It’s a weekday afternoon in late February and I’m taking a nostalgic walk around the leafy streets of the suburb where I grew up. West Pymble, a generally unassuming place, sits on the unfashionable western edge of Sydney’s upper North Shore.
In the cricket nets at Lofberg Oval, where I played rugby for twenty muddy seasons, boisterous under-tens are practicing their batting. A short stroll away is the scout hall where I learnt to tie reef knots under the imperious gaze of Queen Elizabeth II. At the nearby pool a bunch of kids are learning to swim, just as I had done fifty years earlier.
To my eyes, the only signs of the passing of time in this quintessential slice of middle-class suburbia are the taller trees and the solar-powered EV charging station that now dominates the pool’s carpark. As I’m about to discover, though, things have actually changed quite a bit — and might yet change a lot.
At the West Pymble shops, just a torpedo punt from my now-demolished childhood home, I have an appointment to observe a group of political activists who are keen to overturn the established order of things here in the federal electorate of Bradfield. These friendly locals in matching blue-green T-shirts are leafletting their fellow West Pymblians. “Vote 1 Nicolette Boele Independent,” the team’s leaflets proclaim. “For people, not political parties.”
When I lived in West Pymble it was pretty much a politics-free zone. No one leafletted the citizenry weeks before an election; we all knew which party would win. Since 1949, when it was created, Bradfield has been an impenetrable Liberal Party citadel. Not anymore. Democracy has broken out on its streets.
According to the ABC’s election analyst Antony Green, Bradfield will be a seat to watch at this year’s upcoming federal election. In the teal corner is the community independent Nicolette Boele (pronounced Buller); in the blue corner is Liberal candidate Gisele Kapterian, a party moderate who used to work for Coalition foreign minister Julie Bishop.
It will be a closely fought campaign. Boele first ran for Bradfield against Scott Morrison’s communications minister, Paul Fletcher, in 2022. That year seven teal or teal-like independents shocked the political establishment by winning (or defending) blue-ribbon Liberal seats across the country, including Bradfield’s neighbouring electorates of Warringah, North Sydney and Mackellar.
Though Boele didn’t manage to surf the teal wave all the way to shore, she did take Fletcher’s margin from a whopping 16.5 per cent to a marginal 4.2. Suddenly this Liberal citadel was missing a portcullis.
A year and a half later, at the 2023 Voice referendum, Bradfield was the only Liberal-held seat in the country to return a majority Yes vote, with a shade over 52 per cent in favour. Boele had kept her network of election supporters in place and campaigned for the Yes vote. The counterweights on the drawbridge had fallen into disrepair.
Then, in September last year, the Australian Electoral Commission redistributed the seat of North Sydney — held since 2022 by teal independent Kylea Tink — out of existence. A substantial chunk of the seat’s voters were transferred to Bradfield, reducing the Liberal margin to a notional 2.5 per cent. The alligators had disappeared from the moat.
And then, in December, Paul Fletcher announced he would retire from politics. Fletcher maintains this unfortunate series of events didn’t influence his decision, but he didn’t do his party any favours by pulling the plug. Sitting members usually bring in a percent or two of the vote simply by being the incumbent. The citadel’s defences had all but crumbled.
When I catch up with Ms Boele at her new HQ in Lindfield, just a stone’s throw down the road from Fletcher’s Pacific Highway office, she assures me that Bradfield’s many disgruntled voters are still unhappy today. “What I think a lot of people are thinking is that the Liberal Party no longer understands them, or even seeks to understand them, or represent their values,” she says.
Her campaign has deep roots in the community and a battalion of 950 volunteers. Boele and her team have been hard at it since February. Her campaign website shows every day packed with events across the electorate: doorknocking in Chatswood; leafletting in Wahroonga; corflute lines in St Ives. The operation is also well-funded by donors large and small, the former including Climate 200, the pressure group founded by businessman and political activist Simon Holmes à Court.
The Boele insurgency might be the most interesting thing to happen in West Pymble since the 1950s, when police shut down the open-air two-up game held weekly in the bush at the end of Minnamurra Crescent. And the most interesting thing to happen at this year’s election might yet be the formation of Australia’s third minority federal government in its history.
Not that the numbers and complexion of the post-election crossbench in the House of Representatives are easy to predict.
The current parliament’s nineteen crossbenchers include the seven teals; four Greens; that unclassifiable Queenslander, Bob Katter; Rebekha Sharkie from South Australia’s Centre Alliance; veteran Tasmanian independent Andrew Wilkie; the teal-adjacent rural independent Helen Haines; former Liberal Party member Dai Le; and three refugees from the Coalition — former National Andrew Gee and former Liberals Russell Broadbent and Ian Goodenough.
Changes are inevitable. For a start, the redistribution made Kylea Tink a one-termer. Teals having a second go, like Bradfield’s Boele or Wannon’s freshly cashed-up Alex Dyson or Cowper’s Caz Heise, could yet enter the parliament. The Greens, on the other hand, are predicted to struggle, so there might be fewer of them. Dai Le is in for a tough fight in Fowler against Labor’s Tu Le. The three former Coalition MPs will struggle to hang on.
The key bloc will be the six teal MPs plus rural independent Helen Haines, who seem on track to successfully defend their seats. In these seats held for decades by the Liberal Party, they represent a teal wall Peter Dutton will be hard-pressed to surmount if he wants to claim majority government.
So, how likely is it that the 2025 federal election will give neither Labor nor the Coalition a majority in the House of Representatives? According to some polls, quite likely.
An Accent Research and Redbridge Group poll conducted in December last year projected a 98 per cent chance of minority government. For what it’s worth, the poll predicted the following result: sixty-nine Coalition, sixty-four Labor, four Greens, nine others, and four ties (between Labor and the Coalition).
A mid-February YouGov poll predicted seventy-three Coalition, sixty-six Labor, one Green and ten others. But polling expert Ben Raue of The Tally Room noted, “If you drill into the individual seat data, it produces most likely outcomes of seventy Coalition, sixty-six Labor, ten others, one Greens and three ties.”
No one in any of these three possible scenarios is getting the seventy-six seats needed to claim outright victory.
At this point I make the usual provisos about polls. They’re a snapshot, an educated guess, the election hasn’t even been called yet. Regardless, I will make this bold claim: if the polls are right — and remain that way up to polling day — the politicians of Australia will be off to the saleyards in the wake of this year’s federal election and the horse-trading will begin.
Not long after his self-guided defenestration from politics, Fletcher delivered a somewhat bitter speech to the Sydney Institute. Setting the tone was his opening declaration that “the teals are a giant green-left con job.” But his main argument was the danger they posed to the majesty of majority government. “My argument is that majority government is a good thing for Australia,” he said, “and the teals constitute the most serious threat to majority government in eighty years.”
The prospect of a hung parliament is often portrayed —mainly by the major parties and their supporters — as a political disaster. Don’t believe the hype. Sydney University’s Anne Twomey, a leading expert on the Australian constitution, says a hung parliament is “one of those subjects about which there are a lot of myths, usually myths that are manipulated for self-serving purposes.”
It’s sometimes argued, for example, that the party with the largest number of seats or highest primary vote should supply the prime minister. Unfortunately for advocates of this position, it doesn’t take the Constitution into account. In the event of a hung parliament, it’s of no interest to the governor-general who has the most seats or the biggest primary vote; it’s all about who can demonstrate they have the numbers to pass a confidence vote on the floor of the House of Representatives.
If there is a hung parliament, Peter Dutton has said he would talk with (and presumably seek support from) Bob Katter, Dai Le and — interestingly — the teal member for Wentworth, Allegra Spender. I would add Mayo’s Rebecca Sharkie as a likely target. But he’s ruled out dealing with the other teals and the Greens.
If he’s going to be PM in a minority government with these four crossbenchers, the Coalition will need to win seventy-three seats: because seventy-three plus four, minus one speaker, is a majority of seventy-six on the floor of the House.
If he doesn’t get to seventy-three, Dutton will have to choose some extra dance partners, and maybe some of them will prefer to boogie with DJ Albo, leaving the Liberal leader as a political wallflower.
If the Coalition does win the most seats, it won’t mean Dutton’s a shoo-in for the Lodge. If Labor got to sixty-nine and the Coalition dropped to seventy, for example, and if the six urban teals, the lone rural teal Helen Haines and Dai Le (who, after all, represents an old Labor seat) all threw their lot in with Labor, the Albanese government would survive with seventy-seven votes on the floor of the House. Stranger things have happened in Australian politics. Anyone remember the illustrious career of senator Pat Field?
And what of Paul Fletcher’s contention that minority governments lead to domestic political chaos? It’s not well remembered today, but Julia Gillard’s minority government was a pretty well-run operation. Despite not having the numbers on its own, it managed to pass much of its legislative agenda with the aid of three independents (Andrew Wilkie, Rob Oakeshott and Tony Windsor) and the sole Green in the House at the time, Adam Bandt.
And the person in charge of all this, as manager of government business in the House, was a bloke named Anthony Albanese. Much of the chaos in the Gillard years was the result of internecine hatreds within the Labor Party arising from the dumping of Kevin Rudd, not the minority status of the government.
Critics could also point to the Trump Factor. At times of geopolitical tumult, some commentators will argue that Australians would be mad to risk a minority government. History tells a slightly different story.
In October 1941 the balance of power in federal parliament was held by two independents: Arthur Coles, co-founder of the Coles department store chain, and Alexander Wilson, a wheat farmer from Victoria. The prime minister was the Country Party’s Arthur Fadden, who ruled in coalition with the United Australia Party, which had recently hacked down its own PM, Robert Menzies.
Not surprisingly, the government was fractured by internal divisions and never looked like being an ongoing concern. Fadden was famously advised by his Country Party colleague Archie Cameron not to bother taking up residence at the Lodge because he “would scarcely have time to wear a track from the back door to the shithouse.” He was right.
Coles and Wilson voted to bring down the Fadden government after a biblical forty days. Labor’s John Curtin became prime minister, and performed the job very creditably until his death in 1945.
This momentous event happened in wartime — just a few months later the Japanese would be on our doorstep — and yet Canberra didn’t crumble into dust and the Australian nation didn’t collapse into the sea. Chaos wasn’t created by independents; it was ended by them.
Still, the Trump Factor might trump all. If the election comes down to a question of who is best placed to handle the erratic and dangerous president of the United States, voters might feel inclined to favour the major parties — and even the government — over independents and minor parties. Better the devil you know.
Depending on how the numbers work out, a key question in all of this will be: are the teal independents ordinary politicians?
Are they people who, having clawed their way into parliament, will hang on for dear life? Or are they motivated by a higher ambition, to make a difference, even if it might mean losing their seat? Would they prefer to stick around for a good time, rather than a long time, and bugger the adverse electoral consequences that anointing Anthony Albanese as PM could possibly have in their formerly Liberal seats? Or will they hold their noses and support a government that wants to solve the climate crisis by spending huge wads of public money on nuclear reactors?
If the teals do well, could we end up with a crossbencher as speaker? Would you like to see question time monitored by someone like the teals’ Monique Ryan? In their negotiations with the Coalition, this key slice of the crossbench might even insist that the secret coalition agreement governing the relationship between the Liberals and the Nationals is made publicly available for the first time in its history.
Most importantly, better policy ideas might have a better chance of becoming law. Many issues flicked into the too-hard basket by the major parties might finally get a run: tax reform, for example, on which the teals’ Allegra Spender has done a lot of work in conjunction with the former Treasury head Ken Henry.
The respected political journalist George Megalogenis revealed in his recent Quarterly Essay, Minority Report: The New Shape of Australian Politics, that his attitude towards minority government has changed over the years. Once fearful of its potential for gridlock, he’s now more optimistic. It could be the shot in the arm Australian democracy and policymaking needs.
We hear a lot about disruption nowadays. Minority government might be disruption, but in this case it would come with Australian characteristics — and might not be such a bad thing. •
Funding for this article from the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund is gratefully acknowledged.
