Tom White was an Uber executive in South Korea in 2022, a world away from the political earthquake that shook his native Australia. He wasn’t there when the teal wave crashed through his home town of Perth, dumping the Liberals from their prized western suburbs seat of Curtin.
White returned home in 2023 with the aim of winning the seat back for the Liberals.
He’s seen enough in the period since to feel confident of one thing. “Times have changed,” White says.
Whether that statement holds true may well determine if White and his fellow Liberal candidates in the seats of Goldstein and Kooyong in Melbourne, and Wentworth and Mackellar in Sydney, are able to regain the once-safe turf lost in 2022 – and if aspiring teal MP Nicolette Boele wins the north Sydney seat of Bradfield, after falling short three years ago.
Was the teal wave an anomaly, the consequence of a perfect storm of factors that no longer exist or have largely subsided? Or was it a realignment in Australian politics that won’t be reversed in one election cycle – if ever?
Hanging in the balance
The success of the six teal independents in 2022 (including Kylea Tink, whose North Sydney electorate has now been abolished) was widely attributed to a groundswell of discontent that built around Scott Morrison and his government’s inaction on climate change, political integrity and the treatment of women.
With Morrison gone and cost-of-living consuming voters’ attention, Liberals are optimistic about regaining at least one teal seat, even as Peter Dutton focuses his attention and messaging on the outer suburbs.
Zoe Daniel in the bayside Melbourne seat of Goldstein and Kate Chaney in Curtin are considered the most at risk, followed by Sophie Scamps in Mackellar on Sydney’s northern beaches, according to Liberal sources familiar with party strategy and internal research.
But Liberals are worried about Bradfield.
“They [the Boele campaign] are throwing lots of money at it – it’s out of control,” one Liberal source said.
In Curtin, White says, the climate of 2022 has been replaced by one defined by “collapsing living standards”.
He says the Liberals – at least in Western Australia, where the party’s brand was in tatters in 2022 – are now a more “competent and trustworthy” brand, while the teals have been exposed as “radical”, particularly on environmental issues.
The comments were made before the WA Liberals’ disastrous state election, where the party won just seven of 59 seats.
Chaney, by contrast, says the underlying cause of her success is still prevalent.
“We’ve seen a long-term decline in primary support for the major parties, and I haven’t seen anything in the past three years that would change that,” she says.
It is a view shared by Allegra Spender, who is attempting to defend Malcolm Turnbull’s old seat of Wentworth against the Liberal Ro Knox.
“Things have changed [since 2022], but I come back to the principle of why did the independents get elected?” Spender says.
“It’s because they stood up for the issues that mattered to their community, where they felt that the major parties were not standing … up for their values.”
Three years after traditional Liberals turned on Morrison, Chaney – whose lineage is Liberal royalty in WA – says Dutton is similarly out of step with voters in the party’s old heartland.
“Peter Dutton is testing Donald Trump’s lines, and that doesn’t speak to the values of an economically sensible, socially progressive electorate like mine,” she says.
Curtin sits on a 1.3% margin after a post-election redistribution, the second narrowest of the teal seats behind Wentworth on 0.5% (according to the Australian Electoral Commission’s estimate – the ABC’s Antony Green gives Spender a much more comfortable margin).
It means any misstep could shift enough votes to turn the result.
When Guardian Australia meets Chaney at Matilda Bay on the banks of Perth’s Swan River, the MP is caught in a media storm after describing the extension of Woodside’s north-west shelf gas project to 2070 as “unacceptable”.
The subject is politically sensitive in WA, where hostility to gas is anathema for the state’s influential business community.
Following a furious industry backlash, including dire warnings about the “nightmare” prospect of Greens and teal-tinged hung parliament, Chaney clarified she was open to the project proceeding subject to certain conditions.
“The idea that I would hold the country to ransom over a single gas project is absolute nonsense,” she said at the time.
The episode highlighted the intensifying scrutiny on the teals, who are no longer considered political outsiders but potential kingmakers in a minority parliament.
Asked who she would side with in a hung parliament – a question she’s fielding on a near daily basis – Chaney vows to decide each vote on its merits.
“I’ll retain my independence – that’s the promise that I’ve made to my electorate,” she says.
A ‘luxury product’
Of the six Liberals vanquished in the teal wave, Tim Wilson in Goldstein is the only one attempting to win back his old job.
Liberal MPs and strategists view Goldstein as the most winnable teal seat, where law and order and antisemitism (the electorate has a large Jewish population) are frontline issues.
Wilson, a former Australian human rights commissioner, senses a “dramatic change” in voters’ political priorities since 2022.
“People are realising that the teals are essentially a luxury product in a market where people are struggling to pay their mortgages and afford their energy bills and their grocery bills,” he says.
While continuing to advocate for climate action, political integrity and gender equality, the independents – in particular Daniel and Spender – are focusing increasingly on economic issues, such as tax.
Daniel says arguing for tax reform is consistent with her overarching political raison d’être: to advocate for long-term changes the major parties are afraid to touch.
“They won’t do it on tax because it’s too big, it’s too risky, it takes too long,” she says. “They won’t do it on climate because it’s too big, it’s too risky, it takes too long.”
One similarity with 2022 will be the budgets of the teal-Liberal contests.
The battle for Curtin has been billed as a “seven-figure” fight between Chaney and White, who has used large fundraisers with conservative figures, including the former prime minister John Howard, staffer-turned-Sky News host Peta Credlin and columnist Janet Albrechtesen, to increase his campaign war chest.
After spending $973,200 in 2022, Chaney has raised more than $1m in the three years since to fund her re-election campaign, according to donations disclosed on her website.
That includes more than $277,000 from the fundraising vehicle Climate 200, which helped bankroll the teal independents in 2022 and is backing 35 independent campaigns in 2025.
This will be the last federal election in which such sums can be doled out before new laws capping individual donations at $50,000 come into force.
After railing against the major parties for passing the laws, the independents and Climate 200 have used paid ads on Meta platforms attacking the caps to drive donations to their campaigns.
Among them is Boele.
‘Not just a vibes election’
The Bradfield candidate spent more than $100,000 advertising on Facebook and Instagram in 30 days before the campaign started, making her the 12th-biggest spender of any politics-related entity in the country.
Boele is considered the most likely of the non-incumbent teals to win a seat after running Liberal frontbencher Paul Fletcher close in 2022.
Fletcher’s retirement and a boundary redistribution which cut the seat’s nominal margin to 3.4% has made it even more winnable.
The finance and clean energy expert never stopped campaigning after 2022 – at one point branding herself the “shadow member for Bradfield”.
“People have always just thought that Bradfield is one of those places that when election night comes around, even when you see your how-to-vote card, it’s a fait accompli who’s going to win,” she says.
“And what they are seeing, considering that this is a seat that’s in play, is that they actually might have a choice in how they vote that can make a difference.”
The size of Boele’s volunteer army (it has doubled to 1,000 since 2022) combined with her campaign spending has Liberals concerned.
The Coalition started the campaign needing to win 19 seats to form a majority – a target that has seemed increasingly out of reach as their polling position slumps – and defeat in Bradfield would make an already uphill task even steeper.
The salesforce executive candidate Gisele Kapterian beat anti-voice campaigner Warren Mundine to win Liberal preselection, averting what some insiders feared would be a disaster for the party’s hopes of holding the seat.
“I think she is relatable to a lot of teal voters,” one Liberal says of Kapterian.
After a perfect storm hit the Liberals in 2022, Kapterian was confident voters would view the Coalition as best placed to handle the “complex challenges” of 2025, including the declining living standards in Australia and the global uncertainty of Donald Trump’s tariff war.
“People know this is not just a vibes election, this is not just about soundbites,” she says.
