Party atmosphere without the party machine: The army behind the teals

At 11am on Easter Monday – the day before pre-polling began – Glenferrie Road in Malvern was quiet. Most shops and cafes were shut for the public holiday.

But inside Monique Ryan’s pop-up campaign office, it felt like a party. Dozens of volunteers chatted and busied themselves, a barbecue was cooking out the back, and Shania Twain’s Man! I Feel Like a Woman blared over a Bluetooth speaker.

Monique Ryan’s campaign staff and volunteers prepare pre-poll and election-day material. Credit: Rachael Dexter

The scene provides a glimpse into the teal army: the unpaid foot soldiers of the community independents’ movement who knock on doors, organise, create social media content, arrange corflutes and feed the troops.

The teals are the seven women who took Australia by surprise in 2022 when they won or held formerly blue-ribbon Liberal seats.

In Victoria, the teal wave was led by Ryan, who ousted former treasurer Josh Frydenberg from the seat of Kooyong, and Zoe Daniel, who won the bayside seat of Goldstein from Tim Wilson.

During this election, the teals are looking to cement their position by winning a further term while holding true to their promise of a “new way” of doing politics.

However, the teals’ commitment to greater integrity has come into question during the campaign after Ryan’s husband, Peter Jordan, was caught on video removing a sign backing Liberal candidate Amelia Hamer, and teal volunteers released “dirt files” of unfavourable material about their rivals to the public through social or mainstream media.

Another challenge is the broadening of the teal message, with more candidates emerging like Alex Dyson in Wannon, who dresses in the orange of a community rural independent but shares many values with the teals and a common funding source in Climate 200, and Ben Smith, Victoria’s reigning father of the year, who is running in the Mornington Peninsula seat of Flinders.

Election day is shaping as a test of whether the teal wave was a one-off phenomenon or is a political movement that is here to stay.

If the teals do build on their 2022 success, it will be in large part thanks to their sophisticated campaigning, combining old-fashioned door-knocking with targeted social media spending.

The Kooyong working bee was prepping an eye-watering amount of Ryan-emblazoned material for the two pre-polling stations that opened last week and the 42 others that will need to be manned on May 3.

The jobs involved sorting 2000 corflutes of different designs – different photos of Ryan, different phrases, some in Chinese for certain parts of the electorate, which stretches from Malvern in the south to Balwyn 10 kilometres north.

One group counted and wrapped up bundles of plastic bunting, another zip-tied A-frame signs together, another counted sandbags and wooden stakes, while another group outside loaded the bundles of paraphernalia destined for the different booths onto the back of a ute.

A team of youngsters – who stand out from the largely grey-haired group of retirees who have the time and capacity to help run the campaign – were huddled around a laptop editing TikToks for Ryan’s youth-oriented Instagram account @youth4mon, which posts memes and joke posts for Ryan with a much sharper and snarkier tone than Ryan’s official account, which boasts 116,000 followers.

A volunteer at work inside Zoe Daniel’s campaign headquarters, which serves as a hub for about 1000 volunteers. Credit: Simon Schluter

On the walls – painted teal, of course – were handwritten lists of stocktake, a coloured-in chart celebrating the numbers of doors knocked on over the past few weeks, and dozens of Polaroid photos of smiling teal volunteers taken at one of the campaign’s Thursday pizza nights.

Conal Feehely, the young man in charge of organising Ryan’s swarms of volunteers, says there are 2000 on the books and 1500 who have been active. He’s hoping the full 2000 will turn out on the big day.

These aren’t just folk from the 2022 election, he says in a teal apron, tongs in hand. He’s standing over a teal-coloured Weber barbecue cooking up snags for a volunteers’ lunch.

“It’s pretty close to half of them being new recruits,” he says. “A lot of people [from the 2022 campaign] have either moved out of the electorate or been redistributed outside of the electorate.”

Zoe Daniel volunteers Viresh Ratnayeke and Michael Mack at her campaign headquarters. Credit: Simon Schluter

“It’s been fantastic – new generations of people just continue to be motivated by Mon. It’s exciting.”

It’s a similar set-up at Zoe Daniel’s campaign headquarters in Hampton, whose exterior is painted teal and which is furnished with hand-me-down furniture donated by volunteers.

The headquarters acts as a hub for Daniel’s almost 1000-strong group of volunteers. One of the most important groups is the 320 door-knockers, led by Simon Cox and Di Findlay.

Cox, a retired research scientist in spacial technologies, makes maps of Goldstein’s suburbs for door-knockers to target, charts which areas have been covered and then collates the data from each door-knock.

Each door-knocking team ranges from six to 30 people and is allocated a “captain”. A team goes out every weekday, and two or three teams are out on Saturdays and Sundays.

Inside Ryan’s campaign office.Credit: Rachael Dexter

“We will have knocked on something like three-quarters of the doors in this electorate by the end,” Cox says.

Door-knockers attend a one-hour training session and are equipped with kits containing clipboards with maps and flyers to hand out. They track their progress and feed notes into an app.

Simon Cox is in charge of Daniel’s door-knocking teams.Credit: Simon Schluter

Findlay, a retired school principal, co-ordinates the teams and says her experience in marshalling large groups of people and preparing timetables has come in handy on the campaign trail.

Meanwhile, Cox is surveying the data that comes back, feeding information to Daniel’s electorate office if it is relevant to it or to the campaign team.

“A lot of it is, in this area everyone is talking about crime, in another area it is cost of living,” he says.

Daniel’s volunteers communicate via WhatsApp groups and use an open-source CRM (customer relationship management) system to track attendees at events, automatically emailing those who attended to thank them and reminding those who did not show up about the next event.

Like Cox and Findlay, the door-knocking teams are dominated by retirees – “there’s lots of grey hairs” – Cox says, in contrast to the stereotype of teals volunteers being young professionals.

“We have the time,” Cox says. “We’re fortunate to be in a position where we are past that stressful part of our lives.”

Like Ryan’s campaign, in which younger volunteers are relied upon to manage social media, Gen Zoe operates its own accounts, which try to directly appeal to young people in the electorate.

The teals are big spenders on social media. Data from Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, shows Climate 200 spent the most on advertising in Victoria in the past 90 days, $998,736, just ahead of Labor’s $989,000.

Ryan’s campaign alone has spent $253,190 on social media advertising in the past 90 days, while Daniel has spent $75,279.

Daniel likes to say that in the previous election, her team was building the plane while trying to fly it, but this election the teals say the plane is ready to go.

“We’ve been able to get more organised. Getting organised has felt easier as, obviously, we knew how to do it,” she says.

Daniel says reaching people through social media and mainstream media is more difficult than it was at the last election.

“The digital space has changed quite a lot, so we’re doing video on-demand advertising and stuff like that we didn’t do last time,” she says.

Some teals are also using influencers to assist in their campaigns, with NSW independent MP Allegra Spender under scrutiny over a series of social media posts by influencer Milly Rose Bannister, whose videos were “made in collaboration” with Spender.

Daniel has not engaged influencers but turned to comedian Dan Ilic for a touch of star power as the host of her campaign launch at the Kingston Town Hall.

Ilic runs a company that received almost $588,000 worth of donations from Climate 200 during the 2022 election campaign, but Daniel’s team says neither it nor Climate 200 paid Ilic for the hosting gig.

When it comes to dirt files, sources have included people connected with the teals campaigns.

A volunteer for Ryan’s campaign posted details on social media about a recent Supreme Court of Victoria judgment that showed Liberal candidate Amelia Hamer was a beneficiary of a $20 million family trust.

“Let’s be very clear, the way people found out was because of Monique Ryan’s volunteers,” Hamer told the ABC’s 7.30 last week.

Monash University politics lecturer Dr Zareh Ghazarian says battles over corflutes and compiling dirt files run the risk of compromising the teals’ focus on integrity.

“One of the unique points that they put forward at the last election was that they would do politics differently because they were going to be coming into the parliamentary system with these new ideas,” he says.

He believes this campaign is make or break for the teals, and they will leave nothing on the line.

“This will be the election where either the teals consolidate themselves in national politics or appear to be a one-hit wonder, a flash in the pan,” he says.

Cut through the noise of federal politics with news, views and expert analysis. Subscribers can sign up to our weekly Inside Politics newsletter.