Australia elections: Women's anger on climate change ends Liberal party rule

Professional women and voters concerned about climate change unleashed a third force in Australia’s election, taking a number of seats that ended nine years of conservative rule even as the Labour Party remained five seats short of forming the government.

Women who left successful careers in business, medicine and media to enter politics as independents were on track to win five seats from Scott Morrison’s Liberal party in its affluent urban heartland in Saturday’s general election, as moderate voters abandoned the government, says a Reuters report.

Independents looked set to win at least 15 of the 151 lower house seats, ABC election analysts said. Labour remained five seats short of the 76 seats it needs to form a government as counting continued on Sunday.

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Personifying the disruptive change were centrists, mostly women, dubbed “teal” candidates because of teal-coloured marketing material used as they targeted seats held by Morrison’s conservative party.

“You seldom see this in Australian politics – a campaign that springs up and catches fire,” the report quoted Simon Jackman, a University of Sydney professor, referring to teal community campaigns run by women volunteers.

Climate change struck the biggest chord with voters, said Jackman, who worked on polling data with Climate 200, a group funded by a former Liberal donor that gave money to around 20 independents.

Anger on integrity issues

Highly educated voters were also angry at the government on integrity issues, including the handling of gender and sexual assault claims in parliament that would not have been tolerated in most Australian workplaces, he said.

The election showed women’s anger at Morrison and at inaction on climate change, said Chris Wallace, a professor at the University of Canberra. “There was a large overlap between women outraged by the government and voters overall who wanted action on climate policy,” she told Reuters.

This “mobilised women in never before seen numbers – including the affluent, middle-class professional women who donned teal T-shirts and took several safe seats off the coalition,” Wallace said.

Independent Sophie Scamps, a doctor who won a Sydney seat held by the Liberals for 70 years, told Sky News, “There were so many people in Mackellar saying, ‘I have voted Liberal my entire life and they no longer represent me.'”

Need to be more inclusive

Former Liberal finance minister Simon Birmingham said the Morrison government should have embraced a more ambitious 2030 emission reduction target, and the election showed the Liberal Party needed to be more inclusive. “Especially Australian women who are much more highly educated today,” he told ABC television. “It’s a cohort that we have clearly failed to have represented in sufficient numbers.”

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Greens appeared to have won two seats in the Queensland city of Brisbane that were badly hit by floods, and were leading in the flood-affected Brisbane electorate. Greens leader Adam Bandt said Liberals and Labour both lost vote as a record number of people voted for the Greens. “This result is a mandate for action on climate and equality.”