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.

This doesn’t pass the sniff test, you don’t need to vote “tactically” in Australia, we have preferential voting, so a Green Vote might preference a Teal and see their vote flow that way of the green candidate doesn’t hwt wnogh if the primary vote but thats a a different thing then Voting 1 Teal.

I think the point you are overlooking here is that the Teal candidates were brand new independents who had a big campaign focused on environmental policy presenting them as direct competitors to the Coalition incumbents. The study is suggesting voters made the collective assumption that their candidate/party would be unlikely to win (my guess is Labor voters: because these were Liberal seats, Greens voters: because The Greens up until this point had only ever held one seat in the lower house) so they directed their first preference vote to the Teal independents a) to ensure this new independent would gain enough votes to not instantly be eliminated in the first round but also b) with the hope that voters from other blocks (Liberal, Labor, Greens, etc) would do the same. The Teal candidate was likely the second preference for all of these blocks to a candidate from one of the other main contenders (Liberal/Labor/Greens). For example, a Labor voter might see them as more rational than a Greens candidate, a Greens voter might see them as stronger on the environment than a Labor candidate, etc. The primary goal in these electorates was not to get the first choice candidate/party elected to power - it was to ensure the Coalition lost the seat. The Teal independents were the candidates that these different groups all predicted would be the most likely to pull this off, but this required that enough people preference them first on the ballot to avoid early elimination.