Current talk of independent MPs (‘the Teals’) forming a new party is fraught and potentially a huge backwards step for a functioning democracy, Tim Dunlop argues.
The community independents’ movement had the potential to be the beginning of a reinvigoration of democratic politics in Australia.
Their originality grew out of the structured discussions of kitchen‑table conversations developed in the Voices-Of movement since 2013, as well as in local organising, and a commitment to the idea that representation needed to be anchored in community deliberation rather than party offices.
This is why the 2022 election was consequential. The result wasn’t just your typical swing or a protest vote: it was a realignment around a new “floating third” of the electorate. The independents not only tore the heart out of the Liberal Party, they installed a cross-bench, or the beginnings of a cross-bench, with real democratic legitimacy.
This wasn’t a glitch in the system, although the media often treated it as such. It was the system finally trying to reflect the pluralism of the country itself,
the bits that didn’t fit within the traditional two-party system.
Incredibly, it was an organic correction to what had become political party overreach, the sort of thing very few countries have been able to pull off. If current reporting is correct, and a significant number of community independents are now going to form a new political party, this innovation will be put at risk.
To understand why, we need a bit of history and political theory.
Particracy vs democracy
Parties present themselves as the natural form of politics, and as a political formation, they certainly offer advantages. Our official parliamentary practices, not to mention most media reporting, help maintain this naturalistic illusion, and in the standard story, Australia’s system of government is understood to be what happens when one party or coalition commands a majority.
In the rare event when there is a so-called “hung parliament”, it is treated as a kind of pathology.
What is erased in this story is not just how suspicious the architects of federation themselves were of parties (as were the US’ Founding Fathers: Editor’s note) to the extent they purposely excluded them from mention in the constitution. Eventually, the arrival of strong parties removed power and deliberation from the floor of the parliament and relocated it behind caucus doors, party rooms and executive committees.
Deliberation and sovereignty, the actual work of balancing competing interests, arguments and evidence, was taken out of public view. Decisions made in backrooms were enforced through a brutal party discipline, then more or less rubber‑stamped by a parliamentary chamber that increasingly behaved like a stage set rather than as a representative body.
This was sold back to us as democracy, but in fact, what we had been granted was a great inversion: elected members stopped representing voters in the parliament and started representing the party to the voters.
Two-party system failure
Over time, the two‑party system normalised this cooption of power to such an extent that the political class, including most of the media, came to see “politics” and “parties” as synonymous. The choreography of government versus opposition, Prime Minister versus Leader of the Opposition, became the whole story, and anything that disrupted that rhythm was cast as instability.
The result is a self‑serving definition of stable government that presents the smooth operation of party machines as the goal, ignoring the deeper, more demanding
stability that comes from a system genuinely responsive to a diverse electorate.
So, the current talk of the independents forming a new party is fraught and potentially a huge step backwards. I’m not opposed to loose alliances or shared branding, and some of that already exists informally in the way these MPs co‑operate and vote. And I’ve always been clear that independents are not magically above politics.
But a party is something else. It is an organisational form that centralises control, disciplines members and relocates decision‑making away from local communities and back into a caucus.
To the extent that a new party would be rooted primarily in the affluent, liberal‑leaning seats that birthed the first wave of community independents in the Voices-Of mould, it would also risk hardening exactly the class and geographic boundaries that tilt political decision-making away from egalitarian outcomes.
A backward step
If the independents go down that route, they stop being an experiment in doing politics differently and become, at best, new players in the same old game:
exactly the game that voters are indicating they are fed up with.
The 2022 breakthrough, which showed that communities could organise, preselect and elect their own representatives outside the party system, would be reinterpreted as a mere staging ground for yet another party brand.
The alternative they represent—a growing, heterogeneous crossbench connected to local communities, bound by overlapping values rather than a single platform, and prepared to negotiate issue by issue—is not only a healthier way to do politics, it is much closer to what we mean by democracy.
It doesn’t abolish parties, but it does break their monopoly on representation and forces a re‑democratisation of parliamentary life, allowing governments to build majorities in public rather than simply counting caucus numbers in private.
In my book, Voices of Us, I suggested that the independents were part of a long arc in which citizens could reclaim politics from the closed circuits of party and media. The danger now is that, in the understandable search for resources, staff and status, not to mention, I imagine, the perceived threat of One Nation, that arc is bent back towards the very form that hollowed out our democracy in the first place.
If the independents are serious about transforming Australian politics, they need to resist the gravitational pull of party logic and keep faith with the communities who proved that another way is possible.
At this point, we don’t know what a new party might look like, and as I say, I am not against some loose Coalition that gives collective advantage to those who choose to join it. And given how our systems of government, including the most recent changes to campaign finance laws, stack the ledger in favour of parties, it is understandable that people might want to access the inbuilt advantages of that formation. But whatever advantages are gained, something fundamental and potentially transformative will be lost.
All of which means,
I’m still inclined to think that parties are the problem, not the solution.
And here’s something further to keep in mind.
The local communities that voted for independents in 2022, and again in 2025, took an enormous risk, putting a huge amount of faith in their candidates to do politics differently. If it all turns out to be about the formation of just another political party, that will not just be a shame, it will be very close to a betrayal.
Republished by permission – original here.
Tim Dunlop is a writer and researcher based in Melbourne. His latest book is "Voices of us: The independents' movement transforming Australian democracy."