Grace Brooks’s essay, ‘The Technocratic Populism of the Australian Teals: Anti-politics for the Middle Class’, puzzled me. While sharing her central critique of the limits to what the Teals can achieve without a party structure and platform, I disagreed with much of the rest of her essay.
Brooks describes the Teal phenomenon as arising within a milieu of ‘hostility towards traditional political parties’, dismissing the Teals’ use of the term ‘the duopoly’ to refer to those parties. Yet elsewhere she acknowledges the ‘etiolation of Australia’s two major parties’. It seems to me that the arrival of the Teals has been a welcome response to that etiolation. It is of course far from the only solution to decades of political stagnation in this country, but it has certainly blown away some cobwebs and pointed the way to different possibilities. I am not unhappy that the Teals are ‘technocrats’ if that means knowledgeable and competent, with “evidence-based” policies. Nor am I am unhappy if they are ‘populists’ if that overused term means in this case that they were chosen actively by the electorates they represent, rather than as the result of a box-ticking exercise.
Brooks is heavily critical of the ‘community’ approach taken by the Teals, exemplified in particular by ‘community consultations’. She suggests they are ‘nowhere near as democratic as mass parties in their post-war heyday’. That ‘heyday’ may never have really existed for the Liberals and it ended for the ALP in 1983. Regardless, the Teals have arisen in the 2020s, not the 1960s. As a disinterested observer, I have the impression that the Teals have been genuine and diligent in their efforts to meet with and listen to the people of their electorates, a process initially modelled in the Victorian regional seat of Indi by Cathy McGowan and Helen Haines. All such processes have their limitations, but the fact that they have led to an emphasis on middle-class concerns in formerly blue-ribbon Liberal electorates is hardly evidence of failure of the process.
Is the Community Independent movement ‘anti-political’, as Brooks suggests? It is certainly anti-party-political. But in 2022 several of the Teals rode a wave of the sort of ‘mass-electoral mobilisation’ that, as Brooks indicates, had largely disappeared from party politics.
Are the Teals ‘just as beholden as the current political class to polling data, focus groups and consultants’? That seems an outlandish claim. Is the Teals’ focus on transparency and integrity merely ‘a big part in the Teals’ (technocratic populist) messaging’? The Teals and other independents (Helen Haines and Andrew Wilkie in the House of Representatives, David Pocock in the Senate) have certainly emphasised integrity. They have pushed hard for a strong federal anti-corruption commission, for restrictions on political lobbying, and for important changes to electoral funding fairness and transparency. These are all matters of central importance to improving the nation’s politics. (In all three cases, the end results fell far short of optimal, thanks to the machinations of, yes, the ‘duopoly’, with the hope that a future Teal/Green/other-independent hung parliament might achieve better).
Reference to the ‘billionaire backing’ provided—via Climate 200—by Simon Holmes à Court ‘to support candidates who align with his values on environmental reform and government integrity’ seems a cheap shot. Holmes à Court has certainly been central to the Teals’ electoral success, but a shared emphasis on climate action and political integrity hardly justifies the implication of compromise suggested by Brooks. Other donors have (legally) given much larger sums to Climate 200. Far better to donate based on belief than for influence.
As the essay progresses, Brooks hints at and then makes clear her concern that the Teal phenomenon represents not just a rejection of ‘government … mediated via mass membership parties’, but in particular (for her) a ‘mass social-democratic party based on links to trade unions’. Barring radical change, such as societal collapse consequent on accelerating climate catastrophe, our system of parliamentary democracy will remain the heart of Australia’s government. As Brooks argues, in this system a political party (in contrast to independents, no matter how competent and committed) does offer a comprehensive policy platform to the entire electorate, with consistency over time. However, hope for the resurrection of a party held together with the glue of ‘labour and unions’ is as anachronistic in 2025 as a belief in the ‘ism’ of Marxism. Those of us ‘interested in left-wing social and economic reforms’ should indeed give up on it.
Brooks makes clear the challenges posed by the atomisation of a post-neoliberal society for the formation of strong, cohesive societal groupings, including political parties. Nonetheless, it is arguable that, in 2025, The Greens do constitute the sort of ‘mass social-democratic party’ envisaged by her. It remains to be seen whether a party with its twin cores of climate/environment and social justice can broaden its electoral appeal to break through the 12 per cent barrier.
We are in the midst of an election which has shown starkly ‘the staleness of Labor and the Coalition’. We will soon know whether the Teal phenomenon has been able to maintain or even increase its momentum. My own hope is that a good number of Teals, Greens and other independents will be central to a dramatic improvement in political processes and outcomes in the next parliament.
Response from Grace Brooks
I will clarify the limitations of the Teals ‘evidence-based’ and ‘community consultation’ approach with one salient example: housing affordability. The problem with ‘community consultation’ is that not everyone in the community has the same interests, owing to very real economic and social stratifications. For instance, the interests of property investors are in opposition to the interests of renters. There is no amount of evidence-based solutions or consultation that can address the solution of housing/rental affordability (lower house prices) whilst simultaneously protecting the interests of property speculators (rising house prices). This limitation becomes obvious in the incoherent policy platform of the Teals on the issue of housing affordability. Namely, their inability to address tax breaks for property investors which drive up property prices. This is why political parties based on articulating interests—rather than values, community, and ‘evidence-based solutions’—are necessary to cohere an egalitarian political movement.
The Technocratic Populism of the Australian Teals: Anti-Politics for the Middle Class
Grace Brooks, 17 Apr 2025
For all their claims of reinvigorating democracy, transparency, and integrity, Community Independents are nowhere near as democratic as mass parties in their post-war heyday.
Comments
I think what might be missing here – both from Grace’s very interesting article and from Richard Barnes’ response to it – is an appreciation of Teal-style politics as the authentic expression of a ‘class’ with a material basis in socioeconomic reality. If Teal and Teal-adjacent candidates appear overwhelmingly technocratic in their outlook, it is because, as members of a ‘knowledge class’ that has come to economic prominence in the decades since offshoring etc., they believe that ‘expertise’ rather than interests should inform political decision-making – a stance that (ironically) accords with their interests. If they don’t tend to see themselves as ‘political’ (except of course in the mundane sense of taking part in a political process), it is because they think (to paraphrase Stephen Colbert) reality has a distinct Teal bias.
The Left has always struggled with the notion of a knowledge or professional class, often on the reasonable grounds that it is a sociological category with no particular explanatory power, or that it’s the old right-wing suspicion of ‘elites’ dressed up in socioeconomic language. But one of the contributions of Arena has been to show how forms of knowledge are themselves constitutive of material reality. Understanding the conflict between ‘the Teals’ and the sentiments they represent on the one hand and reactionary populism on the other – a conflict that maps pretty neatly, I think, onto the 2024 US election – is essential to framing a liberatory politics for the future.