Inspired by 2022’s teal wave, community independent campaigns are building momentum across the country in lead up to the next federal election.
is retracing her path from political bystander on Sydney’s northern beaches to the Gold Coast, where she and her husband have founded a community independent campaign in the seat of McPherson – one of many such grassroots movements proliferating across the country in the lead-up to the next federal election.
It’s a shiny little campaign vehicle. Regular events since April have yielded pledges north of $50,000 and a volunteer database of more than 600. At the time of writing, McPherson Independent was finalising its selection of a candidate for a seat that’s changing at warp speed. A hot spot for post-COVID immigration from Sydney and Melbourne, it averages 800 new voters a month, which has lowered the median age to 50 and driven house prices through the roof.
Of course, the unknowns exceed the knowns this far out from the next federal election, not least the timing. A date this year would be too soon for many nascent campaigns. State contests in WA in March and in Queensland next week – both against long-term Labor governments – are likely to shift the federal calculus. And however many community groups proliferate, not all will launch campaigns, still less find the sort of rock-star candidate who makes it viable.
Or the WA campaigns not just inspired but schooled by those who worked on Kate Chaney’s lightning-fast Curtin 2022 tilt, such as lawyer and Curtin Independent founder Tony Fairweather, another speaker at the July politics-in-the-pub event in Fremantle. Or Watershed, a new communication, data and strategy company set up earlier this year along the lines of Populares, which advised a number of 2022 campaigns.
Heise managed almost 48 per cent of the two-candidate preferred vote in a seat once held by Country Party founder Earle Page, cutting the National’s margin from almost 12 per cent to just over 2 per cent. Cowper is another seat in demographic flux after post-COVID immigration, typifying the way city and country streams are mixing. Heise will not only take Climate 200 funding, as she did last time, but is also consulting the teals’ marketing guru, Dof Dickinson, on refreshing the brand.
Within the Canberra bubble, views break along predictable lines. To the Coalition’s point woman on the teals, Sussan Ley, the new breed functions as an “opposition to the opposition and let the government off the hook. They claim to be a community movement but they’ve been bought and paid for by vested interests, by big money.” Ley estimates she’s visited the six formerly blue-ribbon seats almost 30 times since the last election. “They’ve brought big money into Australian politics.
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