Six months on: The women who plunged the Liberals into crisis

They were swept in on a fairy tale. Triumphant, cashed-up community campaigns sent six impressive women to Canberra on platforms of action on climate, integrity and gender equity, stripping the Liberals’ ranks of some of their best talent and plunging the party into an identity crisis.

But when the final numbers rolled in from May’s federal election, the teal wave was tinged with uncertainty.

In Kooyong in Melbourne’s south-east, a seat so blue it had been held by Liberal Party founder Robert Menzies, Dr Monique Ryan had just unseated a treasurer with prime ministerial ambitions. But she concedes she was uneasy.

The teal independents, clockwise from top left: North Sydney MP Kylea Tink, Goldstein MP Zoe Daniel, Curtin MP Kate Chaney, Kooyong MP Dr Monique Ryan, Mackellar MP Dr Sophie Scamps, and Wentworth MP Allegra Spender. Credit: Matt Davidson

“When I was elected, I was really concerned that because we didn’t have the balance of power, we wouldn’t be able to get anything done or achieve the things that we’re really keen to achieve,” Ryan says.

She’s also quick to add: “I’ve learned that has not been the case.”

Collectively, the teal independents vanquished the Morrison government by claiming heartland Liberal seats, all but one of them held by men: Ryan in Kooyong, Zoe Daniel in Goldstein, Allegra Spender in Wentworth, Kylea Tink in North Sydney, Dr Sophie Scamps in Mackellar and Kate Chaney in Curtin.

But ultimately Australian voters delivered a majority Labor government, meaning the independents backed by Climate 200, a crowdfunding initiative set up by Simon Holmes a Court, were immediately under sustained pressure to prove to their communities that they hadn’t been dealt out of the action.

The presence of David Pocock in the Senate - the bona fide kingmaker from the ACT - has intensified this challenge.

While the teal MPs and Pocock, who also received funding from Climate 200, are aligned on many policy issues, the dynamics of the Senate – where the government needs just one extra crossbench vote, along with the 12 Greens, to legislate without the Coalition - mean the ACT senator wields much greater influence.

Nonetheless, Ryan and her fellow teals are adamant they have delivered real change by shaping the Albanese government’s big-ticket legislative achievements: the creation of a National Anti-Corruption Commission, an enshrined 43 per cent emissions reduction target, and industrial relations changes.

Spender argues it is the opposition that has dealt itself out of key debates, pointing to the Coalition’s opening gambit of opposing the climate target legislation and the Liberals’ decision to boycott the government’s jobs and skills summit.

“I genuinely feel I’ve had much more impact as an independent than any member of the opposition. On so many major issues, they’re just not in the debate, and they’re not making the legislation better,” she says.

As an example, she points to Labor’s contentious IR reforms which she, like the Coalition, voted to reject. But in her negotiations with the government, she and other crossbenchers advocated for changes to the proposed union right of veto over multi-employer pay deals and a statutory review of the new laws, measures which Pocock ultimately secured in the Senate.

It is true, however, that the government has demonstrated its preparedness to sideline the crossbench in favour of working with the opposition. The new federal anti-corruption watchdog will conduct its investigations largely in secret after the two major parties agreed on this key design feature, ignoring howls of protest from the teals and other crossbenchers.

But Spender says the decision by the Coalition to back the NACC, reversing course from the Morrison government, can be attributed to the influence of the teal MPs and the message their election sent to Liberals about the demand for an integrity watchdog with teeth.

Independent MPs (from left) Kylea Tink, Zoe Daniel, Kate Chaney and Allegra Spender on the crossbenches.Credit: Alex Ellinghausen

“Labor might have said that they would do it [legislate the NACC] anyway, but certainly the Coalition getting on board has very much to do with who’s sitting in the crossbench now and recognising the political reality of what they have just gone through,” she says.

Daniel, a former ABC foreign correspondent, says that when it comes to the policy influence flexed by teal MPs, the government has been “amenable to some things, not to others”.

“When the National Anti-Corruption Commission legislation was debated in the House, we debated that for about 4½ hours. The government largely didn’t accept the amendments, but it forced the attorney-general to really justify the legislation in the form that it was,” she says.

Keeping the teals close

The relationship between the crossbench and the new government got off to a rocky start when Prime Minister Anthony Albanese moved to slash the number of advisers allocated to them from four per MP to one.

The decision angered teals and other crossbenchers, who argued it would hobble their ability to scrutinise legislation. While the government eventually gave ground and allocated an extra adviser to the Senate crossbenchers and independent MPs Helen Haines, Rebekha Sharkie and Bob Katter, who have geographically large electorates, the teals were overlooked.

Since then, however, Labor has played an obvious if unspoken strategic hand, keeping the teals onside by handing them tangible, if mostly small, policy wins they can take to their electorates.

The ALP has a snowflake’s chance of ever winning seats like Wentworth or Goldstein, but its grip on power will be determined in part by how long those once-Liberal electorates continue to embrace their independent MPs.

Employment Minister Tony Burke, who works closely with the crossbench in his capacity as Leader of the House, says the teals are playing “a serious role within the parliament”.

“There’s a real strength to the House of Representatives’ crossbench at the moment. As a government, we’ve been wanting to make sure that even though we’ve got a majority in our own right, that both debate and the consideration of amendments is constructive,” he says.

Burke says the recent passage of the Secure Jobs, Better Pay bill - the government’s contentious IR changes that included an expansion of multi-employer bargaining - put paid to the idea that the teals functioned as a bloc.

“They’re certainly not a party. The first time it was really noticed publicly about them voting not as a bloc was on the Secure Jobs, Better Pay bill, but there had been other times when people had gone in different directions,” he says.

“So while they arrived with similar principles, they’re all applying their own judgement issue by issue.”

The IR bill was furiously opposed by big business and the Coalition, which said the changes would leave the economy exposed to industry-wide strikes, an argument rejected by the government, which instead claimed the changes were fundamental to getting stagnant wages moving.

Spender, Chaney and Scamps voted with the Coalition to reject the bill, while Ryan and Daniel backed the government and Tink abstained. After amendments were secured by Pocock and the Greens in the Senate and the bill returned to the lower house, Scamps and Chaney joined Ryan and Daniels in voting for the amendments, while Tink and Spender voted against them.

Opposition frontbencher Jane Hume, one of two figures leading the Liberal Party’s review into its election loss, says a key message from the teal wave is that the party must work harder to win back women voters. But this won’t come at the expense of letting the independents off lightly.

“As Liberals, we will be holding teal members to account across the board. We have already seen them reveal some of the values they didn’t tell the electorate about at the election,” Hume says.

She singles out Ryan as someone who was “happy to vote to repeal stage three tax cuts, and has already voted for Labor’s radical industrial relations legislation”.

Driving force of teal wave

The great teal steal was a historic phenomenon in Australian politics, and one to which the Macquarie Dictionary and the Australian National Dictionary Centre paid tribute by choosing “teal” as their 2022 word of the year.

Once a mere colour, and also a small wild duck, teal is now also defined by Macquarie as: “A political candidate who holds generally ideologically moderate views, but who supports strong action regarding environmental and climate action policies, and the prioritising of integrity in politics.”

But there is a live debate over whether the teals are a flash in the pan - a response to a deeply unpopular prime minister who failed to connect with moderate Liberals and women in particular - or whether they represent a nascent movement tracing its origins to Cathy McGowan’s 2013 victory over Liberal Sophie Mirabella and posing a long-term threat to the major parties.

A major study, published this week, found that the driving force behind the great teal steal was not disaffected Liberal voters but “tactical” Labor and Greens voters who abandoned their party’s candidates in a bid to unseat the incumbent MP.

The Australian National University’s 2022 Australian Election Study, one of the most comprehensive surveys of voting behaviour, found that 31 per cent of teal voters had backed Labor at the 2019 election while 24 per cent had supported the Greens. They were assisted in their efforts by a smaller cohort of disaffected Liberals, 18 per cent, or fewer than one in five teal voters.

It was a level of tactical voting that far exceeded rates found in most international studies, the report said.

As the study’s co-author Sarah Cameron concluded this week: “The medium-term success of the teals will depend on how much they can create a distinct political identity to carry to the 2025 federal election.”

The original teal, Warringah MP Zali Steggall, chose the colour for her 2019 campaign when she unseated Tony Abbott, to symbolise her political constitution as a mix of traditional “Liberal blue” values and “green” environmental concerns. All of the lower-house independents associated with the 2022 wave used teal in their campaign branding, except Tink, who used pink.

But the teal motif is perhaps better understood as a spectrum; some independents are “bluer” than others.

As Hume’s comments indicate, the opposition is eager to use the debate over stage three tax cuts, which is almost certain to be resurrected in 2023, as a litmus test for the teals and their wealthy, economically conservative electorates, which stand to reap the most benefit from the changes.

Legislated by the Morrison government before the pandemic, the tax cuts will kick in from mid-2024 for workers earning up to $200,000, and deliver major relief to higher-income earners. But the whopping cost of the package - $254 billion over a decade - has fuelled questions about whether they should be scrapped. It’s a decision the Albanese government will have to make before the next election.

Spender, who has a masters in economics from Cambridge University and was managing director of her late mother Carla Zampatti’s fashion empire before entering politics, has been non-committal about whether they should be kept or ditched, instead calling for a wide-ranging review into the tax system.

Tink, a former charities CEO, has declared her support for the tax cuts to “go ahead in 2024 as planned” but says they will only be realised if the government identifies “other revenue streams”.

Chaney, the granddaughter of a Menzies government minister, has labelled the cuts “not very responsible policy” and called for them to be delayed pending a review.

But it is Ryan who has unequivocally called for them to be axed, declaring in August that the tax cuts made “no economic sense” and assistance should instead be prioritised for people on low incomes.

‘Not going anywhere’

There are already signs the Liberals view Ryan as the weakest link in the teal chain, and Kooyong the most likely of the six lost seats to be clawed back.

In an interview with this masthead last week, Liberal leader Peter Dutton said he believed Ryan “will disappoint people” and threw his support behind a comeback bid by former treasurer Josh Frydenberg.

Ryan dismissed Dutton’s remarks as “incessant negativity”, “completely off the mark” and part of a “concerted move” by Liberals to attack independents.

“I was a bit gobsmacked. Not because he’s having a go – that doesn’t surprise me at all – but because that’s just not my experience and not the feedback I’m getting from the electorate,” she says.

The paediatric neurologist, who quit as chief of neurology at Melbourne’s Royal Children’s Hospital to run for office, also had a message for those who suspect that she regrets her political foray and will pull the pin after one term.

“I loved my old job. It was a great job. I was incredibly lucky to have it, but this is the best job I’ve had in my life. And I’m not going anywhere,” she said.

‘The best job I’ve had in my life’: Member for Kooyong Monique Ryan.Credit: Alex Ellinghausen

There is a truism in politics that once an independent secures a seat, they have it for life. But as the teal wave demonstrated, the age of political conventions and safe seats is over.

Daniel acknowledges her election was an ongoing “experiment” for her conservative-voting electorate, but says she’s not expending a lot of energy contemplating how best to fend off a Liberal challenger next time around.

“I’m just trying to be focused on doing a good job. Seriously, I’m not sitting around thinking, ‘oh, I might be threatened in two years’ time’.

“I think if you do a good job, or the best job that you can do, and you put yourself up for re-election, and then the public decides, it’s as simple as that.”