Australian Politics

This is the section on the Teal vote from the study:

The conditions for the rise of alternative actors in Australian politics have been brewing for some time. However, voter disenchantment with the major political parties alone is not enough to see a change in outcomes; there also needs to be a viable alternative for these disenchanted voters to support. The 2022 election combined several factors which supported the success of the Teal independents, including demand factors from voters and supply factors from the Teals. Voters were dissatisfied with the major parties generally, and the incumbent Coalition government and prime minister in particular. On the supply side, the Teals ran well-funded, well-organised campaigns, that were widely covered in the media – with funding from Climate 200’s Simon Holmes à Court. The Teal campaigns tapped into frustrations with the incumbent Coalition government on issues where they were perceived as weak, including climate change, political integrity, and gender equality.

Who are the Teal voters? Are they ‘frustrated urban voters’ or ‘disaffected Liberals’ registering a short- term protest vote, or do they represent a long-term change in the political behaviour of progressive conservatives? Making any assessment about the future electoral prospects of the Teals is hampered by the relatively small number of these voters in the surveys. It also assumes that the strategies of the major parties will remain unchanged, an assumption that we know will be incorrect. We can, however, make some evaluations based on the prior voting and ideological placement of Teal voters.

Based on their recalled vote in the 2019 election, 14 a majority of Teal supporters in 2022 were tactical voters intent on unseating the incumbent Liberal. Figure 3.2 shows that 31 percent of Teal voters had supported Labor in 2019 and a further 24 percent had supported the Greens. Just 18 percent said that they had voted for the Coalition. The view that Teal voters are ‘disaffected Liberals’ protesting the policies of their party therefore applies to less than one in five Teal voters. In contrast, by far the largest group are tactical voters who see their preferred party as nonviable in the electorate and use this information to defeat the most viable party—the Liberals. This is a level of tactical voting which far exceeds that found in most international studies.

How do Teal voters see themselves (and the other parties) in terms of their views about the political world? Using the zero to 10 left-right scale, Figure 3.3 shows the mean position of the various party voters on the scale. Coalition voters are, as we would expect, most likely to place themselves on the political right, with a mean of 6.7 on the scale, while Greens voters are most likely to place themselves on the political left (mean of 3.0). Teal voters are almost the same as Labor voters in their ideological position with a mean of 4.4 compared to Labor voters’ mean of 4.3. Perhaps more importantly, Teal voters are more likely to see the Liberal Party as further to the right than any other party group, except for Greens voters. For example, Labor voters place the Liberals at 6.6 on the scale, compared to 7.1 for Teal voters. These findings counter the narrative of Teal voters as disaffected Liberals, showing that for the most part, they see themselves as left-of-centre.