This electorate is one of Sydney’s most affluent. It is not immune to cost-of-living pressures

Paul Signorelli has been selling flowers from his Willoughby shop for 45 years but business has never been so slow nor costs so high. He says the global financial crisis and the 1990s recession did not hit trade as hard as the current spiralling costs of living. No one splurges on flowers any more.

Signorelli’s store is in the federal seat of Bradfield, the electorate where 40 per cent of voters are professionals, the median weekly household income is $2644 and 36 per cent of home owners do not have a mortgage. Regardless, rising living costs is the issue du jour in Bradfield.

“Before COVID, flower prices hadn’t changed for 30 years,” Signorelli says. “COVID hit, prices doubled and they haven’t come down. During the GFC and Paul Keating’s recession we had to have, I was going really well because flowers were just a little bit of luxury that people could afford because they were cheap, but this has hit me hard.”

Willoughby business owner Paul Signorelli has been selling flowers for 45 years but says business has never been so bad.Credit: Steven Siewert

Down the road at the High Street Bakery, cafe manager Wendy Wha says the business is having the same struggles. Locals still come, she says, but once there were lines out the door for takeaway coffees. Not so much any more. Coffee is more of a treat than a necessity these days.

Bradfield is known by locals as the lungs of Sydney. Its suburbs are leafy, enveloped by tree canopies, meaning the north shore electorate remains temperate when western Sydney sizzles. Its Pacific Highway spine stretches from Ku-ring-gai in the north to St Leonards in the south, and it is one of Sydney’s most affluent electorates. It was also one that did not succumb to the teal tide in 2022.

Neighbouring Warringah was already in teal hands, Zali Steggall having unseated former prime minister Tony Abbott in 2019, but in 2022 she was joined on the crossbench by another teal, northern beaches GP Sophie Scamps in Mackellar. Closer to the city’s CBD, Kylea Tink ended the political career of moderate Liberal powerbroker Trent Zimmerman in North Sydney.

Bradfield remained in Liberal hands. But only just. Teal candidate Nicolette Boele (pronounced Buller) gave sitting MP and Liberal frontbencher Paul Fletcher an almighty fright. She turned Bradfield into a marginal seat after securing a primary vote of 20.89 per cent. The seat is even more marginal after last year’s boundary redistribution.

Teal candidate for Bradfield Nicolette Boele almost seized the seat in 2022.Credit: Sam Mooy

Boele was defeated but not despondent. She retained her campaign office on a prime piece of corner real estate on the Pacific Highway at Gordon and styled herself as Bradfield’s shadow member. It was her foundation donors, she says, who coughed up to ensure the “doors stayed open and the lights were on”. She temporarily gave up her office to make way for the Bradfield for Yes campaign, which fought to convince the electorate to support the Voice to parliament.

Bradfield was the only Liberal-held electorate in Australia to vote “yes” in the referendum.

Boele is running again at this election but not against Fletcher. In a speech at the right-leaning Sydney Institute in early December, Fletcher denounced the teals as a “Green left con job”. “The intention was to get people to think ‘that nice teal candidate could almost be a Liberal – I’ll vote for her’,” he told the think tank.

A senior Liberal with knowledge of the Bradfield campaign, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said a week later polling showed that Fletcher was on track to lose Bradfield.

Liberal candidate for Bradfield Gisele Kapterian says rising living costs are the No.1 issue in the electorate.Credit: Sam Mooy

On December 10, Fletcher surprised his colleagues and announced that he would not contest the election. Gisele Kapterian, a Salesforce executive and former Liberal staffer, was hastily installed after securing the backing of former premier Gladys Berejiklian and former federal treasurer Joe Hockey. Warren Mundine, a leading No campaigner in the referendum, also ran for preselection but Kapterian prevailed.

During the campaign, it emerged that Kapterian was named in a $650,000 settlement former political staffer Rachelle Miller reached with the Commonwealth. Miller worked for then-cabinet ministers Alan Tudge and Michaelia Cash from 2016-2018 but disclosed in 2020 that she had an affair with Tudge and complained that the two, along with Kapterian, who was Cash’s then staffer, had discriminated against her and failed to provide a safe work environment. In July 2022, the Commonwealth settled Miller’s claims for $650,000 without admission of liability from anyone she had accused of wrongdoing.

Kapterian says cost of living is the issue dominating conversation in Bradfield. Parents with young children are struggling to afford daycare, families who moved into the electorate for its high concentration of top-performing private schools are finding fees out of their reach and small businesses are hurting, she says.

“Cost of living is postcode-agnostic,” Kapterian says.

“We have a lot of small business owners in the area. There was one cafe in Lindfield I was talking to, and they were saying their energy bills were $2900 a quarter before, $12,000 a quarter now. No wonder the price of coffee is going up.”

Liberals remain hopeful that Bradfield will be retained. But the party faces some uphill battles, not least because of a sense that federal Opposition Leader Peter Dutton has styled himself, and some of his policies, on Donald Trump. Kapterian downplays this fear, insisting that sentiment shifted after Dutton came out strongly in support of Ukraine following Trump’s infamous televised clash with President Volodymyr Zelensky.

Kapterian also says that Dutton has given her an ironclad guarantee that the Liberals would not walk away from the Paris Agreement if elected. That will matter in Bradfield.

‘Disillusioned and detached’

Boele says climate change remains a major issue for Bradfield voters, although, like the rest of the country, cost of living is the No.1 discussion point. Housing affordability is also a big concern for Bradfield voters and has been consistently brought up with her and her volunteers as they doorknock the electorate. With a big campaigning head-start over Kapterian, Boele says she and her team have knocked on about 15,000 doors, the bulk since about June. However, Boele’s campaign was briefly thrown off course in early April when she was forced to apologise after making a sexual joke to a 19-year-old female hairdresser at a Gordon salon. She admitted it was a poor attempt at humour.

The big question remains: Can Boele, who has almost twice as many volunteers working on her campaign as she did in 2022, build on her success and turn the seat teal? Perhaps she can, given Australian voters are increasingly disillusioned with the major parties.

Sarah Cameron, a political scientist from Griffith University and a chief investigator for the Australian Election Study, says there has been a gradual decline in “political partisanship”, which hit “record lows” at the 2022 election.

The proportion of rusted-on voters – those who always vote the same way – dipped to just 37 per cent at the last election. Cameron says voters were “detached from major political parties” and there is no reason to think they have swung back to the major parties in 2025.

The teals seized once blue-ribbon Liberal heartland, but that does not mean all their supporters were conservatives. Rather, Cameron says data shows at the last election, one in five teal voters had previously voted for the Coalition, while 31 per cent had voted Labor and 24 per cent Greens.

When presented with a teal candidate, which are “economic right but more socially progressive”, some voters in Liberal heartlands found their fit. There were also some disaffected Coalition voters who could not bring themselves to back Scott Morrison for prime minister.

What about the teals this election?

Cameron says just over 50 per cent of people have made their mind up on their voting intentions early on, but undecideds are more likely to vote for the minor parties, which include the teals.

When it comes to what swings voters, Cameron says just over 50 per cent vote on policy positions, 20 per cent based on political parties, 10 per cent on the local candidate and between 10 and 15 per cent on the party leaders.

Teal candidate Nicolette Boele (far left), pictured with MPs Sophie Scamps, Kylea Tink, Allegra Spender and Zali Steggall before Mardi Gras this year.Credit: Dion Georgopoulos

As for North Sydney, MP Kylea Tink will not be returning to Canberra. Her electorate was abolished in the boundary redistribution. Despite being “devastated” that she could not continue – for now – as an elected official, Tink is throwing her support (and volunteers) behind Boele’s campaign. Through the Community Independents Project (CIP), Tink is also helping on the campaigns for many other community independents around the country, most notably in Dickson, the Queensland seat held by Dutton.

The independent candidate in Dickson is Ellie Smith, who was picked after an executive search involving some 3000 potential political aspirants. That is the professionalism of the movement, Tink says, which is far broader than the term “teal” would suggest.

Meanwhile, shadow attorney-general Michaelia Cash wrote to the Australian Electoral Commission on April 4 to ask if the CIP was breaching electoral laws by failing to register as a campaigning organisation, which would force transparency for its funding and spending.

CIP director Tina Jackson argued it did not fall into the category of a campaigning organisation based on legal advice that suggested its advertising and activity were not designed to influence votes.

Tink acknowledges the term teal stuck because of the “class of 22” – which was characterised by a group of professional, educated women who gave up their lucrative careers to run for parliament – but says the descriptor has become too widely used.

“The major parties gave the movement a snatchy name, and ridiculed those communities who chose to elect an independent, thinking it was only because they were cranky with Scott Morrison,” Tink says. “But Australians are done with the two-party system and community independents have never been more relevant”. In 2025, community independents are from all walks of live. “Nurses, teachers, a father of the year,” Tink says. She says electorates are already mobilising, “ready for the 2028 election”.

In Willoughby, Signorelli says his wife and accountant want him to call it quits. He barely covers costs, and he can’t see signs of business improving. But he desperately wants to keep selling flowers. “The problem is, I am emotionally attached to the place,” Signorelli says with a shrug.

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