Opinion
Zali Steggall likens Australia’s newest political party to a Boeing 747: “The jumbo jet has taken off and we’re taking on passengers.”
It’s odd to reach for a metaphor of such large dimensions. The party has just two MPs. Steggall and Allegra Spender. And no other members, unlike the customary “mass party” model.
They’re both teals with wealthy Sydney harbourside electorates, hardly representative of Aussies doing it tough in a cost-of-living crisis.
As for passengers, who would board such an experimental aircraft? “We are pretty much now two years out from the next election, and so it takes that long to build a movement, to have success,” says Steggall.
Redbridge’s Kos Samaras says that while it’s too soon to have any real polling, he’d expect the Community Strong Australia party to have single-digit support in its first poll outings in the next weeks.
“Voter awareness is practically non-existent” judging by Redbridge’s near-daily focus groups conducted in recent days, he says. And, by Friday afternoon, the new party had a mere 74 donations, Steggall tells me.
“Well, it is day two,” she says, reasonably enough. It was only announced on Thursday. “One Nation has been going for 30 years; we’ve just hit the starting line.”
All fair. But Steggall and Spender’s Community Strong needs to get “as much attention and cut-through as One Nation,” according to Samaras. “They have no risk that they won’t be re-elected; their challenge is to grow.”
Indeed, their seats look safe. It’s striking that the Liberal Party has given up on reclaiming their electorates, traditional heartland Liberal bastions previously held by prime ministers.
Steggall defeated Tony Abbott in Warringah in 2019. Spender beat Dave Sharma in 2022 to claim Wentworth, the seat previously held by Malcolm Turnbull.
They are among seven Liberal strongholds seized by so-called teals: economically conservative, socially progressive community independents. One, North Sydney, was abolished in a redistribution. The Liberals managed to reclaim the Melbourne seat of Goldstein. So the teal tally in the House is now five.
The evidence that the Liberals have given up on recovering these seats? The party formally rescinded its support for the aim of net zero carbon emissions by 2050. This is the white flag of surrender.
Climate action was the greatest single issue that carried Steggall to victory against Tony “climate change is crap” Abbott. And it was a force majeure in every teal campaign.
“I don’t think it was a conscious decision by the Liberals to give up,” says political scientist Judith Brett, professor emeritus at La Trobe University. “They’ve hardly got any people representing city seats any more.”
The astonishing statistic that testifies to Liberal failure is that, of the 88 seats classified by the electoral commission as urban, the Liberals hold just nine. There is no mathematically plausible pathway for the Coalition to return to power without winning seats in the city, where most of Australia lives.
Instead of confronting this fact with a major drive to win the cities, the Liberals are scratching around in the peripheries and the red-dirt regions.
It’s a danse macabre set to the soundtrack of a Murdoch media siren song calling the party to oblivion in the mistaken belief that it’s marching to a Trumpian far-right triumph.
“The obliteration of modern urban representatives means that is what the party has become,” says Brett, who has written extensively on the history of the Liberal Party.
“This is a rural and regional-based party which has allowed National Party-type positions – especially on climate change – to prevail. I think the Liberals are in sort of a death spiral.”
What on earth is Angus Taylor doing? This week he was unable to decide whether he favoured a Hansonite “monoculture” or the multiculturalism that his own party created jointly with Labor over the past half century. He settled on multiculturalism “but not Labor’s version”.
Taylor doesn’t know what he believes. He is an empty suit of insincerity. Brett says “there seems to be no strategic thinking in the Liberal Party”.
So this is one of the groups that Steggall and Spender hope will board their plane. “There are vast numbers of disaffected moderate Liberals” to whom Community Strong “will probably appeal” says Steggall.
Appeal with what? One of the reasons the new party is interesting is that it has a novel structure. It has just four stated principles – sensible economic management, climate action, quality, integrity – and unstated specific policies.
Why so vague? To allow its parliamentarians to represent the wishes of their individual communities rather than be bound to a rigid party line.
In Community Strong, every vote is to be a free vote. Even with a mere two MPs, they’ve had clashing positions on tax, Palestine and workplace relations.
And the party has no leader. They call themselves a “team”, a position they will revisit only if they manage to build a parliamentary caucus of 10 or more.
But aren’t they too late? Haven’t the disaffected Liberals sided with Pauline Hanson? Yes, but many are there only because they think they have no alternative.
“People say, ‘Yeah, I’ve got a couple of issues with One Nation around racism but where else can I go?’,” says Kos Samaras, based on his firm’s focus group work. “I’ve lost count of the number of people who’ve said that.”
But, of the people who say they are One Nation voters, he does know how many have parked there for want of an alternative. It’s about one in six.
So with its most recent poll support around 30 per cent, these “default” supporters amount to about 5 per cent of the electorate.
They are revolting against the duopoly of Labor and Liberal, or the uniparty, as Pauline Hanson calls them. Her angry insurrectionist party is the “somewhere else”.
“But now, obviously, there’s another offering,” says Samaras. Steggall says this is exactly what Community Strong aims to be – an alternative. “You can only vote for the choices on the ballot paper, and if there isn’t a choice on the ballot paper that reflects your values and views on issues, who do you vote for? Where do you go?”
Spender says many voters feel “homeless”. They aim to make Community Strong their new home. In spite of its name, which smacks of marketing people rather than real ones. The Betoota Advocate proposes an alternative: “Competent Sheilas Australia”, which has Steggall chuckling.
Beyond despairing Liberals, the new teal party is aiming for disaffected Labor voters, too: “We are in the second term of a Labor government. People are getting a lot more critical of what’s being done and what’s not being done and Labor can’t just blame the other party any more,” says Steggall.
Many voters with immigrant backgrounds support Labor simply because “they think the Liberals are racist and they vote Labor by default”, Steggall says.
And the new party’s third target market is simply the swinging voters who have no fixed affiliation: “There’s a large cohort in the centre looking for reason, for fact-based policy without ideology,” she says.
Samaras agrees with this assessment. He reckons they could plausibly pick up voters from One Nation, Labor, the Liberals and Greens, and hope to capture about six House seats such as Bennelong, Menzies, Deakin, Mitchell and Berowra, and possibly a Senate seat or two.
But with just two MPs? By forming a party, Community Strong is creating a brand name and a legal entity that allows them to do three things. First, they can offer their branding – their party name – to the dozens of other community independents who will run for House seats at the next election, expanding their reach.
Second, they can use the brand name to put themselves above the line as a party on the ballot paper for the Senate. This is the chamber where small parties can exert maximum coercion on government legislation to make an impact.
Third, they can avail themselves of changes to political funding laws that favour incumbent parties over new challengers.
Spender and Steggall say they feel a responsibility to confront One Nation and its racism: “It’s dangerous and divisive,” they say.
Samaras says there are signs Hanson has peaked. She overreached in her comments last week assailing workers’ rights. Samaras describes this as “the dumbest thing she’s ever done”. And she attacked women’s rights.
And then there’s Hanson’s “monoculture”, a big political opportunity for Competent Sheilas Australia. The people feeling threatened by it, says Steggall, “are feeling small, and they are making themselves small because they feel that they might be targeted. That’s dangerous, and we can’t let that take hold”.
Tickets for the 747 are now on sale.
Peter Hartcher is political and international editor. He writes a world column each Tuesday.
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Peter Hartcher is political editor and international editor of The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age.Connect via email.From our partners
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