‘Urgency and directness’: Inside Labor’s courting of the teal independents

Politics was changed in the 47th parliament in a way the major parties are still grappling with.

With a hung parliament widely tipped for the next federal poll, both major parties are wrestling with how to deal with the teals.

Labor in particular has worked to cultivate relations, given frequent cabinet-level briefings and contact with ministers.

“I have as much access to ministers as anybody in the back bench of the government,” independent MP Kylea Tink tells The Saturday Paper.

“There have been occasions where I will receive a note from a backbencher of Labor saying, ‘Heads up, this is coming.’ And I kind of have to go back and say, ‘Actually, I already know.’

“So, I do think that the government has made a concerted effort to recognise the potential of people like myself in the House and to work with me constructively. I’m not saying I’m getting preferential treatment at all, but I think I would describe it as a constructive relationship.”

Opposition Leader Peter Dutton dismisses the House independents as “green teals” who vote for Labor and the Greens while not achieving anything in parliament or their local electorates.

“If the Labor Party is to go into minority, it’s a disaster for every Australian, because Anthony Albanese will be joined at the hip with Adam Bandt and with the green teals,” he told reporters during a visit to Western Sydney. “And so the economy will get harder, not easier, for families.”

In addition to Labor’s weekly briefings for the independents, the Coalition now holds crossbench briefings, mediated by the manager of opposition business, Paul Fletcher, and chief opposition whip Bert van Manen, where there is an opportunity to speak to shadow ministers about their portfolio.

“It’s certainly productive,” says Monique Ryan, the member for Kooyong. “I don’t see how being overtly hostile would be helpful, really, to anybody.”

The major parties have hit election mode, and it shows. “I would say that the urgency of meetings is increasing,” Tink says, “and maybe the directness of meetings is increasing.”

It is not all positive. The early decision by the prime minister to cut taxpayer-funded political staff on the cross bench is still raw, although some changes to staffing were later walked back.

“There are times when it gets a bit tense,” Ryan says, “where I think of the sea dumping bill, where we had a feeling that the government was trying to pull the wool over our eyes with it, which they did actually.”

The member for Indi, Helen Haines, sees it too.

“I’ve seen some pretty testy responses from the prime minister in respect to political donations, for example, gambling reform … So, when it comes to policy issues, you can see a little bit of thin skin,” she tells The Saturday Paper.

“I think that the cross bench really takes it up to the government in terms of doing better, improving legislation. I think that’s the role we’re playing very strongly.”

The major parties are still working out what to make of the expanded cross bench in the House and the Senate, but Allegra Spender says they get woken up every now and again.

“The census example is not a bad example actually,” the Wentworth independent MP tells The Saturday Paper, pointing to the tension over sexuality and gender identity questions being included in the 2026 census.

“Because you sat there going, ‘Okay, Labor thought it was fighting with the Coalition on this, and this is why it behaved like this.’ But actually, it forgot that it was actually fighting the community and also a whole bunch of the cross bench weren’t going to let it go quietly either.”

After several Coalition defections during the term, there are now 18 members of the lower house cross bench, including four members from the Greens, stalwart Queenslander Bob Katter and Rebekha Sharkie from the Centre Alliance.

A non-major-party source told The Saturday Paper the prospect of a hung parliament, widely predicted in various polls, loomed large.

“Labor needs to work out who to dance with. They are being smart,” the source says.

“These women stop the Liberals from forming government. At the end of the day, the government needs the House indies to keep their seats.”

The Greens are also eyeing off the balance-of-power position. There are five more lower house seats the party believes it has a strong chance of winning. Moreton in Brisbane, long held by retiring Labor MP Graham Perrett, is one. There are also the Labor seats of Wills and Macnamara in Melbourne, the northern New South Wales seat of Richmond, and Patrick Gorman’s seat of Perth. The Greens also believe they can win the Liberal seat of Sturt in South Australia, but Labor thinks it can as well.

“We are confident that we can continue to hold our ground and grow,” Greens leader Adam Bandt told the National Press Club. “And we will be in a strong position to fight for change in the next parliament.”

Labor strategists dismiss the confidence as bluster, saying the Greens are over-hyping the contest when current polling places the progressive party at the same level it was at the last election.

“It is propaganda,” The Saturday Paper was told.

The Labor camp expects the teal independents to retain their seats and regards the Greens member for Brisbane, Stephen Bates, as vulnerable. However, senior Coalition figures have been talking up their chances of taking back Curtin from Kate Chaney and Kooyong from Ryan.

Unpublished polling, reported by The Saturday Paper in August, shows the independent Melbourne seats of Goldstein and Kooyong, Mackellar in Sydney and Curtin in Perth are at risk of falling back to the Coalition.

Monique Ryan sees the independents as challenging the party paradigm in Canberra. She fears Labor and the Coalition will do a deal over the government’s electoral reform package, which has been long debated and as yet not shared in its final form with the cross bench.

“My concern is that they will come to an agreement around electoral reform and donation reform, which will disadvantage minor parties and independents, and that were they to do that, as we’ve seen in Victoria and in New South Wales at a state level, that would potentially make it more difficult for minor parties and independents to be elected,” Ryan says.

“I think that’s a fairly rational concern.”

The historically low primary vote in Labor’s 2022 election win is not improving for the Albanese government, according to RedBridge Group pollster and former Labor strategist Kos Samaras.

“The probability of a hung parliament has definitely increased over the last few months. So we were looking at early in the year a 50-50 proposition where Labor may be able to secure a majority of seats in the parliament, but now it’s looking more likely at minority Labor government, and a deep one at that, so relying on a larger number of MPs on the cross bench,” he tells The Saturday Paper.

“I think the Albanese government, they will prefer to deal with the teals, but a deep minority government may indeed also require the Greens’ support.”

Publicly, the prime minister will always say Labor is aiming for government in its own right. During the 2022 campaign, he ruled out any alliance with the Greens.

According to Samaras, “2022 is definitely not going to be 2025”.

“In 2025, they are the incumbent government. There is no Morrison factor there. There is a slight surge to the Coalition vote that is mainly from the back of people that left them because of Morrison but will have historically voted Liberal,” he says.

“So, there is that element. Then there are the other factors like in Western Australia. There will be a recalibration. That result was absolutely an outlier.”

This week, Albanese said he was determined to add to the number of Labor seats and indicated that the government’s position would improve when it “came to the crunch” on polling day.

This is backed by current Labor polling, according to a senior Labor source, although not seen by The Saturday Paper, which is described as “pretty typical midterm polling results”.

What is more concerning to Labor people is the public expectation now, possibly nine months out from the election, that a hung parliament is a certainty.

It is a narrative that will change the way political messages are sent to voters in an already challenging media and social media market.

Cost of living is the number one issue for voters, but Samaras points to RedBridge polling, where only 24 per cent of surveyed Australians could name one thing the Albanese government had done since the election to make their lives better. A further 19 per cent were not sure. Only 15 per cent of people aged 18 to 34 could name one thing.

It is a harsh observation.

“Well, it’s a very difficult environment for any incumbent to get credit for what you’ve done, because the sustained cost-of-living pressure means that there’s never been a government in the world that people have felt had done enough on cost of living,” a source in the Labor camp told The Saturday Paper.

“It’s just inherently one of these things where people say, ‘Well, you know, that was good, but you need to do more.’ ”

Are the independents a threat to sitting Labor MPs?

Samaras does not believe so, although he notes such an unseating just happened in the Northern Territory election, with Justine Davis beating a former Labor minister to take the Darwin electorate of Johnston.

He says the public mood is with the cross bench.

“Whenever we speak to Australians,” Samaras says, “they like the prospect of the major parties having to rely on independents and other players within the parliament.”

Within Labor, The Saturday Paper understands, the threat is being taken seriously although there are not yet challengers in Labor-held seats with high enough profiles to win. The Muslim Vote movement in south-west Sydney is being taken seriously based on the recent experience in the United Kingdom where there was a strong Muslim vote against Labour.

One Labor MP told The Saturday Paper money was a particular concern, with expectations that an independent candidate funded by the likes of Climate 200 would “dwarf anything we are able to do”.

The MP said it was easy to promise change as an independent, but it was far more difficult to have a plan for the entire country and as a government.

The opposition leader publicly says he had a one-term strategy for returning the Coalition to power, but Labor strategists see it as a two-term play.

Dutton is not attempting to rehabilitate the inner-city Liberal vote in policy areas such as climate and integrity. Instead, he is focused on grinding down the government’s standing in the outer suburbs and regions.

The theory goes that a term of minority government would make it easier for the Coalition to beat Labor, and that Dutton is happy to leave Albanese to negotiate with a teal cross bench.

“We’ll see more manufacturing businesses close,” Dutton warned on Thursday. “We’ll see it harder for mining to compete. And if mining is not competitive in our country, we don’t pay for schools, we don’t pay for infrastructure, we don’t pay for police, we don’t pay for the hospitals that we need without the productive, mining and manufacturing and agricultural sectors.”

The independents say they are in parliament to “get things done” and have found their power in the current parliament by debating ministers on legislation details “sometimes for hours”, communicating amendments that don’t pass in the House to the Senate, and prosecuting policy arguments in the public arena.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gSTg99VoHLc

In some ways, Zoe Daniel says, not having the balance of power is purer and less transactional.

“I kind of like the fact that that process is not, ‘I’ll give you something if you give me something’,” the Goldstein MP tells The Saturday Paper.

“This process is actually, ‘You need to make better policy, and these are the reasons that you do it’. So, it actually depoliticises that to a large degree.”

The former foreign correspondent, who reported on the Trump administration from Washington, DC, agrees that the amount of money in Australian politics needs to be managed, but a level playing field needs to be created.

Daniel insists the independents are not a threat.

“I think the two-party system is a threat to itself,” she says. “It’s up to them to change their behaviour. It’s up to them to show more accountability. It’s up to them to show more vision for the country. It’s up to them to be more ambitious. It’s up to them to stop bickering with each other.

“It’s up to the Liberals to demonstrate what their principles and values are, and it’s up to Labor to follow their principles and values without pandering to politics of fear. That’s all up to them. But my role is to try and force them to do that … and if they’re not performing, to call that out.”

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