Saturday, December 14, 2024

Yes, independents are agents of chaos … for the major parties

Independents are agents of chaos ... for the major parties

Jacqueline Maley write in
The Sydney Morning Herald

‘If you had said to me two years ago, I would be wearing an aqua T-shirt up in Mosman, I would have said: ‘No way.’’’

So said one of the Zali Steggall volunteers I interviewed during the 2019 election, a resident of Warringah. She was the kind of woman who had always voted Liberal but had grown fed up with the party in general, and Warringah MP Tony Abbott in particular. (Steggall, of course, thumped Abbott and now sits on a margin of 7.2 per cent.)

Such women have collectively got over any horror they harboured for the colour aquamarine and have expanded their ranks for this election.

Blue-ribbon Liberal seats including Kooyong, Goldstein, North Sydney and Wentworth are now under threat from strong ‘‘teal independent’’ candidates, named for the distinctive candidate T-shirts they wear (although Kylea Tink, the former charities CEO challenging Trent Zimmerman in North Sydney, has pink merchandise).

The teal independents are exciting great interest during an otherwise dull campaign.

This is partly because they represent a disruption to politics-as-usual and partly because they look very different to the people we are used to seeing represent us.

It says a lot about the lack of heterogeneity in our parliament that these relatively young women, who all had successful careers before running for politics, represent something so fresh.

They are wealthy, white, welleducated and polished – they are not exactly ‘‘diversity’’ candidates. But in our system, decades behind what the rest of Australia looks like, they represent some change.

The independents have also attracted attention because, as Tink put it in a candidate debate last week, they ‘‘absolutely terrify the two major parties’’. This terror has morphed into a scare campaign run by the Liberal Party and its media backers, which makes the startling claim that the independents imperil democracy itself.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison says voting for the ‘‘climate independents’’, who are backed by Simon Holmes a Court’s Climate 200, will result in ‘‘chaos and instability’’. Further, we are told, these independents pose a threat to geopolitical stability.

As Phillip Coorey recounted in The Australian Financial Review a few weeks ago, Morrison has contended that the nation is ‘‘at a critical juncture’’, with ‘‘war in Europe, growing Chinese belligerence, inflationary pressures building, and a budget ravaged by COVID-19 that was in desperate need of repair’’.

In such treacherous times, it would be impossible, he said, for a government to ‘‘do deals with independents just to get to lunchtime and to night-time’’. ‘‘That’s no way to have strength and resilience at what is a very, very uncertain time,’’ Morrison said.

North Sydney MP Trent Zimmerman repeated a version of this argument during a candidate debate last week when he referenced global instability, and the fact that democracies around the world were under pressure. This was no time to put ours under pressure, too.

Goldstein MP Tim Wilson, who faces a challenge from independent and former ABC journalist Zoe Daniel, wrote a piece for The Australian last week, titled ‘‘‘Independents’ want to override our democracy’’.

‘‘Despite claims that so-called independent candidates want you to find your voice at the ballot box, the real agenda is to shut it down,’’ Wilson began, rather hysterically.

The use of scare quote marks for ‘‘independents’’ goes to one of the chief claims against them – that they are ‘‘fake’’ independents who actually belong to a de facto political party run by Climate 200, which supplies some of their funding. This is probably the best blow their opponents can land on the independents, who are undoubtedly aligned with each other. The conformity of their agenda, and the fact they all take funding from the same source, does make their mob look like a decentralised party of sorts.

But none of these candidates will be voted in because they are part of a bloc. They are winning votes on the strength of their names. Steggall was already a public figure when she stood for politics, which went an enormous way towards making her electable.

The teal independents are also criticised for refusing to name who they will support in the event of a hung parliament. It is a neat argument because it makes sense – you should be able to read on the box exactly what you’re voting for, right?

But true independence always comes with a measure of unpredictability because it means you can change your mind as facts and situations change around you. Any voter choosing an independent places trust in the candidate to make the best decision they can at the time. It is the sort of voterly confidence of which the major parties can only dream.

Former prime minister John Howard said last week that ‘‘if any one of these anti-Liberal groupies wins, we’re not going to form the next government’’. Howard was also the one who used to say that the people never get it wrong.

Across the globe in Washington, DC, another former Liberal prime minister, Malcolm Turnbull, all but endorsed the climate independents as a means of thwarting the ‘‘capture’’ of the Liberal Party by its dominant right faction.

It is utterly ridiculous to suggest that legitimate candidates engaging in a democratic process are somehow antidemocratic.

On the contrary, the independents serve a market that has been neglected by the major parties for too long.

 

The demand is there, and supply has arrived.

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