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Election polling seen by The Saturday Paper shows teal independents adding to their tally of seats in demographics that cut harder into the Coalition’s heartland. By Mike Seccombe.
Polling shows teals support is growing in Coalition base
The electorate of Cowper on the New South Wales Mid North Coast is National Party territory.
Except for two years in the early 1960s when Labor briefly took over, Cowper has been held by members of the Nationals – or their previous iteration, the Country Party – for more than a century. In the past 60 years it has been represented by just four MPs, all men, all Nats.
At the 2022 election, though, something extraordinary happened. A woman with a background in nursing, with no allegiance to the Nationals or any other party or previous political experience, very nearly took Cowper.
Only a little more than 26 per cent of voters put a No. 1 beside Caz Heise’s name, compared with more than 39 per cent for the Nationals incumbent Pat Conaghan – but she was the second choice on the ballot for far more people than he was. After preferences, Caz Heise won 47.68 per cent of the vote.
This coming election, if polling seen by The Saturday Paper is correct, Heise will likely win the few thousand extra votes she needs to wrest Cowper from Conaghan. The research was conducted on her behalf by Climate 200 – which aggregates and distributes funds to selected independent candidates.
The poll of 980 electors in the seat conducted late last month showed the first-preference vote for Conaghan had fallen by almost five points since 2022, to 35 per cent. On a two-candidate-preferred basis, it put Heise on 53 per cent.
It’s not a lock – the poll’s margin of error was plus or minus 3 per cent – but Conaghan, and the Peter Dutton-led Coalition more broadly, should be concerned. Cowper is very different from the other seats the current crop of community independent candidates have previously won.
The rise of the so-called teals was the biggest story of the 2022 election. They not only won much of the Liberal Party’s most prized electoral real estate, but they also took out some of the party’s strongest performers and a substantial chunk of its already-shrunken moderate wing. That cemented the hybrid Liberal National Party of Queensland, from which new leader Peter Dutton sprang, as the dominant force in the Coalition.
Had Josh Frydenberg survived the election, he would almost certainly have become party leader instead of the hard-right Dutton. Dr Monique Ryan took Frydenberg’s Melbourne seat of Kooyong 52.9 per cent to 47.1. Zoe Daniel snatched nearby Goldstein from Tim Wilson by the same amount.
Their success was replicated in Sydney, with Allegra Spender taking Wentworth from Dave Sharma, and Dr Sophie Scamps beating Jason Falinski in Mackellar. Zali Steggall, who had trounced former prime minister Tony Abbott in Warringah in 2019, improved her margin, winning 61 per cent to 39 against the anti-trans Liberal candidate Katherine Deves. Perhaps the biggest surprise of all was the narrow victory of Kate Chaney in the Perth electorate of Curtin.
The loss of these blue-ribbon seats was a disaster for the Liberals. The only slight comfort was that all of them were of a particular type. The voters in those electorates were wealthy, highly educated and relatively socially progressive, attracted to the teals’ promises on climate, the treatment of women and integrity in government. The Coalition refocused on outer suburban and provincial electorates that were, it was thought, concerned with more bread-and-butter issues.
Since 2022, the political climate seemed to have grown more favourable. Cost of living, housing and inflation became the dominant issues.
Which is why the poll result in Cowper is so interesting.
The seat, which extends north from Port Macquarie to Coffs Harbour, is much less ethnically diverse than Australia as a whole and rather less educated. Only 9 per cent of its residents have university degrees, compared with 15 per cent nationally. Household income is only 70 per cent of the Australian average. Its people are almost a decade older than the average.
The neighbouring electorate of Lyne has a similar demographic profile. It also is held by the Nationals, and it, too, is at risk, according to the Climate 200 polling. The survey of 867 electors in late February found the primary vote of the Nationals incumbent Dr David Gillespie had fallen to 39 per cent, from 43.5 at the 2022 election.
This puts him in what Climate 200 founder Simon Holmes à Court calls the danger zone, which he recently described to the National Press Club as when a candidate’s primary vote drops below 43 per cent. This allows an independent “to come from second … and win”, he said.
“We’re supporting nine incumbents and 26 challengers. We’ve polled 19 of those seats in the past few weeks and in 14 of those 19, the opponent is in that danger zone.
“In all of the incumbent seats – the independents that were elected in ’22 and before – in all of those the opponent is also in the danger zone,” he said.
The poll results for seven of the 26 challengers, provided to The Saturday Paper, suggest the appeal of the independents – or perhaps the disaffection with incumbent conservative MPs – is broad.
The second most likely pick-up for an independent after Cowper is Bradfield, being contested for the second time by self-described finance and clean energy executive Nicolette Boele. It conforms closely to the profile of the seats won in 2022: affluent, highly educated, North Shore Sydney, adjoining Mackellar and Warringah. The current MP, moderate Paul Fletcher, is not recontesting.
A survey of 1047 Bradfield electors conducted on February 3 found the Liberal primary vote was 40 per cent. Factoring in likely preference flows, it suggested Boele would win, with 52 per cent of the vote.
Other strong prospects for independent candidates were quite demographically different. Forrest, for example, in the far south-west of Western Australia, is more similar to Cowper than to Bradfield. Climate 200 polling there recorded the primary vote for the incumbent conservative Liberal Nola Marino was 37 per cent – well within the danger zone. It projected the independent candidate, urologist Dr Sue Chapman, would win 49 per cent of the vote after preferences.
In Flinders, another rural electorate on the Mornington Peninsula south of Melbourne, the Liberal primary vote was 38. The Climate 200-backed independent Ben Smith, the 2024 Victorian Father of the Year and small businessman, also was projected to get 49 per cent of the preferred vote.
Given the three-point margin of error in the polling, Smith and Chapman are serious possibilities to win.
The final two seats for which The Saturday Paper obtained data are in Queensland: Fisher, on the Sunshine Coast hinterland, and McPherson, covering the southern end of the Gold Coast. The primary votes of the incumbent Coalition MPs are 43 and 42 per cent, respectively, and the independents are projected to fall just short – they are remote chances.
Even if they don’t win, though, the fact they are competitive underlines the big shift in Australian politics away from the major parties.
Roughly 30 per cent of electors voted for someone other than Labor or the Coalition at the 2022 election. Independent or minor parties now hold a record 15 seats in the House of Representatives – 10 per cent of the total.
As to whether that number will increase at the coming election, it depends on which opinion polls and pundits you believe. One poll, run in the Murdoch tabloids last week, predicted four of the current teal MPs – Kate Chaney, Monique Ryan, Zoe Daniel and Sophie Scamps – would lose their seats. Its sample size was just 830, across the six incumbent teals’ seats.
The more detailed Climate 200 polling has them holding on. Adrian Beaumont, psephologist for The Conversation website, noted this week that a YouGov poll of 40,000 voters conducted between late January and mid-February also had all the teal incumbents retaining their seats.
The most recent average of all the polls, compiled for Guardian Australia, found that while Labor’s vote was down 4.9 per cent nationally, the Coalition vote was only up 1.1.
Almost four in five disaffected Labor voters were going elsewhere. The likely vote for independents is up 2.7 points and the Greens up 1.1.
The trend has played out in a couple of recent elections, says veteran ABC election analyst Antony Green. In the Western Australian state poll, the Labor vote was down 18 per cent, from a historic high, but the Liberal vote only went up seven. In the byelection for the Victorian state seat of Werribee last month, Labor’s primary vote plunged 16 points, but the Liberal vote only went up by four.
American politics has given a name to this phenomenon: the increasing number of people who reject both major parties are called “double haters”. In the United States, where voting is optional, they mostly stay home. In Australia, they tend to spray their votes around unpredictably among non-major candidates.
Kos Samaras, director of strategy and analytics for RedBridge Group, says double haters are particularly prominent among Millennial and Gen Z voters. More than half of them, he says, profess no “values connection to any registered political party”.
This, says independent data scientist and political strategist Simon Jackman, presents an opportunity for insurgents, if they pick the right issues.
At the 2022 election, he says, the community independents rode into parliament by countering the Coalition government’s intransigence on climate change and its failures on gender equity, integrity and transparency in government, and by harnessing widespread loathing of Scott Morrison. This time, he says, the issues of concern to voters have changed.
The independents’ challenge, he says, is to articulate “a version of the teal issues set and campaign tactics” that can accommodate that shift in the electorate’s mood in their incumbent seats, and also generate wins away from leafy suburbs in Sydney and Melbourne.
This strategy is evident on their websites. Nicolette Boele declares: “I’m running as an independent because I believe it’s us, not the major parties, who are best placed to solve the challenges we face – rising bills, the housing crisis, and a supermarket shop that’s become far too expensive,” she writes.
The clear subtext is a variation of the Bill Clinton-era mantra: “it’s the cost of living, stupid.” Not climate or women or integrity in government.
We’ll know in about six weeks how successful the independents’ pivot has been. For many it will be tough, and some will likely lose. As the most vulnerable of the incumbents, Kate Chaney, puts it: “The community will make up its mind, and I will cry or I will celebrate.”
Their consolation is that the major parties are also struggling.
Polling shows both Anthony Albanese and Peter Dutton have deeply negative approval ratings. The expert consensus remains that the most likely outcome is a minority Labor government, and the least likely is a majority for the Coalition.
It may well be the case, says Simon Jackman, that the strongest thing going for the independents is not any specific policy but their promise to be honest brokers.
He suspects voters actually want a hung parliament and that the decisive consideration will be this: “Do you want a partisan seat warmer or do you want a player?”
This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on March 22, 2025 as "Teal towns".
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