Teals must come clean before the election. Voters have a right to know

In coming days – perhaps as soon as next weekend – Anthony Albanese will take the short drive from Parliament House to Yarralumla to advise the governor-general to dissolve the 47th Parliament and issue the writs for an election.

It will be an election like no other because there are many more crossbench MPs standing for re-election than ever before.

Teal appeal: Independent MPs Allegra Spender, Zali Steggall, Sophie Scamps, Zoe Daniel and Monique Ryan.Credit: Alex Ellinghausen

Despite a slight drift back to the government recently, opinion polls still predict that neither of the two main parties will secure a majority. Several factors make that look like the most plausible post-election scenario.

Labor’s slender majority (three seats) is smaller than the number of seats that first-term governments typically lose at their second election. Because the crossbench overwhelmingly comprises seats won from the Liberal Party, the opposition goes into the election needing to gain 21 to form a majority. As Peter Dutton has often said, he has a mountain to climb.

To the pure arithmetic should be added the factors that, historically, first-term independents tend to be re-elected, and that (as the tightness of the polls suggests) neither main party can expect a majority-producing landslide.

So a question that will loom large in the campaign is: If neither main party emerges with a majority, which of the two would the crossbench support?

We know the answer, in part. The Greens have made it clear they would only support Labor. However, there are likely to be few Greens after the election. Three of their four seats are in Brisbane. In the electorate of Brisbane (where I live), former Liberal MP Trevor Evans is standing again. He is fondly regarded – in fact, many people think he is still the member, so invisible is the Green incumbent.

The fact that Evans – an important figure in the marriage equality debate in 2017 – is campaigning as the first openly gay LNP MP will do him no harm in the suburbs of Brisbane’s inner north. In adjacent Ryan, the LNP candidate is a well-credentialed, Cambridge-educated young barrister – Margaret Forrest, whose earlier career included working as a prosecutor at The Hague’s International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia.

Support for the Greens in Brisbane and Ryan is being dragged down by the other local Green, Max Chandler-Mather. The high-profile MP’s popularity tanked after his foolish decision to closely identify himself with the CFMEU. His electorate, Griffith, is Kevin Rudd’s old seat; Labor will wage a battle royal to reclaim what it regards as one of its lost crown jewels. I expect the LNP will preference Chandler-Mather last.

That the Greens are unlikely to be a large element of the crossbench – perhaps reduced to just one – would come as a huge relief to Anthony Albanese. While almost everyone I know loathes the Greens, I do not know anyone who hates them more than he does.

Among the other crossbenchers, north Queenslander Bob Katter is unlikely to support Labor, his friendship with Albanese notwithstanding. Nor would Tasmania’s Andrew Wilkie support Dutton.

So it may well come down to whichever teals are re-elected (or newly elected). Of all possible permutations if there is a hung parliament, a teal-controlled balance of power is the most likely.

Teal MPs have been cagey about who they would support. In recent weeks, one teal MP after another has been showcased on ABC’s 7.30. When Sarah Ferguson asked which party they would support, each of them dissembled. Ferguson did press them, but so gently as to recall Paul Keating’s remark about being flogged with a warm lettuce leaf.

Of course, you can understand why the teals do not want to show their hand. If they do, they will immediately lose a chunk of their vote. If they declare for Labor, many Liberal-leaning teal voters will be put off. And vice versa. It is a rational calculation for any politician to keep their cards close to their chest.

But weren’t the teals supposed to be the people who were going to change politics? Wasn’t their appeal that they were the anti-politicians, the ones who weren’t going to play the same old-school games? Or was all that sententious talk just so much empty rhetoric?

Teal MPs can barely open their mouths without uttering the word “transparency”. Yet on the most fundamental issue of all – who should form government – they have done their utmost to avoid being transparent. In this respect, they compare unfavourably with the Greens, who are at least being honest about what they would do.

Even if we allow that the teals shouldn’t be forced to show their hand before the main parties have announced all their election pledges, there can be no justification whatever, once all the policy bids are on the table before polling day, for each teal MP not to make their intentions clear. As they are so fond of saying, the public has a right to know.

The teals talk a big game about transparency but, as a political tactic, choose not to be transparent about the most important question of all.

You’ve probably seen the graffito on many a wall – “It doesn’t matter who you vote for, you always get a politician”. That’s universally, self-evidently true. But there’s something peculiarly nauseating about the hypocrisy of political aspirants who affect a pretentious virtue by posing as anti-politicians, only to reveal themselves, once they get themselves elected, as the most calculating politicians of the lot.

George Brandis is a former Liberal senator and attorney-general. He also served as Australia’s High Commissioner to the United Kingdom.