The Rise and Impact of Australia’s Movement for Community Independents

On election night 2022, Zoe Daniel, Community Independent candidate for the bayside Melbourne electorate of Goldstein, declared: ‘What we have achieved here is extraordinary. Safe Liberal seat, two-term incumbent— independent’ (Daniel 2022). Daniel was celebrating her defeat of the Liberal incumbent and junior minister Tim Wilson with 33,815 firstpreference votes and 52.76 per cent of the two-candidate-preferred vote. And so it was that the Liberal Party was defeated by a Teal Independent in six inner-city electorates, in Melbourne, Perth and Sydney: Curtin, Goldstein, Kooyong, Mackellar, North Sydney and Wentworth. Yet, the full story of the Community Independent candidates at the 2022 election, and the movement that supported them, is more complicated than suggested by the caricature of affluent metropolitan electorates preferring professional female Independents over ‘moderate’ Liberal incumbents.