(featured image appropriated from this ABC article)
I like talking about power. In my experience – in politics, civil society, work, life, whatever – power dynamics impact what people do, how people respond, and generally what happens. And then, people with power often don’t like talking explicitly about the power that they have, or acknowledging the power imbalances that might exist in a scenario, ostensibly I suppose because they’re worried about losing it? Who knows.
Anyway, power dynamics came to mind recently when I was reading Phoebe Hayman’s new article in the Australian Journal of Political Science – Political Outsiders? A Study of “Teal” Independent Campaign Demographics in the 2022 Australian Federal Election. Phoebe and I are friends, and research collaborators around independents and minor parties in Australian politics, so it would feel a bit weird to call her “Hayman” like I would writing about a different author, so I’ll stick with Phoebe.
Phoebe’s article got me thinking about issues of power and legitimacy when it comes to political actors – politicians, parties, etc – and so here are some thoughts on that. The ramblings consider not just legitimacy in terms of how many and what kind of people vote for political candidates, but also in terms of who gets out to support candidates, the candidates themselves, as well as who selects or chooses people to be candidates.
Climate 200 and the Liberal Schism
The article discusses the issue of representation as it relates to engagement in election campaigns – through a mixed methods analysis of Climate-200 backed (aka “Teal”) independent candidates, campaigners and volunteers in the 2022 federal election. The general argument is that these independent campaigns deviated only from Australian major party politics in one significant way – gender. That is, the people running, campaigning and volunteering for the Teal campaigns were like those that do so for major parties, except for there being a higher proportion of women. In particular, highly educated White women. For me, this supports the idea that the Climate 200 independents surge in 2022 represents a schism from the Liberal Party, centred around gender and climate.
Presuming that this schism continues (i.e. that the Liberal Party do not actively address their gender and climate issues and are unable to retake these seats from the independents) we can probably expect to see some form of realignment of power within the Australian right. This will be contested by many of the Teals, the Liberals, the Nationals, the variations of these state by state, and possibly also far-right parties who have won lower house seats, like One Nation, the Shooters, Fishers and Farmers – although whether the latter two can keep their elected candidates in the party more than a year post-election is a different question that may influence their negotiating power.
ALP strategist Lachlan Harris, appearing on the Casey Briggs’ great new ABC show Swingers suggested that a major party primary vote below 30% would result in a major cleavage in that party (and thus Australian politics). With the Liberal / National parties’ (LNP) combined vote in 2022 at 35.7 and the Australian Labor Party (ALP) at 32.58, that might not be all too far away.
Political scientist Simon Jackman, talking to Mark Kenny on the Democracy Sausage podcast, suggested similar. He noted that such an event was potentially more significant for the LNP as they don’t have a preference flow pathway like the ALP does from the Australian Greens, which essentially means that Albanese and the ALP could form majority government in 2022 on the lowest ALP primary vote since pretty much forever. Albo may personally hate the Greens (for ‘eroding’ his local kingdom / birthright out from under him at a council and state level is my thesis), but Labor and the Greens are an increasingly intertwined electoral wall against the right.
Internal Distributions of Power
What interests me is not simply who wins – instead, I like thinking about how power is distributed within these political entities. Who has it? Who is fighting for it? Where are the contests? Stereotypical politicians and political volunteers in Australia are White men, who by default hold the most power within the organisation. This is particularly true within the LNP. As alluded to above, Climate 200 is arguably a reaction to this – in an alternate universe, there’s a LNP government led by Malcolm Turnbull where most of the current Teals are frontbench ministers. That these Teals wiped out the moderate wing (all boys of course) of the Liberal party is also fascinating and certainly reflects why we ended up with Peter Dutton as opposition leader.
Ethnicity is also a factor when it comes to political power. Phoebe’s research finds that Teal ethnic minorities were “among the groups most identified as under-represented” when it came to participants in the campaigns (either as campaign leaders or volunteers).
This lack of ethnic diversity was observed in the make-up of Climate 200 backed candidates in 2022, and the candidates they are supporting in 2025 are overwhelmingly women and appear 100% White. In 2022 at least, as Phoebe notes, “Well-educated, professional White women were explicitly and successfully sought as candidates due to a perceived electoral appeal in response to the Liberal Party’s short-comings regarding the representation of women” (p.16).
In her article, Phoebe notes that, generally, Australian political parties were “less likely to run ethnic minority candidates in safe seats,” an effect that was “significantly stronger for the Liberal Party than the ALP” (p.6).
We can see this effect within the ALP at work in the 2022 election, where Kristina Keneally (a kinda Teal lookalike) was imported into what was a safe ALP seat (Fowler) over the local branch preferred member of the Vietnamese community, Tu Le, who eventually lost to Independent Dai Le (no relation) also of Vietnamese heritage. This election in Fowler it’s Le v Le, with the ALP finally running an ethnically minority candidate in what is now definitely not a safe seat.
Who selects the candidate?
I chatted to ABC journalist Claire Simmonds towards the beginning of the campaign about some of these legitimacy factors. The article was mainly about the independents, but I tried to make broader points about how the people (or groups) who select candidates are the ones that those people are accountable to when they get elected.
In her new article, Phoebe distinguishes between “applicants”, “recruits” and “self-selectors” in terms of selection of the candidates. A “self-selector” is how we might have once thought about independent candidates – particularly a lone wolf style of figure like Bob Katter. An individual who decides to run and then builds a campaign (and eventually maybe a mass vanity project) around them.
The other two categories are much more what we would think about in a traditional political party – people who apply (from within a party membership, or to an advert in the case of some of the Teals) and people who are recruited for particular qualities. Like the preference for well-educated, professional White women amongst Climate-200 backed candidates, or the way that parties try to recruit people with cultural capital – rock (Peter Garrett) and sport (Glen Lazarus, Nova Perris, John Alexander) and movie stars (Paul Mecurio).
Across the Climate-200 stable, Phoebe shows that candidate selection processes appear to have been decentralised: i.e. there were no conditions imposed on campaigns for how to choose their representative. This created a lot of variety in the processes – from candidates having meetings with community groups who eventually endorsed a candidate, to decisions made by the central “committee”.
In my view, the process that was used determines who the elected MP is ultimately accountable to. As I was quoted saying in the ABC article:
“When it comes to decision making, the people that politicians are accountable to immediately are the ones that they are going to make decisions to benefit.
“So, is that going to be a political party, is it going to be a bunch of rich people, is it going to be a group of engaged citizens?”
Double Down on Decentralisation
I’m hoping that the emergence of the Teals and the fragmentation of the right, following a similar trend on the left (albeit more organised into a loosely aligned Labor-Greens collective), will present a unique opportunity to reimagine how power is distributed in Australian democracy. The erosion of two-party dominance is a form of decentralisation in itself, as is the broadening of representation away from a parliament full of White men to that is more representative of the nation as a whole.
I’d also like to see more decentralisation in organisations, including political parties. Over time, institutions tend to gravitate towards centralisation and also forms of ossification and stagnation. Decentralisation, on the other hand, helps to redistribute control within organisations more organically, allowing new leaders to emerge and allowing them to adapt and grow.
I explored these ideas within my PhD thesis (and this article published out of it, or the tl;dr version published by the Commons Social Change Library) by thinking about whether decision-making in civil society organisations (including political parties) was centralised or decentralised. Also, whether the connections were relational or transactional.
In this sense, the rigidity of the Liberal Party structures saw White blokes in power keep giving the best opportunities to other White blokes. For the ALP, the quotas for women that they introduced have been a method to decentralise that form of power in the party. Along these lines, I’m a fan of quotas and structures that attempt to ensure diversity of voices and decision-making power.
Yes, I’m rarely if ever the beneficiary of them. But I seem to be doing plenty fine on my own. And how many more dudes named Mark do we really sharing opinions and making decisions and stuff? Off the top of my head there’s Latham, Butler, Speakman, McGowan and Dreyfus.
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