New Teal Opposition (10 May 2025)
Kate Chaney says independents have gained a permanent foothold in Australian politics after she doubled her margin in the western suburb seat of Curtin and more than a million people around the country gave “Teals” their primary votes.
“I don’t think the independent movement is going away,” she said after her victory.
“I think people are seeing what it’s like to be represented by someone who answers to them, not to a party, and they like it.”
Ms Chaney defeated Liberal challenger Tom White by a comparatively comfortable 2.8% margin, enough for ABC election guru Antony Green to call the seat on election night.
The first-term MP breathed easier than she did three years ago, when she waited five agonising days of counting before declaring victory over then-Liberal MP Celia Hammond with a 1.3% margin.
Ms Chaney was 5,336 votes ahead of Mr White with 95,588 votes counted by the middle of this week.
“This time around we had had three years of doing politics differently, and that involved a lot of community engagement, deeply understanding our community, and I think that really made a difference,” she said.
Mr White polled well ahead of Ms Chaney on primary votes – 41.1% to 33% – but strong preference flows from Labor, the Greens and Legalise Cannabis were enough to close the gap.
The Liberals have made much of Ms Chaney’s reliance on left-wing preferences, telling voters in one election flyer that she “pretends to be independent”.
But Ms Chaney said the Teal movement was “based on there being enough people in the community who are unhappy to make some change”.
Independents had received 1,027,452 primary votes around the nation with 80% of the count completed.
Ms Chaney’s victory came despite an election-eve attack in The West Australian, whose front page on Friday claimed there was a “Teal deal” with Labor. The paper claimed there was a “secret arrangement” with “ALP campaign headquarters working to help re-elect independents to spoil Liberals”.
“I certainly didn’t have any deal,” Ms Chaney said.
“The campaign against me was determined to paint me as being someone’s stooge. I think the major parties still have a lot of trouble with the concept of independence. It offends them, and we saw more of the same blatant scare campaign. We saw I was apparently a Greens stooge, or an ALP stooge, or a Climate 200 stooge. The assumption is that there must be some man in the background pulling strings.”
The Liberal Party was so pleased with The West Australian’s front page that they turned it into a giant poster that they mounted outside Curtin polling booths.
Ms Chaney said although Mr White had not personally attacked her, his Liberal Party had thrown constant negativity at her through mail-outs, posters, pamphlets, press ads and texts.
“It was a pretty unashamed campaign against me,” Ms Chaney said.
“I feel so relieved that we ran a positive campaign in light of all the relentless attack ads and still managed to win. That was the thing that made me most nervous – do all these attack ads actually work? The conspiracy stuff just got more and more hysterical the closer we got to the election.
But ultimately, I think people didn’t buy it.”
Most of Ms Chaney’s exhausted volunteers attended her party at the UWA Tavern to watch the count on Saturday night.
“We’ve been very, very lucky to have so much community support,” she said.
“It’s a very humbling thing, all the people putting in all that time and energy.”
Despite not holding the balance of power in Parliament, she said she intended to continue tackling her job as she did before.
“It’s clear that the ALP has been given a big majority, but that doesn’t really change how I do my job,” she said.
“Ultimately, it’s about holding government to account. I think with the Liberal Party in its current state of disarray, the crossbench will play an even greater role in actually being an effective opposition, working constructively and collaboratively. We’ll see whether Labor’s majority gives them courage or just makes them arrogant. I will be pushing for better long-term thinking on issues like housing and tax reform, climate, productivity – all the things that take more than three years to do. These things often get ignored when politicians are focused on winning the next election, not thinking about the future of the country, so they will be the issues that I push at a national level.”
Ms Chaney nearly had a new Teal neighbour in Fremantle independent Kate Hulett, who came close to unseating Labor MP Josh Wilson.
“I know what it feels like to be in that very tense situation,” Ms Chaney said as votes were still being counted.
The 2022 emergence of the Teals as an electoral force came at the expense of Coalition MPs, but Ms Chaney said independents were taking the fight to both major parties.
“It looks like at this election, we’ll see a continuation of the long-term trend of declining support for major parties, with possibly under two-thirds now voting for a major party,” she said.
“I think that’s a good and healthy development in our democracy, and I suspect we’ll see more over the future.”
