One of the most interesting democratic movements of recent years has been Australia’s Community Independents Project. The movement is a grassroots initiative, built on an intimate understanding of local concerns, and sharing political organizing tactics. Although its origins were in a rural electorate, the movement has had its most success in the country’s wealthiest, well-educated seats, where suspicion of the Liberal Party in its formerly safest seats has grown.
Yet the movement now finds itself at a crossroads about how to proceed, with several independents elected via the model contemplating forming a political party. Were they to do so, it would present the next stage in the fracturing of Australian politics. It also may prove an enormous risk to what has made the movement appealing in the first place.
The impetus for the discussion on forming a new party has come from Australia’s new campaign finance laws. These laws introduce caps on donations and campaign spending, alongside stricter disclosure rules. To compensate for lost private revenue, established parties would receive tens of millions of dollars more in public funding. While the laws were ostensibly designed to reduce the influence of big money in politics, they also serve to significantly raise the bar for new political entrants, creating considerable advantages for incumbents.
This financial squeeze is now pushing independent MPs to confront whether they can remain structurally independent or not. While their political appeal is rooted in being outside of the tribalism and negative incentives of political parties, forming a party would unlock access to the donation structures and administrative funding that the new laws deliberately reserve for registered parties. This places independents in a bind.
Yet the discussions may also be due to an ideological space opening up within Australian politics, as the Liberal Party has lost the ability to think clearly about what kind of party it is, and how to communicate with the public.
The Liberal Party was formed in 1944 as an amalgamation of the country’s conservative and liberal political forces as an attempt to counter the strength of the Labor Party. The post-World War II ideological environment in the West made it easy for such a party to be coherent and remain together – as to be a conservative was to work in defense of liberalism. However, without the grand ideological battle with the Soviet Union and through the emergence of radical new political entrepreneurs like U.S. President Donald Trump, this commitment to liberalism has waned.
This created the space for the Community Independents Project. Offering a politically consistent commitment to both economic and social liberalism, with a prominent concern for the environment, the movement has been able to build itself through seats that are sympathetic to these political ideals. With the Liberal Party politically confused and weighed down by its symbiotic relationship with increasingly radical News Corp media outlets, it has struggled to compete in well-educated seats.
The now enormous threat from the One Nation party has only intensified this problem. The Liberal Party responded to One Nation’s rise in a predictable manner: It has sought to ramp up reactionary rhetoric in order to try and coax back those who are now demonstrating support for One Nation. There is a clear problem with this approach, however. People who are attracted to reactionary rhetoric are always going to go for the real deal rather than the imitation. At no point has the Liberal Party thought that the better tactic would be to explain to people why One Nation is a threat to the country.
This has created greater political space for a new liberal party. If the Liberals and One Nation are both now trying to make the public more angry, more chaotic, and more grievance-bound, the Labor Party cannot be left as the only adults in the room. A new party of responsible actors who are committed to the liberal principles that the Liberal Party is abandoning makes both political and structural sense.
Of course, this is all easier said than done. Already two independents have signaled their unwillingness to join a new party, and forming a party would naturally lead to the very group-based thinking, internal power dynamics, and leadership contests that plague other parties.
However the Community Independents Project has already broken the model for political organization in the country; they could apply this same thinking and break the model of political parties as well. There may be an opportunity to create an arrangement more akin to a 19th century Westminster structure, where party discipline was weak and MPs were primarily concerned with representing their local constituents, while having a consultative and research structure for broader national and foreign policy issues.
This may present the opportunity to get around campaign finance laws and take advantage of Australia’s current political fracturing.
