossible to trace from the outside. Renata Kaldor, for instance, originally spoke to Trine Barter, a friend of her daughter who would go on to co-manage Kylea Tink’s North Sydney campaign, to dissuade her from taking on the sitting Liberal MP Trent Zimmerman, whom Kaldor knew and liked.

Kaldor describes she and her husband, who together founded the Andrew & Renata Kaldor Centre for International Refugee Law at the University of NSW in 2013, as old-style Liberals. “Not only were we Liberal voters, we’d both belonged to the party,” she says. “One of Andrew’s best friends is Nick Greiner. We had been on a campaign when he was trying to become premier [of NSW in the 1980s]. That’s how we learnt some of our skills.”

They were, though, “members of a different party”, she says, both leaving the party when “John Howard’s attitude towards Asian immigration became clear in the early 1990s”. Instead of persuading Barter, Kaldor was herself persuaded by the younger woman of the links between climate change and refugees. The Kaldors became founding members of Kristen Lock’s North Sydney’s Independent group, which selected Tink, even funding a crucial and expensive early survey that convinced the group it was on the right track.

Philanthropists Andrew and Renata Kaldor were former Liberal voters who left the party when “John Howard’s attitude towards Asian immigration became clear in the early 1990s”.Credit: Jacky Ghossein

Barter had in turn come to the cause via two women, Kirsty Gold and Tina Jackson, who, while largely unknown outside the movement, have a fair claim to being, alongside Cathy McGowan, its great connectors. The pair, whose joint day job was managing Zali Steggall’s 2022 campaign, come up constantly when people talk about who they turned to for advice on setting up campaigns and finding candidates.

Gold, an environmental philanthropist, and Jackson, a former National Trust CEO, had been central in Steggall’s 2019 campaign to unseat former prime minister Tony Abbott. In the years since, they had done as much as any to foster independent campaigns in other electorates, in addition to sharing the job of managing Steggall’s 2022 re-election bid.

“What Tina and Kirsty did in Sydney, bringing that group together and supporting each other, is as important [as Climate 200],” says Cathy McGowan, who co-founded the Community Independents Project in 2021 with Jackson and others to connect, advise and foster independent campaigns across various levels of government.

“The sum of the parts was a grassroots movement, but done very professionally, because politics is an A-grade sport. A blood sport.”

Along the way, a community politics model minted in McGowan’s campaign for the rural Victorian seat of Indi almost a decade ago morphed into the sophisticated, urban, grassroots campaigns that took heartland Liberal seats in 2022. “We always joked we were grassroots Warringah-style, because we’re professional, we’re educated, we have funds and connections,” Gold says of the local variant of the model created for Steggall’s 2019 campaign. “The sum of the parts was a grassroots movement, but done very professionally, because politics is an A-grade sport. A blood sport.”

That model had drawn heavily on skills and experience developed by Kerryn Phelps’ successful 2018 campaign for the Sydney seat of Wentworth. Phelps’ win, which followed Malcolm Turnbull’s retirement, was reversed when Dave Sharma took back the seat for the Liberal Party in 2019. Before that happened, however, it had fostered a whole cadre of independent campaign expertise, including liquidator Damien Hodgkinson and former Labor adviser and Populares founder Anthony Reed, who went on to work not just in Warringah but on a number of 2022 campaigns.

While sections of the media would cite those paid advisers as evidence of a coordinated, quasi-party approach across campaigns, the really bad news for the Coalition was that the broader networks that underpinned the movement were rotten with skills accumulated over other campaigns and careers.

Zoe Daniel’s campaign to unseat Tim Wilson in the safe Liberal seat of Goldstein in bayside Melbourne, for instance, drew on none of the personnel shared by Warringah, Wentworth and others. They did just as well, however, with an entirely sui generis team that included communications consultant Sue Barrett, ABC political veteran Jim Middleton and marketing guru Peter Court.

Court had been approached to help in the Goldstein campaign by its chairman Keith Badger, a former regional senior executive with car-repair company Midas, whom he knew from another of the loose community networks that figured in 2022, swim clubs – in this case Melbourne’s Icebergers. A former advertising agency boss, Court was busy building a house and working on a cattle embryo project at his farm in Mansfield in north-east Victoria at the time.

“I said to them, ‘Look, I can give you until Christmas,’ because I just had so much on my plate,” Court says. “But when Christmas arrived, I was ... obsessed with the prospect of success. Intellectually, this project was becoming one of the most stimulating and fulfilling things I’d ever done.”

What particularly fascinated the veteran marketer was the consistency of sentiment the campaign quickly identified among voters. “In political campaigns simplicity is everything, being able to drive a campaign off a single, usually unifying sentiment,” Court says. The way that sentiment was identified, too, said everything about just how directly the campaign drew on the community. “As someone who founded and ran a research company, you would expect me to say, ‘Well, we did thousands of focus groups; we did large, quantitative studies’ [but] we didn’t … our constant feedback from over 1000 field volunteers was unequivocally pointing to a … universal trigger that crossed all demographic, cultural, religious and socioeconomic boundaries.”

Peter Court tapped into the “shared frustration, irritation, embarrassment and powerlessness” in Goldstein to shape the messaging strategy for Zoe Daniel’s campaign.Credit: Paul Jeffers

That trigger would prove another of the independents’ secret weapons. “At the end of the day, everyone – and this didn’t just apply to Goldstein, this was across the country – was just pissed off,” Court says. “You didn’t have to have a hundred different arguments, or follow every focus-group opinion down every rabbit hole, if you tapped that one.”

In Goldstein, that turned into a two-beat messaging strategy to tap what Court describes as a “shared frustration, irritation, embarrassment and powerlessness” and motivate “the 29 per cent of disengaged voters who would not respond unless they could see a clear and immediate material loss or gain”. The first beat was that sticking to your previous voting pattern would get you more of the same. The second, that same was not safe.

Not that Court or other independent campaigners take all the credit for the result. “I don’t think you can say, ‘Look how clever we were,’ ” he says. “Scotty Morrison and those guys, they just did it to themselves. All we were doing, really, was tapping into the damage that they were doing to themselves.”

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To many, the strength of the wave that swept the ballot box on May 21 came as a surprise. In fact, that swell had been building for years, even if it managed to hide in plain sight all the way to election day. The milestones along the way are clear, if only in retrospect. From the 2017 marriage equality debate to the 2021 Women’s March 4 Justice, from Kerryn Phelps’ 2018 campaign and Medevac legislation to Zali Steggall and Helen Haines’ climate and integrity bills, each added fresh momentum, networks and skills.

As Lyndell Droga’s story indicates, the Women’s March was particularly galvanising. In the clean air between lockdowns on March 15, 2021, after a powerful day of action on which 110,000 people converged on cities around Australia, people who had previously only connected via Twitter and Zoom were able to get together in the flesh, compare notes and discuss next steps.

Denise Shrivell, one of the founders of North Sydney’s Independent who would end up running social commentator Jane Caro’s Senate bid as a candidate for the Reason Party, remembers an impromptu get-together at Canberra’s QT hotel on the evening of the march as particularly important. “Everyone was there,” says Shrivell. “Tina Jackson, Sue Barrett [Voices of Goldstein co-founder, who ran Zoe Daniel’s campaign], Jane Caro, Margo Kingston [founder of the NoFibs citizen journalism website], Licia Heath of Women for Election, and Kate Hook and Linda Seymour [who would run as community-backed independents in the federal NSW seats of Calare and Hughes, respectively].”

“I absolutely draw a direct line from the March 4 Justice to the success of the teals. The whole march [had this] sense of camaraderie, that something was brewing.”

Jane Caro agrees. “I absolutely draw a direct line from the March 4 Justice to the success of the Teals,” she says. “The whole march [had this] sense of camaraderie, that something was brewing. People said afterwards, ‘Well, what’s happening? Where’s that gone? Oh, it was just one [event].’ No, a whole lot of women decided to stand for election, to stand up and say, ‘No, your parliament is not taking us seriously, so we’re going to invade your parliament. We’re going to make you take us seriously. We’re going to make you listen to what we have to say.’”

Carolyn (Caz) Heise was one of those who decided to run, in the northern NSW Nationals stronghold of Cowper, after attending the march. “I went to the rally on the lawns of Parliament House with a friend and some very hand-painted banners,” recalls Heise, a 51-year-old mother of two who had been recovering from a cancer diagnosis when the pandemic hit, and who would go on to turn the previously safe seat into the most marginal National Party electorate in the country.

“We did a tour of Parliament House and I kept thinking, ‘Okay, I’ve beaten cancer against the odds. I’m well, I’m healthy, I’m qualified and I’m very passionate about the Earth and the misogynistic, unequal [power imbalance] that still prevails.’ I thought, ‘If I can beat cancer, I’m going to stand up and shout from the rooftops about what really matters, and I may as well do it in a way that could create real change.’ ”

“They came to us because we weren’t a political party and the way we campaigned didn’t feel like politics,” says Ann Capling, Monique Ryan’s campaign manager.

In the end, that was what made community-backed independents different, says Ann Capling, a former political scientist who also managed Monique Ryan’s campaign to unseat then treasurer Josh Frydenberg in Kooyong. “It was a social movement, not a political movement,” she says simply. “People were sick to death of politics the way they were done in Australia … They came to us because we weren’t a political party and the way we campaigned didn’t feel like politics. It genuinely felt like community.”

It’s also why the genie unleashed at the 2022 ballot box is unlikely to go back into the bottle any time soon, as the proliferation of independent campaigns ahead of the upcoming Victorian state election and those limbering up in NSW ahead of the March election attest. Even those are just the tip of another iceberg. As ever, most of the activity is beneath the surface. Kirsty Gold points to how Anyo Geddes, a key figure behind Sophie Scamps’ unseating of Jason Falinski in Sydney’s Mackellar, is now working with the Community Independents Project.

“It is a great story of women in Indi, Warringah and now Mackellar working together to grow the grassroots movement,” she says. “Many of us see 2022 as the launch-pad for the movement: a key outcome of seven new Teals getting elected is that everyone around the country now realises it is possible, many communities have done it and they can do it, too. We are all making a 10-year commitment to the movement.”

In August 2022, the Community Independents Project held its first convention since McGowan’s inaugural February 2021 session. Back then McGowan had expected about 50 people to attend, and was shocked when 300 people turned up from 81 electorates. This time around, 460-plus people attended from 100 electorates. As veteran federal independent MP Andrew Wilkie, who participated in a panel, observed at the time: “If that doesn’t send a shiver down the spine of the old parties, then they’re not paying attention.”

This is an edited extract from Independents’ Day (Allen & Unwin, $35), by Brook Turner, out Tuesday.

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