Labor majority is a gift to Greens and teals — they can become the real opposition

That Saturday night party of the election, amid four blaring TV screens, food smeared across the carpet, broken bottles, soggy edibles floating in flat Coke — I spent the evening alone — the real question for any radical was: what did one really want?

The left party line has always been to hope for, indeed to work for, a hung parliament with a Labor plurality with a Green bloc it would need to rely on. The rise of the teal community independents complicated this somewhat, but the election of four lower house Greens delivered the sort of result many were hoping for.

Yet there was another thought, perhaps brought on by age, that maybe the best thing would be for a Labor majority after all. Disappointing as it would be — we should have run a sweep on the exact hour Jim Chalmers would say, “The books are so much worse than we thought” — any sort of minority regime would be an open target for the Coalition and have it staggering through withering fire to a first-term loss.

But the very worst thing would have been Labor falling short of a majority by one or two seats. Bad for the community independents and the Greens, because Labor could have shopped around and played them off against each other, forever, until the movement was destroyed by parliamentarism.

Now, by being denied a slice of power, the community independents have the opportunity to develop a movement without the fragmenting effects of it. They were always going to have to do this if the movement was to develop, expand, and be able to have a chance to replace its members as they leave (and some won’t want much more than a single term).

History is clear on this. Independents don’t survive unless they are diligent local members, available for very local issues and individual voter needs. But in the distinctive case of the CIs — and this is a pretty special occurrence in the realm of Westminster-system parliaments and all electoral systems currently — there is a need for something more.

They will have to show their voters, and the country, that they are both individual independent members and part of a recognisable movement. Ideally they’ll need a joint press conference at some point, with six to eight of them arrayed behind one very big table, answering questions from a pack of (selected) journalists. And yes, they should be in eight different shades of teal, after which the colour can be retired a little.

The teal-CIs shouldn’t be afraid of any sort of bulldust “Aha!’ accusation from the right about an expression of connection and unity. No one who voted for them was under any illusions that their candidate was not part of a movement; independent is not isolated. There’s bound to be some hostility to the teal-CIs from groups within other social classes, because the teal-CIs represent some very specific class regions — by and large, the intersection of knowledge-class types and the wider professional bourgeoisie.

That class sits on the boundary of the “rulers” and the “ruled”, and it’s also the “class of conscience”. Many people resent knowledge-class representatives (cough *the Greens* cough) because they have both a technical command — they run the systems and machines — and also a priestly/clerical role, identifying themselves with ethical action.

But you can only be what you are. Teal-CI electorates run the joint and own a fair bit of it. Movements that start in other class-geographic regions will be “teal-adjacent”, or simply in dialogue with the teals. The teal-CIs are expressing universal concerns — that we all need action on climate change; we all need a government of integrity — but in their specific politics, and they should do that in their own style unashamedly. Cultivating a little hatred from your enemies can be your secret weapon.

Having shown a basic parliamentary “manifestation”, the teal-CIs will have to build movements in their electorates.

In Victoria, that will be initially directed to the state election in November, where teal-CI candidates must run against the few remaining sitting Liberal members, and the Labor seat of Hawthorn, and possibly Albert Park — preferencing Labor, but still offering an alternative to the Andrews government’s road-building program, reopening of gas exploration, and the shady character of past Labor politicking.

In NSW there’s the lead-up to 2023 and, well, a banquet of rich targets. And in South Australia there’s the Bragg byelection on July 2, which is as teal as you can get, and where dissident Liberal Chelsey Potter may run.

The state campaigns are particularly important to building a general social movement. They’ll allow the teal-CIs to connect to local struggles — on the North East Link in Victoria, lack of public transport options, lack of green space, bad urban planning — that would in turn allow for protest and visible campaigning for aims achievable on the ground and connected to wider issues. They in turn would feed into local government campaigns.

Winning these state seats would be better than losing. But what’s crucial is running, to connect federal issues to on-the-ground ones under state jurisdiction. That would provide a focus and narrative for the next four years. Elsewhere, with a longer lead time, the campaigns have to be started from the ground up. Quite aside from the need for parliamentary campaigns to spread “downward” to be full politics, volunteers who worked their guts out and want continued involvement will feel justifiably betrayed if there is no way to continue the campaign.

With that underway, and a teal-CI movement unity established in the public eye, the teal parliamentary contingent can become a powerhouse of policy development and advocacy, connected to grassroots campaigns and in an alliance with the Greens on shared issues. In such an alliance — with some public manifesting — the Green-teal alliance forms a bicameral alliance, 12 in the house, and 13 (the Greens plus David Pocock) in the Senate. Each group needs the other. Later, it may well be necessary for the Greens to make their left status explicit in relation to the teals. But there’s enough for a shared program for now. 

The right has been crowing about the narrow lockout of the Greens and independents. One suspects that in this case it’s being honest (it seems impossible to believe it is so innumerate and stupid as to believe its “not right enough” line on the defeat, but hmm). The right is so focused on narrow victory, the big brass ring, that it can’t see anything else. The Green-independent bloc opportunity now is to supplant the Coalition as the de facto opposition, offering reasoned alternative policies to Labor, thoroughly documented, and producing and launching its own branded and collective reports, not only holding Labor to account but raising the whole standard of how governance and politics mesh with argument and evidence.

Meanwhile the Coalition will be plunging around, mistaking tactics for strategy, with no coherent position on climate change, the Uluru statement, a federal ICAC (unless it surrenders), women and representation, and much more. A unified “third group” will displace the Coalition into a disarray unable to be resolved before 2025.

What does one want? The permanent leftward shift of the Australian polity, the emergence of the “third bloc”, a left populist movement to represent disaffection in currently safe Labor seats, the defection of the Victorian Nationals from the party to sit as independent Nationals, the defection of moderate Liberals to form a teal “right”, and the descent of the remaining Liberals and Nationals into a reactionary rump of about 45 seats, never to regain power in their own right. Now that would be the occasion for a party.