Viewed
Speech to The Sydney Institute - Why Majority Government is in the national interest - and the Teals are not
Introduction
I am pleased to speak at the Sydney Institute – which for decades has been an important forum for considered public policy debate.
Today I want to argue in favour of majority government – that is to say, a House of Representatives in which one political party has at least 76 of the 150 seats.
We hear plenty of talk that a Parliament filled with Teals - or as they call themselves, community independents – is a good thing. I am here today to argue it is unambiguously a bad thing.
I want to start by arguing that the Teals are a giant green left con job. It is remarkable what a soft run this big money political exercise and its backers such as Melbourne billionaire’s son Simon Holmes a Court have been given by many political journalists in Australia.
Next I want to look at the track record of the Teals in Parliament – and the disconnect between what they promised and what they have done.
Lastly I want to argue that majority government is a good thing – but it is at real threat due to the Teals.
A Giant Green Left Con Job
Let me turn first to the giant green left con job perpetrated on the Australian electorate by Melbourne billionaire’s son Simon Holmes a Court and a group of other wealthy people.
Left front groups are a well established tradition
Of course, this is far from the first time the organised left has established front groups to run in elections which are not branded as Labor or Greens. Look at Get Up, which has been a presence in Australia for at least fifteen years. Bill Shorten was one of the founders of Get Up and served on its board for many years.
The rationale of Get Up is to deliver money and resources into elections in a way which makes it harder for Coalition candidates to get elected. GetUp’s 2019 Post Election Report boasts of its contribution towards defeating incumbent Liberal MP Tony Abbott in Warringah, for example.[1]
Another recent example of a left wing front group is the Australian Recreational Fishers Party, founded by an ex Labor candidate, which ran candidates in three Tasmanian seats in 2016. It was a single issue party tapping concerns about so called ‘super trawlers’ operating in Tasmanian waters. In Lyons, its candidate received 6.3 per cent of the first preference vote; when she was eliminated, almost two thirds of her votes flowed to Labor or the Greens. The Liberal candidate Eric Hutchison - defending a margin of just 1.2 per cent - was defeated.[2]
The Teals, then, are very much in the tradition of front groups established by left-wing political operatives which are designed to lure votes away from the Liberal Party by tricking voters about their bona fides. As with other such groups over time, many of the campaign volunteers are members of unions or the Labor Party or the Greens Political Party, and have simply put on a different t-shirt for a few weeks.
Not a grass roots community movement at all
That being said, one of the big differences with the Teals is the scale of the money involved. Just to remind you, in the 2022 election they spent $2.1 million in Kooyong, $2.1 million in Wentworth and across the six seats they won, spent almost ten million dollars.[3]
These amounts being spent on campaigns in individual electorates are without precedent in the Australian political system. If the Liberal Party had done the same thing, there would have been screams of protest from the media and others about the Americanisation of politics.
This is but one of the many pieces of evidence that the Teals are not a grassroots community movement - they are a carefully designed and centrally controlled clique, backed by big money and a sophisticated campaign apparatus.
Let me remind you what we know about them. They ran a highly advanced national polling operation, coordinated by Kos Samaras, previously the long term assistant secretary of the Labor Party in Victoria.
They used a well known ‘progressive’ campaign agency based in New York, Populares, to develop their messages.
They were backed by Climate 200, a political funding vehicle, whose chief executive Byron Fay has previously worked for organisations like Climate Strategy Advisers, for a Joe Biden aligned Political Action Committee during the 2020 US presidential election.[4]
The look and feel of the Teal campaigns - the graphic design, the slogans, the t-shirts, the photography and videography - was extremely slick. It was also highly consistent across multiple electorates.
So too their key campaign issues, were consistent across multiple electorates: climate change, an anti corruption commission and the treatment of women in politics.
There is an evident and obvious tension between claiming to be, in lots of different electorates, a genuine grassroots based community movement, and campaigning on identical issues in each of those different electorates.
Of course it is not an accident that these issues were deployed across multiple campaigns. They were chosen through expensive polling work across the country.
We know Climate 200 also used a team of specialist lawyers from Marque Lawyers, to support this integrated, national campaign.[5] So it is no surprise that they used the same standard set of tactics in different electorates.
To give one example, in late April 2022 The Age reported that:
Guide Dogs Victoria will investigate why its chief executive appeared in Liberal Party election pamphlets endorsing Treasurer Josh Frydenberg in his inner-Melbourne seat of Kooyong.[6]
This story was triggered because Climate 200 followed a specific tactic of complaining to the Australian Charities and Not for Profits Commission if a Liberal candidate issued a brochure containing an endorsement by an executive of an organisation regulated by the ACNC.
I know this because they did exactly the same thing in my community of Bradfield, where I issued a brochure containing endorsements from several respected community figures including the manager of a local Lifeline branch.
Focus on duping Liberal voters
Of course one of the other big problems with the claim of being genuine community independents is that the Teals without exception ran in seats which had historically been Liberal or National seats. That is true of the seats they won: Mackellar, Warringah, Wentworth, North Sydney, Goldstein, Kooyong, and Curtin. It is also true of other seats they ran in: Boothby, Bradfield, Calare, Casey, Clark, Cowper, Flinders, Grey, Hughes, Mayo, Page, and Wannon.
This is one of the most compelling pieces of evidence of the Teals being a green left con job: these so called spontaneous community movements, by apparently complete coincidence, appeared in a range of Liberal seats and made no appearance in Labor seats.
Every aspect of the Teal campaign was carefully designed to dupe traditional Liberal voters. Is it a coincidence that in a third of the new seats they won in 2022, the Teal candidate was the daughter or niece of a long time Liberal MP, with the same last name? Of course it is not a coincidence: it was part of a deliberate plan.
The strategy was clear: to appeal to traditional Liberal voters who would never vote Labor but who were disenchanted with the Coalition after some tough years of COVID and all its consequences. The intention was to get people to think, ‘That nice Teal candidate could almost be a Liberal, I’ll vote for her.’
Such trickery, backed by big money, has a long tradition in so-called progressive politics. In John F Kennedy’s first campaign to win a House seat from Massachusetts, one of the Democratic primary opponents was Joseph Russo, a popular city councillor. So the uber-wealthy financier Joseph Kennedy paid for another man with the same name to run in the primary. With two men named Joseph Russo on the ballot paper, neither got enough votes to win; instead John F Kennedy won.[7]
Very deliberate psychological tactics to create a sense of ‘a community movement’
The Teals’ strategy was backed by very specific campaigning practices designed to create the sense of a mass community movement. There were several standard tricks in their playbook.
One was to have a big launch with several hundred people all wearing the same T-shirt - safe in the knowledge that no-one is ever going to be able to check if the same activists turned up at similar launches for several different Teal candidates.
Another was to have people - in some cases campaign volunteers, in other cases paid operatives - wandering around in shopping malls and other public spaces wearing the candidate’s t-shirt. This was all about demonstrating ‘social proof.’ Humans are social animals; they are more likely to vote for a candidate if they think lots of other people are thinking the same way.
For the same reason, the Teals had a focus on getting a large number of campaign posters in homes across the electorates they were targeting.
Exploitation of Preferential Voting
Yet another feature of this Green left con job was a deliberate strategy to leverage the operation of Australia’s preferential voting system. If Australia had a first past the post system, none of the six Teals who entered the Parliament in 2022 would have been elected. Of the six, most had a first preference vote which was only in the thirties or even twenties, a long way behind the first preference vote secured by the Liberal candidate.
In North Sydney, for example, the Liberal candidate Trent Zimmerman received 38.1 per cent of the first preference vote; the Teal candidate received only 25.2 per cent.[8] But the way the Teals won, of course, was by rolling up all of the preferences from non Liberal candidates.
It is also clear that the Teal first preference vote came from two sources: former Liberal voters; and Labor and Greens voters who were voting tactically. In North Sydney for example the Liberal first preference vote dropped from 52.0 per cent to 38.1 per cent; this block of almost fourteen per cent of votes cast moved from the Liberal candidate to the Teal candidate.
But of the other eleven per cent received by the Teal (to achieve the total of 25.2 per cent), 5.1 per cent came from Greens voters and 3.6 per cent from Labor voters. That is, the Greens vote dropped from 13.6 per cent to 8.6 per cent and the Labor vote dropped from 25.1 per cent to 21.5 per cent.[9]
Left wing voters saw a chance to unseat a Liberal incumbent and voted in large numbers to do so. They knew that if the Teal candidate could successfully attract votes from Liberal voters who saw the Teal as almost a Liberal, then the Teal was more likely to be successful than someone running under a Labor or Greens banner.
The proportion of previous Greens voters in North Sydney who moved across to the Teal candidate (around one in three) was significantly higher than the proportion of previous Liberal voters (around one in four) who made that move.
Teals Track Record
I want to turn now to what we know about the Teals from the way they have operated in the Parliament for the last two and a half years. This is important, because in the 2022 election the Teal candidates were largely an unknown quantity. They made vague promises about doing politics differently, with vacuous claims such as ‘Better is possible’. But there was very little information about what they actually stood for.
Record of voting with the Greens
Two and a half years later, things are very different. The Teals have cast hundreds of votes in Parliament. Recently I asked the Parliamentary Library to give me a report on their voting record.
That report shows that the great majority of times the Teals are lining up with the radical, extremist Greens Party.
If you look at substantive votes on Bills – which, if passed, become laws with binding legal effect – Kate Chaney voted with the Greens 73 per cent of the time; Zoe Daniel voted with the Greens 81 per cent of the time; and the other five all voted with the Greens between 74 per cent and 80 per cent of the time.[10]
Even on procedural motions – such as ‘that the motion be put’ or ‘that the Member be no longer heard’ – the seven Teal MPs have voted with the Greens between 69 and 77 per cent of the time.[11]
Let me give some examples. In February 2023, every Teal MP voted with the Greens against legislation (supported by both Labor and the Coalition) which strengthens the character test in circumstances where a non-citizen has committed multiple criminal offences. The change allows these multiple offences to be added together in determining whether the non-citizen fails the character test and therefore can be denied an Australian visa.[12]
In October 2023, just nine days after the appalling Hamas terrorist attack in which more than 1400 innocent people were murdered by terrorists in Israel, Kylea Tink and Sophie Scamps joined forces with the Greens to accuse Israel of committing war crimes.
The House was considering a motion which contained the following as paragraph (2):
‘That this House…(2) stands with Israel and recognises its inherent right to defend itself.’
The Greens moved an amendment to delete this paragraph and replace it with the following:
Omit paragraph (2), substitute: “(2) condemns war crimes perpetrated by the state of Israel, including the bombing of Palestinian civilians, and calls for an immediate ceasefire between all parties and an end to the war on Gaza, recognising also that for there to be peace there must be an end to the state of Israel’s illegal occupation of the Palestinian Territories.”
Teal MPs Kylea Tink and Sophie Scamps voted in favour of this amendment.[13]
Those Australians who voted for a Teal candidate on the premise that ‘that nice Teal candidate could almost be a Liberal’ were certainly not expecting to get an MP who voted very largely with the Greens. Nor is it likely they were expecting an MP who would push for new and higher taxes.
But that is what Teal MPs like Zoe Daniel have been doing. She told the Sydney Morning Herald in September she had been calling for an “everything on the table” independent review of tax since before she was elected. “Negative gearing is just one piece of this. We’re going to have to think much bigger to fix the housing crisis.”[14]
Mackellar Teal Sophie Scamps has similarly come out against the current negative gearing rules, according to a recent Herald article where she said a recent forum with voters in Mackellar had shown support for tax changes. She was quoted as saying:
“The most popular solution, with almost unanimous support, was for a paring back of the tax rules that give real estate investors an unfair advantage over first home buyers.”[15]
Her activism against negative gearing would no doubt come as an unpleasant surprise to the 6,300 taxpayers in Mackellar who lodged a tax return claiming a deduction for losses on a rental property.
Made little practical difference – but made it much easier for Labor to govern
Of course what also stands out is that while the Teals made big promises to do politics differently, they have made zero practical difference in the House of Representatives. Labor has had a majority since the May 2022 election, so it wins every vote; it does not need to negotiate with the Teals.
The presence of the Teals however makes it vastly easier for Anthony Albanese and the Labor Party to govern. Labor won with just 77 seats. If all remaining 74 seats were held by the Coalition, and Labor thus had only 76 votes after taking out one MP to be speaker, every division would be a knife edge exercise.
But with the non Labor seats divided between the Coalition and a crossbench of eighteen, Labor can relax, in the knowledge that on any given vote it is extremely unlikely that all of the crossbench will even turn up, let alone vote the same way as the Coalition.
Labor has taken advantage of the presence of the Teals to weaken the scrutiny and accountability that it would otherwise face. To take one example, during the Morrison Government, the then Labor Opposition was typically given the opportunity to ask between nine and ten questions. Prime Minister Albanese by contrast typically shuts down question time after the Opposition has had six or at most seven questions.
The reason he can get away with this is that Labor changed the House of Representatives’ Standing Orders to guarantee a certain number of questions to the crossbench.[16] The practical consequence of this decision has been to reduce scrutiny. The Opposition has Shadow Ministers, each with specialist responsibilities and knowledge, and typically with many years of parliamentary experience.
If an issue is running in a particular portfolio, a Shadow Minister asking a series of questions in Question Time on that issue can have a considerable impact – but it is much harder to have that impact when the total number of questions available is only six or seven in Question Time and not the usual nine or ten.
It has very much suited Labor to have the Teals in the Parliament – and Labor has been careful to dole out small political rewards to each of the Teals. For example, Labor introduced the Climate Change Bill in 2022, to establish a target of a 43 per cent reduction in emissions by 2030. They took particular care to accept and support five different amendments, each moved by a different Teal MP (Monique Ryan, Zoe Daniel, Kylea Tink, Allegra Spender and Zali Steggall), so each could tell their constituents they had had a win. It was transparently orchestrated.[17]
Majority Government is a Good Thing
I have argued today that the Teal candidates won by pretending to be something they are not, and their track record in Parliament shows a big difference between what many of those who voted for them thought they were getting, and what they actually got.
Some would say that this is simply bleating from a member of a political party which lost seats to a disruptive new entrant. But I think the issues are more serious. My argument is that majority government is a good thing for Australia – and the Teals constitute the most serious threat to majority government in eighty years.
The Teals’ message, implicitly or explicitly, is the opposite: majority government is something of no value and if we no longer have it, that is nothing to worry about.
Of course, as I have pointed out, the Teals are a green left con job. Actually, the political operatives behind the Teals have a strong interest in majority government; they just want it to be a Labor majority government.
With one exception, Australia has had majority government at the federal level continuously since 1943. That exception was the 2010-13 period, which brought unprecedented instability and uncertainty. May I remind you that it brought us:
- Labor relying on the vote of Craig Thompson, who was at the time under suspicion of, and who was later convicted of, theft and deception in relation to the misuse of funds from the Health Services Union of which he had earlier been secretary
- Labor appointing disgruntled ex LNP MP Peter Slipper as Speaker, before he was forced to resign following allegations of inappropriate behaviour
- Multiple leadership challenges against Julia Gillard, in February 2012, March 2013 and June 2013
- Each of the four cross benchers securing commitments to various pet projects, such as poker machine reform (pressed by Andrew Wilkie) and imposing a carbon tax (pressed by Adam Bandt and the Greens) despite Prime Minister Gillard having promised ‘there will be no Carbon Tax under the government I lead.’
- Andrew Wilkie withdrawing his guarantee of confidence and supply in January 2012 and the Greens ending their alliance with Labor in February 2013
- Amid the chaos, a government which performed very poorly on its key responsibilities including economic management and protecting the border against illegal maritime arrivals.
The first bad consequence of not having majority government, then, is that it leads to chaotic processes - and regular, abrupt changes of policy direction and of key personnel.
The second bad consequence is that unless a Prime Minister has a clear majority in the House of Representatives, it is virtually impossible to achieve substantive reform. We regularly hear the refrain that today’s politicians are mere pygmies, too timid to deliver big changes, unlike the giants of earlier times. Hawke and Keating lowered tariffs and floated the dollar; Howard and Costello reformed our tax system and introduced the GST.
All true and all to be celebrated – but none of it can happen without having a majority government. Getting the GST through, for example, came at a significant political cost to the Howard Government. It went from 94 seats to 80 seats in the 1998 election; without having a strong majority when it commenced the process of introducing the GST, the Howard Government would never have succeeded with this reform.
I noticed Allegra Spender giving a speech at the Press Club the other day in which she expanded on her big plans for economic reform. That’s great – but she gave no answer to the question of how she as an independent would be able to deliver such reform. Unless you are a government with a strong and stable majority, significant reform is very unlikely to be achieved.
I have argued that a Parliament in which independents have a significant presence, and in turn no one party has a majority, means in turn a weak government - and that is bad for Australia. I want finally to turn to why it is a good thing that voters have before them major party candidates to choose from, as opposed to independent candidates.
As I argued earlier, the way the Teals have voted in the Parliament on many issues would likely come as a surprise to quite a few of the people who voted for them. The big downside with voting for an independent is that you do not know what you are going to get; there is no requirement for them to be clear or explicit about who they are and what they stand for.
The major parties are different; we have track records built up over 80 or more years. When you vote Liberal you know you are voting for a party which has consistently supported smaller government, lower taxes and a strong approach to border protection and national security. When you vote Labor you know you are voting for a bigger spending, higher taxing party with a bigger role for the unions.
I am critical of Labor for many things – but I do not criticise them for hiding who they are or what you are going to get. By contrast, I am very critical of the Teals - the so called community independents - for simply concealing from Australians what they intended to do and who they intended to support. I am equally critical of the big money funders of this cynical green left con job.
There is plenty of criticism of the two major parties as a duopoly. But the fact is that many Australians value the known quantities that we represent. As one factoid which I think supports this claim, in Bradfield in the 2022 election, Labor came third for the first time so the preferences of Labor voters were distributed. In some booths in the northern end of the electorate, up to one third of the preferences of Labor voters came to me as the Liberal candidate. I interpret that as a vote for the stability that the two party system offers.
The Teals at the last election told us that their priorities were climate change, an anti corruption commission and the treatment of women in politics. But voters had no idea what their views and plans were on government spending, on more or fewer public servants, on how they would get inflation under control, whether they would be strong or weak on border protection, and a whole host of other issues.
Nor can you be sure that if you vote for one particular Teal candidate, any policy commitments she makes will be binding on the others. The party discipline of the major parties, by contrast, means that if you vote for a Liberal candidate, you can be confident he or she will support the policies that Peter Dutton or other Liberal front benchers announce.
In practice, the most important thing you need to know if you are voting for an independent is which party they would support to form government if neither major party gets 76 seats or more. The Teals were scrupulously silent on that question in the 2022 election.
At a time when Australia is facing serious challenges, a vote for an independent is a vote for somebody who does not tell you what their plan is, and who has no consistent or reliable way to implement their plan.
In the specific circumstances of the 2025 election, a vote for an independent is almost certainly a vote for the uncertainty and chaos of a left-leaning minority government - the Albanese Government but considerably worse, if that can be imagined.
Conclusion
Let me conclude, then, with the observation that the 47th parliament has the biggest cross bench in eighty years. Many people, including many journalists, seem to uncritically accept the claim that having more independents is a good thing, and independent MPs are inherently morally superior to major party MPs.
I disagree. The stability of the two party system is a good thing. It has delivered many benefits to Australia. Stable majority government is a foundational requirement for achieving any serious reform and advancing our nation’s prosperity.
But majority government is at real risk in Australia – in large measure due to the cynical green left con job perpetrated by the political operatives behind the Teal movement and their big money backers.
As the 2025 election approaches, the public interest would be well served by more critical scrutiny of the Teals and their moneyed mates – and more pointed questions about what the Teals intend to do should they hold the balance of power.
And my message to all Australians is, if you do not like the idea of an unstable minority government with a strong green left bias, even worse than the Albanese Labor Government, the only reliable way to head off that danger is to vote for your local Liberal or Nationals candidate.
[1] 2711-GetUp_Election_Review_2018_19.pdf
[2] https://results.aec.gov.au/20499/Website/HouseDivisionPage-20499-196.htm, D/L 2/12/24
[3] https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2022/nov/07/winning-teal-independents-backed-by-102m-in-climate-200-political-donations, The Guardian, Paul Karp, 7 November 2022, D/L 2/12/2024
[5] Lunch with an electoral lawyer: making every vote count - Law Society Journal, Aug 10, 2022
[6] The Age, Guide dogs charity to investigate CEO’s public pitch for Josh Frydenberg,
April 20, 2022
[7] JFK and the Two Joe Russos – The West End Museum, https://thewestendmuseum.org, D/L 2/12/24
[8] https://results.aec.gov.au//27966/Website/HouseDivisionPage-27966-137.htm, D/L 2/12/24
[9] Author calculations based on results reported for 2022 election (https://results.aec.gov.au//27966/Website/HouseDivisionPage-27966-137.htm) and 2019 election (https://results.aec.gov.au/24310/Website/HouseDivisionPage-24310-137.htm), D/L 2/12/24
[10] Media Release - Teals Vote With The Greens In The House Of Representatives Up To 81 Per Cent Of The Time | Paul Fletcher MP, 10 September 2024
[11] Media Release - Teals Vote With The Greens In The House Of Representatives Up To 81 Per Cent Of The Time | Paul Fletcher MP, 10 September 2024
[12] Migration Amendment (Aggregate Sentences) Bill 2023, Hansard, 13/2/2023
[13] Australian Parliament House, Votes and Proceedings (No. 85—16 October 2023, page 1023)
[14] https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/teals-back-tax-reform-despite-backlash-risk-on-negative-gearing-20240926-p5kdqg.html, David Crowe, Sep 26 2024, D/L 2/12/2024
[15] Ibid.
[16] Australian Parliament House, Votes and Proceedings (No. 2— 27 July 2022, pages 60-61)
[17] Australian Parliament House, Votes and Proceedings (No. 7— 4 August 2022, pages 114-126)
