The Coalition has run a wave of attack ads against the teal independents. Since January it has spent $137,000 on Facebook ads via its “teals revealed” page. Elsewhere, billboards in key electorates promote its anti-teal campaign website, and ads are also running on YouTube.
Many ads zero in on the teals’ voting record in parliament, and some highlight this News Corp article, headlined “Teals ally with ‘radical, extremist’ Greens”, which cites Parliamentary Library research to claim that seven teal MPs voted with the Greens “between 73 and 81 per cent of the time” over a period of more than two years.
But the Coalition campaign is based on only a portion of the parliamentary voting data and does not show the complete picture.
It does not answer key questions, including: are teals more or less likely to vote with the Coalition than other independents? What is their voting record on votes that a Coalition MP has called for? And do Coalition MPs vote with the teals on teal-introduced motions? These are the kind of questions voters living in teal-held or tightly contested seats may want answered.
So Guardian Australia has carried out a comprehensive analysis of how the crossbench voted in the 47th parliament.
First, let’s get some things clear. The term “teal” refers to the independents who ran in urban, previously Liberal-voting seats in 2022, but who differ from the Liberals on climate change and the need for a strong federal anti-corruption agency. The teals are community independents (independents involved with “voices-of” type campaigns) but not all community independents are teals – some rural and regional independents, such as Helen Haines, are not generally categorised as teals.
The teals are not a party. If you’re interested in whether or not they vote like a party, this analysis by Patrick Leslie, a political scientist at the Australian National University, is excellent.
For this analysis, two independents who were formerly in the Liberal party – Russell Broadbent and Ian Goodenough – will be excluded, as both were Liberals for the majority of the 47th parliament.
The full picture
I’ve compared the votes on every division (a division is a vote on legislation or procedural matters) held in the House of Representatives during the 47th parliament.
On each vote I assigned the major parties (including the Greens) a single position – aye or no – depending on the majority position of party members. I then take each of the crossbenchers, including Bob Katter from Katter’s Australia party and Rebekha Sharkie from the Centre Alliance, and checked the agreement between each politician and party on votes where each pair were present. Finally, a total agreement percentage was calculated.
You can see the results in the following heatmap. Darker shades indicate lower agreement and lighter shades indicate greater agreement. The heatmap is sorted by voting agreement with the Coalition (but you can re-sort for any of the other parties and politicians by clicking their headings).
So yes, it’s true that the teals mostly don’t vote with the Coalition and have a higher voting agreement score with the Greens.
However, at least some teals are likely to be better allies for the Coalition in the parliament than for Labor.
If we take Labor’s voting agreement score with the Coalition of 36% as a benchmark, there are two teals who are above this or tied.
Allegra Spender, in the Sydney seat of Wentworth, has a higher voting agreement score with the Coalition at 39%; and Kate Chaney, from the seat of Curtin in Western Australia, is tied with Labor at 36%.
But what if we look only at votes on divisions moved by Coalition politicians?
There are five teal independents who voted with the Coalition 50% of the time or more. And all the crossbenchers voted with the Coalition on Coalition-moved divisions much more frequently than Labor did.
So, despite Peter Dutton only naming one teal in his list of potential allies in a hung parliament scenario, the evidence shows teal independents vote with the Coalition’s divisions at a decent rate – they just don’t vote with the Coalition so much overall.
The major parties don’t vote with independents
While the independent crossbenchers support divisions moved by major party MPs a decent amount of the time, the data shows the major parties do not return the favour.
A stark divide can be seen when you look at the voting pattern on divisions moved by independents.
The agreement score between Labor and the Coalition, which is at 36% for all votes, shoots up to 83%, and the parliament becomes divided, with the two major parties on one side and the Greens and independents on the other. That is to say, the two major parties often vote together against motions from the crossbenchers.
Explore the data
You can explore voting agreement between the parties and crossbenchers in this next chart, including filters for division types and, when the division relates to legislation, the portfolio of the legislation it relates to.
Notes
My analysis uses vote records sourced from the Australian Parliament House’s (APH) divisions API and website. I merged information from several APH sources to combine the division with the mover of the division, the mover’s party, whether or not the division related to a bill, or was otherwise classified as procedural, and, if it related to a bill, the portfolio of the bill.
You can see and reuse the data here. I also cross-checked with data from the theyvoteforyou.org.au API and Pat Leslie’s data here (also from the APH API).
