The Australian general election of 21 May 2022 was a moment of fundamental change in our politics. Although the Labor Party was able to form government in its own right — just — it was nonetheless the first time in our political history that more than thirty per cent of people voted for someone other than the two major parties.
This is a huge development, and it is being underreported by a mainstream media still wedded to an old politics.
Even if they can’t adjust, the rest of us would do well to make the effort, including rethinking the language we use when talking about politics. Concepts like the “two-party system”, “majority government” and “hung parliament” are likely to be terms that no longer make sense in this new dispensation, and to understand why, it is important to step back and look at the developing bigger picture.
Put simply, there is now a third force in Australian politics, an elevated “middle” that is likely to have something of a chameleon character, tied more to the pursuit of practical political outcomes than ideological purity.
So, although the community independents that have emerged over the last few years cleave together on some key issues and share many electoral features in common, they are not a political party in any traditional sense. In fact, they never will be, not if they wish to retain their relevance to electorates who have moved past such identifications.
What the community independents represent is a manifestation of changes in society more generally, reflecting the way in which we-the-people no longer find our political identity entirely within categories like “capital” and “working class”. In this, the major parties have been the architects of their own demise.
Both Labor and the Coalition have pursued what is generally called a neoliberal economic agenda, forcing the country to be more open to world markets and citizens to be more reliant on their own resources. This new order — instigated by the Hawke-Keating Government in 1983 and bedded down by the Howard Government between 1996 and 2007 — has undermined traditional social formations. It has forced businesses to be more global in their outlook and individuals to be more dependent on market-based services for everything from power and water to retirement security in the form of personal superannuation.
In engineering these changes, paradoxically, Labor and the Coalition have fundamentally weakened people’s identity with their own parties.
To put it another way, as the working class became the ABN class, Labor lost its base. As Labor lost its base, the Liberal-National parties lost their raison d’être, which was to oppose the interests of that old working class.
Identity and political association, like so many other things within our highly mobile and technologically connected societies, have dissipated, and just as many of us now work jobs that are not predicated on the idea of building a career over an extended period but are instead portfolio careers with income cobbled together from a range of sources, we are more catholic in the forms of social and political solidarity we seek.
The “teals” are the political godchildren of all these changes, impossible to countenance without the changes neoliberalism wrought in Australian society, and they exhibit a mosaic of views — social and economic — that you would expect to see in a movement seeking to tame the social disruption that neoliberalism wrought, while at the same time being beholden to some of its key tenants. As Zali Steggall told me in a 2019 interview, “I see the centre as being socially progressive — as evidenced by the community’s views on same-sex marriage and climate change for example — but with a more moderate liberal economic perspective on financial policy.”
Squaring this circle of social progressivism and market economics is likely to be the great existential challenge the community independents face, as the needs and wants of the communities they are beholden to for their political life clash with the needs and wants of the larger Australian society. What is good for Wentworth is not necessarily good for Corangamite. What is good for someone on $200K per year is not necessarily good for someone on a tenth of that. What is good for the landlord clashes with what is good for the tenant.
Still, the community independents have tapped into something significant.
We used to talk about Australian politics being dominated by a battle between the elites and the ordinary people, but it now makes more sense to see the key division as being between insiders and outsiders: a political class — which includes the mainstream media — that rules largely in its own interests and speaks only to and for members of that class, and the rest of us who have been kept from genuine participation in our own governance.
The genius of the independent’s movement (and the inner-city Greens) has been to recognise the outsider status of the members of their communities and to build a tent in which they can meet and find common cause. To this end, the independents have instigated what they call kitchen-table conversations, gatherings where citizens are able to voice political views that are then used to inform the agenda of those they elect to represent their communities.
With the kitchen-table methodology, candidates are not imposed from outside and then let loose on a community who they try to convince to vote for them. Rather, the candidates emerge from the kitchen-table conversations and other community gatherings and are so organic to the movement itself.
Alana Johnson, one of the people involved in the Voice4Indi organisation that helped find and elect Cathy McGowan in 2013 in rural Victoria, beautifully summarised the logic of the Voices Of movement and the power of the kitchen-table methodology: “Cathy McGowan went forth, not with a list of issues from a consultation. She went forth as the voice of the people. She knew that she was standing there expressing what people had said. And I think that made a huge difference because they heard themselves in Cathy’s voice and they were ready to go with her.”
This approach has been central to the rise of the third force in Australian politics and overall, it has been a positive thing for our society, reconnecting people with the political process. Indeed, thanks to these community-based political groups, Australia is currently sidestepping a lot of the problems being experienced by cognate countries like Britain and the United States — even Sweden and Italy — where similar concerns about the disruption caused by neoliberal economic policy are finding voice, not in community-based democracy, but in an altogether more dangerous form of right-wing populism and mainstream collapse.
Given what is happening in Europe and the US, what happened at the last election in Australia is an incredible thing, and it is important to recognise that there is nothing lucky about any of it.
Over many years, Australia has developed bedrock democratic institutions that have provided the foundation from which the new third force I have been talking about has been able to emerge. The key elements of this are compulsory voting, preferential voting, and the Australian Electoral Commission, which manages electoral boundaries independent of party interference. These together have allowed community independents, and other locally engaged groups, to not only build a following, but to convert that following into political representation.
The question we need to ask now, though, is how resilient this new third force might be. We have reason to be confident it will grow, but we cannot take a positive outcome for granted.
The test that remains is whether the community independent’s model that has been so successful in affluent electorates can be made to work in areas where community members lack the resources of time and money that were essential to the rise of the “teals”. Making sure that happens is the baseline democratic challenge our newly empowered crossbench faces in the lead up to the next general election.
Will they reach out to poorer electorates and share resources and their hard-won expertise, or will they pull up the ladder behind them?
Tim Dunlop is Melbourne-based writer. His new book, Voices of Us, about the rise of the “teal” independents, will be released on 1 December and is available for pre-order.