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Supporters of teal independent Dr Monique Ryan (Source: Facebook)

The teal movement has emerged as a formidable force in affluent urban areas but their influence is unlikely to spread much further. By Nick Cater.

Paul Fletcher entered parliament representing the safest Coalition seat in metropolitan Australia. Today the seat of Bradfield resembles Little Bighorn, with Fletcher as General Armstrong Custer, bravely holding the greasy slopes against the hostile tribes from the south.

The Liberal Party held on despite a 15 per cent swing against it in the affluent northern Sydney seat that stretches from Chatswood to the southern fringes of Hornsby. His closest rival, independent Nicolette Boele, didn’t dress in teal, but she wore the same platitudes: “Climate change action to give our kids a better future … forward-thinking economic decisions … restore integrity to politics.”

Unless the Liberal Party finds a better way to counter these sentiments, Bradfield could be the next domino to fall in 2025. Three years ago, it was surrounded by five solid blue seats. Now that Mackellar, Warringah, North Sydney and Bennelong have fallen, Fletcher is left with a sole Liberal Party neighbour, Julian Leeser in Berowra, who suffered a relatively modest 7 per cent swing against him but shared the indignity of being forced to preferences.

The rise of the teal movement made last week’s round of Liberal redundancies far more brutal than a tepid Labor Party could have achieved alone. It was a victory of neither the right nor left but the arrival of a third force that defies the two-dimensional continuum to which we normally turn to get our bearings.

While some teal candidates managed to portray themselves merely as Liberal voters with a conscience, the reality is quite different. In a survey of teal independent voters by Compass Polling conducted early in the election campaign, 25 per cent said they had previously voted for the Coalition and 35 per cent for Labor. The remaining 40 per cent were either first-time voters or had a history of voting Green or independent.

Even if the Liberal Party manages to draw its former voters back to the fold, the teal movement would remain a formidable force in the affluent urban areas in which it has flourished. It mirrors the challenge faced by Labor with the Greens, which will be its main opponents in inner-city seats in Melbourne and Brisbane for the foreseeable future.

Tony Abbott’s defeat in Warringah in 2019 delivered a shock to Liberal MPs in leafy seats who felt vulnerable for the first time in their careers. It was they who led the push for the Coalition to adopt the net-zero 2050 target, against the wishes of the majority in the party room. Scott Morrison as prime minister held out for more than two years, backed by his energy minister, Angus Taylor, who argued it was dangerous to commit to a target that there was no way of meeting with proven technology. Eventually, however, the nervous MPs got their way, with the caveat that the target would be met with technology, not taxes.

Yet none of it was enough to appease teal-leaning voters in seats like Wentworth. “I could tell people until I was blue in the face how much we’d reduced emissions since 2005, how much money we’re investing in renewable energy, the fact that we made a commitment to net zero,” outgoing Wentworth MP Dave Sharma told the ABC last week. “But people just thought that we weren’t serious about it … It’s not our policies … it’s a lack of belief in the sincerity of our commitment.”

For the policy to have worked in the Coalition’s favour, said Sharma, “we needed to look like we’ve got religion on this issue”. In other words, the Liberals would have had to be like the teals, who campaign not so much on policies but on articles of faith. Politics for them is not about trade-offs or meeting others halfway but a forum for the expression of moral purity.

Meanwhile, Morrison invested serious political capital in an attempt to hold ground in metropolitan seats that might have usefully been invested elsewhere. The defection of Coalition voters to One Nation, the Liberal Democrats and the United Australia Party largely happened outside the media’s gaze but was substantial nonetheless.

Australians are increasingly divided by geography, age and gender on the totemic issues that drown out discussion of more mundane policy matters. Anecdotal evidence from polling booths suggests the teal independents, like the Greens, appeal predominantly to younger voters who lack the loyalty to the major parties that is still evident in older voters.

The rise in support for the Greens among voters under 35 over the course of the last three elections has been dramatic. At the last election, 28 per cent of under-35s voted Greens, pushing the Coalition into third place at 23 per cent, according to the Australian Election Study. Support for the Greens was noticeably higher among younger women than younger men, and higher still among university graduates.

This polarisation by age may help explain why a seat such as Kooyong, which Robert Menzies held for 32 years, now features in the column of Liberal losses, despite a vigorous campaign by Josh Frydenberg. Australian Electoral Commission data shows that 23,000 registered Kooyong voters are under 30, about 20 per cent of the electorate. None of them would have been eligible to vote when Frydenberg first won the seat in 2010 with 52.5 per cent of the primary vote.

While the loss of ground for the Liberals is of serious concern, these figures offer some comfort. The rise of the teals does not represent a mass defection from the party as some would like to portray it. Their influence is contained to a relatively small number of seats and is unlikely to spread much further. Older Liberal voters have kept faith with the party, but many of their children haven’t.

Tempting as it might be to measure the magnitude of last week’s defeat by the loss of Kooyong or the swing in Bradfield, the result in the seat of Lindsay in Sydney’s west throws a different light on the Coalition’s performance. Lindsay was lost in 2016 under Malcolm Turnbull. It was recovered in the 2019 election by Melissa McIntosh, who held it on Saturday after preferences with 56.5 per cent of the vote. That makes Lindsay about as safe as Bradfield, which Fletcher retained with 56.9 per cent after preferences. The Coalition’s heartland is shifting.