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With grassroots support and funding from Simon Holmes à Court’s Climate 200, independent candidates are mobilising for the next election in nine east coast seats currently held by the Coalition. By Mike Seccombe.

The forces behind Australia’s teal independents

Independent candidate for Bradfield Nicolette Boele (bottom left) with her volunteers this month.

Credit: Facebook

If Paul Fletcher had been more tactful to Nicolette Boele a few years ago, his political future might be a lot more secure today.

As Boele tells it, about six months ahead of the 2022 federal election she had been approached to run as a community independent candidate in Fletcher’s safe Liberal seat of Bradfield, on Sydney’s affluent North Shore. At first, the finance sector executive was reluctant.

She was pushed by friends, though, and having done a bit of “due diligence” on the people behind the Voices of Bradfield group and been impressed, she was wavering.

At that point she had a chance encounter with Fletcher and put to him her deep concerns about climate change. He was so dismissive, she says, “it pushed her over the line into running” – and running hard.

It was a monumental challenge. Her opponent was well entrenched. Fletcher had been the member since 2009, was sitting on a margin of 16.5 per cent and was a cabinet minister in the Morrison government.

Boele didn’t have much time to mount a campaign, nor much money to run it. She did, however, have community support and, by polling day, 640 volunteers working for her campaign.

She nearly won.

“We got the largest swing in the country against the sitting Liberal,” she says. “It was a real shock to us, to be honest, given that we ran our campaign in about 16 weeks with $340,000.”

A little over $100,000 of that came from Climate 200, the crowdfunding initiative set up by Simon Holmes à Court to support community-backed independents in advancing progressive climate change policy. Most of the money didn’t come in until the final month, however, and it was not a lot, relative to the major parties or even some of the other community independents. Most of Boele’s volunteers, too, only came aboard in the final weeks.

Fletcher’s primary vote plunged 15 points, but he still won with 54.23 per cent of the vote after preferences.

Boele won’t be caught short of time and money at the coming election. She has essentially been campaigning since 2022, styling herself as the “shadow member for Bradfield”. She kept her electoral office open with the help of some $45,000 from the Australian Electoral Commission, which compensates candidates a few dollars for every first preference vote. She kept her volunteer base activated, campaigning for a “Yes” vote in October’s Indigenous Voice to Parliament referendum.

“We were the only Liberal-held seat that returned a ‘Yes’ vote,” she says. “We got match fit in the referendum and even recruited a few more people.”

Her people have “heat-mapped” the electorate to determine where the prospective votes lie. When The Saturday Paper spoke with Boele on Wednesday, she was about to begin a phone banking effort to recruit more helpers. She is hoping to have well above 1000 volunteers out in the electorate by the next election.

And she will have money. She has knocked on doors, pursued small donors and even tapped her parents for a loan, and this week the campaign coffers took in $42,000 from Climate 200. Hers was one of nine community independents’ campaigns awarded grants from the organisation of varying amounts, up to $50,000.

In New South Wales, the electorate of Cowper, on the Mid North Coast between Port Macquarie and Coffs Harbour, also received a grant.

In Victoria, grants went to three community campaign groups: in the rural electorates of Monash and Casey, east and north-east of Melbourne, and Wannon, which extends west along the Surf Coast to the South Australian border.

In Queensland, Climate 200 sponsored four campaigns: in McPherson and Moncrieff on the Gold Coast, and Fisher and Fairfax, on the Sunshine Coast and hinterlands.

All nine seats are held by Coalition MPs.

The money came from a dedicated fund set up two months ago, the Community Accelerator Fund. As of this week, says Climate 200’s executive director, Byron Fay, the CAF had a little more than $1 million in it, raised from more than 1300 donors. Most of that came in the past couple of weeks, following Peter Dutton’s announcement that a Coalition government would abandon Australia’s 2030 emissions reduction target.

“Donations went up twentyfold after that,” he says.

The establishment of the accelerator fund sprang from the understanding that to be successful, independent candidates needed up-front cash, not just to provide for the expenses of setting up electoral machinery but also to catalyse further donations.

“Early money is like yeast,” Fay says. “It raises the dough.”

It also helps to attract quality candidates. Indeed, in some cases, the Climate 200 grants are going to electorates where there is as yet no independent candidate.

The philosophy behind it, says Fay, “is community first, not candidate first”.

That is pretty much the opposite of how campaigns, and their funding, have worked in Australia. As much as the major political parties might seek to paint Climate 200, and the “teals” it has helped elect, as just another party, that’s not the case.

Rather than the typical top-down model, where candidates must sell the policies the party has devised to their electorates, the independents work bottom-up, says Fay.

“The idea is that you build the movement. You start with the kitchen table conversations, talk to a couple of hundred people through that process, you do a report off the back of that … What the community actually cares about fuels things.

“Then you draw up your candidate search spec. And often you get someone really impressive, and often they say no the first few times and take a lot of convincing.”

That was the case with Boele and David Pocock, and a number of other community independents Climate 200 has funded.

Climate 200 did not choose any of them; their respective communities did. Holmes à Court says the organisation provides the political equivalent of venture capital – where it sees a group doing something electorally “prospective”, it provides funds to accelerate development.

Funding is not dependent on a group or candidate agreeing to any particular policy prescription, other than meeting the basic criteria of support for climate action and “restoring integrity in politics”, though the funded candidates tend to be ideologically small-l liberal or centre-left.

A good example of the way the model works is the seat of McPherson, which covers the southern half of the Gold Coast and hinterland up the stunning Currumbin and Tallebudgera valleys to the border ranges.

It has been held comfortably by the Liberals’ Karen Andrews since 2010. In 2022 she won 43.6 per cent of the primary vote, and 59 per cent after preferences. It’s a big margin to overcome but, says Fay, in all of the seats the independents won in 2022, the incumbent conservatives were on primary votes of 38 to 43 per cent.

The Liberals are potentially vulnerable in McPherson, as Andrews is retiring and, despite her efforts to encourage a woman to replace her, the party selected a 29-year-old man who’s a former Canberra staffer and relatively new to the area.

The electorate’s demographics are changing as more young people and tree changers move to the area. Environmental concern is high. Housing and the cost of living are big issues, but so is climate; indeed these concerns are linked in an area particularly at risk of fire and flood.

“We’ve got home insurance bills going up at a rapid rate. Ours is up 19.5 per cent this year,” says Malcolm Edgar, secretary of McPherson Independent.

He and his wife, Leah Stacpoole, set up the group last year with friends and over about seven months conducted some 250 kitchen table conversations to identify community concerns. In February they published the findings in a 26-page, slick-looking document, the “McPherson Listening Report”.

Climate and the environment were big concerns, along with soaring rents, other cost-of-living pressures and homelessness. This was the case across age groups.

“There’s actually quite a lot of despair amongst the older people who participated,” Edgar says, “that their kids weren’t going to be able to have the kind of opportunities that they have, and be able to live around them.”

They also identified a sense that because it had been so safe for so long, their seat had been taken for granted. Fay notes that of the $2.8 billion in community grants handed out by the Morrison government, McPherson received just $900,000, or about 5 per cent of what it should have got had the money been evenly distributed among all electorates.

Edgar and his wife have put up $50,000 of their own money, now supplemented by $10,000 from Climate 200. A couple of weeks ago, the group ran an ad in the Gold Coast Bulletin: “Are you the Independent Member for McPherson?”

They hope to name a candidate by the end of August.

When it is put to Byron Fay that conditions are perhaps less favourable for independents seeking to replace Coalition MPs since the exit of Scott Morrison and the relative decline of climate concerns against economic ones, he politely demurs.

The drift away from all major parties has not stopped, he says.

“We are now, a year out from the election, before a campaign’s even been run, seeing the Liberal–National primary around the same level in a bunch of the seats where community independent campaigns are starting up. So the fundamentals, we think, are really good as a result. They speak to this desire within the community for an alternative way of doing politics.”

Plus there is the competent track record of the independents already elected – who will also get more Climate 200 money this election.

From little things, big things grow. Back in 2021, people who had worked on the campaigns of the two community independents then in office, Helen Haines and Zali Steggall, organised a conference to teach their techniques for winning.

Some 300 people from 81 communities took part. Every successful campaign in the 2022 election can trace its success in part to that effort.

A similar online convention is now under way. As of Tuesday, 730 people, from 121 of Australia’s 151 federal electorates, had registered.

Of those, says Simon Holmes à Court, maybe 60 will subsequently meet for coffee and say, “Let’s do this thing.”

“Maybe 30 of them will get going and maybe 20 of them will have a red-hot go. And we want to work with those 20,” he says.

As for Paul Fletcher, who inadvertently inspired Nicolette Boele to run against him – an electoral redistribution has cut his margin to just 2.5 per cent.

Thanks to his party’s nuclear policy, summarised by Boele as “too late, too expensive and too dangerous”, he faces a cashed-up opponent with a growing army of volunteers.

This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on June 22, 2024 as "Independents’ day".

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