Rarely in Australian history has a governing party suffered such loss in the face of an opponent unable to claim complete victory.\u00a0 It said much about the disillusionment, and plain disgust, from that nebulous centre of the country\u2019s politics.\u00a0 That centre roared on May 21, consuming sitting government members and inflicting a bloody reckoning.<\/p>\n
That reckoning was made in traditional inner-city seats that have never known anyone other than conservative members.\u00a0 It was part of a \u201cteal\u201d electoral tsunami, comprising candidates who would not necessarily wish to vote for Labor or the Greens, but who had found the Liberal-National government of Scott Morrison impossible to stomach on matters ranging from gender equality to climate change.<\/p>\n
In the Melbourne seat of Goldstein, held by the Liberal Party\u2019s Tim Wilson, former ABC journalist Zoe Wilson stormed through.\u00a0 It was a showing most fitting: the electorate is named<\/a> after Vera Goldstein, feminist and women\u2019s rights campaigner who, in 1903, was the first woman to stand for election in a national parliament.\u00a0 \u201cShe ran as an independent several times,\u201d Wilson said<\/a> in a telling reminder, \u201cbecause she was so independent that she couldn\u2019t bring herself to run for either of the major parties.\u201d<\/p>\n In the same city, the treasurer, Josh Frydenberg, was overwhelmed by Dr Monique Ryan in Kooyong.\u00a0 (Postal votes are currently being tallied, but it does not seem likely that Ryan will lose.)\u00a0 This loss for the Liberals will be keenly felt, given Frydenberg\u2019s leadership aspirations.<\/p>\n The story was repeated in Sydney, with the same narrative directed like a dagger at the Morrison government: You, fossil fuel devotees, mocked climate change, disregarded gender equality, and sneered at policing corruption in federal politics.\u00a0 Wentworth went to businesswoman Allegra Spender, who had, during the course of her campaign, managed to assemble an army of 1200 volunteers.<\/p>\n Spender\u2019s team, comprising a number of company directors, many women, is a revealing sign that movements can take root in the arid soil of caution that is Australian politics.\u00a0 \u201cYou said you were standing for the community, not the party,\u201d she told<\/a> supporters, \u201cfor taking responsibility, not blaming, for compassion, not division and for the future, not the past.\u201d<\/p>\n In the seat of North Sydney, held by the mild-mannered Liberal Trent Zimmerman, a victorious Kylea Tink reiterated the laundry list issues that had motivated the teal revolution.\u00a0 \u201cThe majority things for me,\u201d she told<\/a> Crikey<\/em>, \u201care climate action, integrity and addressing inequality.\u201d<\/p>\n The victory of the various independents was the Liberal Party\u2019s version of the Trojan Horse, one that had found itself parked in their heartland seats and released on election night.\u00a0 It was a triumph of community organisation, not rusted party politics, despite Wilson\u2019s fulminations about sinister external forces at work. It was the apotheosis of a movement that began with Cathy McGowan, the Victorian independent who won the rural seat of Indi in 2013.<\/p>\n This was also an election which delivered the highest Greens vote ever.\u00a0 Queensland, almost always the deciding state, may well furnish two, possibly three Greens members in the House of Representatives.\u00a0 The Greens leader, Adam Bandt, put much of it<\/a> down to the turbulent, vicious weather of recent times.\u00a0 \u201cWe\u2019ve just had three years of droughts and then fires and then floods and then floods again and people can see that this is happening.\u201d<\/p>\n Remarkably for the group, they managed to win the Liberal-held seat of Ryan in the process.\u00a0 They are also on the hunt in the Labor-held Melbourne seat of Macnamara.\u00a0 \u201cWe are now on planet Greensland,\u201d exclaimed<\/a> the Greens candidate Elizabeth Watson-Brown on realising her triumph in Ryan, \u201cand we are taking it forward.\u201d<\/p>\n While the Labor opposition have good reason to cheer the prospect of forming government in almost a decade, other facts are impossible to ignore.\u00a0 The Greens continued their now established historical trend of eating away at Labor\u2019s vote in inner suburban areas, notably in Queensland.<\/p>\n Across several states, the party actually suffered, along the Liberal National coalition, a precipitous fall in the primary vote.\u00a0 To form government on such a low primary return is staggering and says much about the loss of appeal of the established parties.\u00a0 \u201cIt would be an unusual win for Labor,\u201d noted<\/a> a sour editorial from the Australian Financial Review<\/em>, \u201cwith no grand policy ambitions or sweeping difference from the incumbent Coalition government.\u201d\u00a0 Only Western Australia, keen to punish the Morrison government, arrested that tendency, and may end up giving Anthony Albanese a majority.<\/p>\n Labor also bungled in the previously safely held south-west Sydney seat of Fowler, where Kristina Keneally, who had only lived in the electorate for a brief spell, missed out to local grassroots independent, Dai Le.\u00a0 The swing of almost 18 per cent<\/a> away from Labor shows that Keneally, when she suffers defeat, does so in grandly catastrophic fashion.\u00a0 The story of this debacle is also salutary to major parties who parachute heavy weight politicians into seats as part of party and personal ambition, rather than the interests of voters.<\/p>\n While the bruised LNP will lick their wounds and rue their ignorance of the community movement that gathered pace under their noses, Australia\u2019s major parties will have to consider a new phenomenon: the non-career parliamentarian, one who enters parliament, not for party allegiance and faction but for voter representation and change.\u00a0 For the Westminster model of government, this is indeed a stunning novelty.<\/p>The post The Great Teal Tsunami: Arise Australia\u2019s Independents<\/a> first appeared on Dissident Voice<\/a>.\n This post was originally published on Dissident Voice<\/a>. <\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Rarely in Australian history has a governing party suffered such loss in the face of an opponent unable to claim complete victory.\u00a0 It said much about the disillusionment, and plain disgust, from that nebulous centre of the country\u2019s politics.\u00a0 That centre roared on May 21, consuming sitting government members and inflicting a bloody reckoning. That [\u2026]<\/p>\n The post The Great Teal Tsunami: Arise Australia\u2019s Independents<\/a> first appeared on Dissident Voice<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":30,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[175,50],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/666084"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/30"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=666084"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/666084\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":667133,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/666084\/revisions\/667133"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=666084"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=666084"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=666084"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}