If recent polling is to be trusted, the Coalition is in serious shit at next week’s federal election. A YouGov poll published this week suggests that, were the election held today, Labor would win 80 seats, enough to win a majority government in its own right. Yes, we all know what happened last time the polls called a Labor victory — but the predicted margins are wider, and the pollsters have (allegedly) learned from their mistakes.

Despite Scott Morrison’s perhaps undeserved reputation as a masterful campaigner, the 2022 election campaign has not gone all that well for him. Its most killer line at the moment came via Barnaby Joyce at the National Press Club this week , when he said the prime minister was kind of like a rude dentist or an asshole mechanic — you don’t have to like him, or want to have a beer with him, or be near him, but you still need to get your teeth and car fixed. Very inspiring. I’m humming the national anthem imagining a competent but unpleasant dentist.

But the biggest wildcard of the election is the ‘teal’ independents, who get their name from the inoffensive shade of blue-green they use on their campaign materials. There are many of them around the country, but the ones people are most interested in are the campaigns looking to unseat so-called moderate Liberal MPs in inner-city seats. 

There’s former ABC journo Zoe Daniel challenging Tim Wilson in Goldstein, businesswoman Allegra Spender tackling Dave Sharma in Wentworth, Sophie Scamps targeting Jason Falinski in Mackellar, Kylea Tink fighting Trent Zimmerman in North Sydney and — most prominently — neurologist Monique Ryan going after Treasurer Josh Frydenberg in Kooyong.

What unites all of them, apart from the fact they’re all in with at least a decent shot, is their platform. They’re not a party, per se, but they’ve got similar priorities: fighting climate change, introducing a federal anti-corruption body, and pushing for gender equality. 

They’re also running in some of the very wealthiest electorates in the country, in political turf that has been deeply Liberal since federation. (In short: these seats are where the accountants, lawyers, “consultants” and LinkedIn grindset types tend to live.) They all receive money from Climate 200, a fund set up by activist Simon Holmes á Court.

Whether they’ll end up succeeding on Election Day is an open question, but the polling looks good for a couple of them. According to the YouGov poll mentioned earlier, both Tim Wilson and Josh Frydenberg — who has often been touted as a future Liberal leader — are set to lose their seats. This is why, if you head to Wilson’s Twitter account, you can see plenty of posts by his team pretending that he likes interacting with his constituents.

(“I love campaigning. All the time outside,” sounds like it was generated by a busted AI.)

The teal candidates want to repeat the success of Zali Steggall, who successfully unseated Tony Abbott in 2019. Back then, commentators attributed that win to the fact everyone viscerally hated Abbott. (which is not an unreasonable take.) 

But the early interest in the teals suggests that the scions of Australian wealth are having their own little populist moment, and no longer think the Liberal Party of Scott Morrison represents them.

Many of these people are never going to vote Green thanks to their wacky ideas about wealth redistribution – gasp! – but they’re certainly interested in candidates who can talk about climate and political integrity without rocking the boat too much on tax. The Liberal Party is facing the same problem Labor has in the past - and just like Labor lost progressive votes to the Greens, so too are the Liberals primed to lose a chunk of their moderate wing to the teals. 

Naturally, this has led to a major meltdown among Liberal boosters in the media. Facing a paradox that makes your average right-ring commentator short circuit, this influential sector has to balance being psychotically furious about the prospect of losing core party territory while also pretending to be happy to lose the support of rich people who happen to believe climate change is real.

The way they’re dealing with the mental strain is by arguing that voting for independents is undemocratic.

Take Greg Sheridan, a longtime journalist and writer for The Australian, who is perhaps best known in recent years for his exhaustively documented friendship with Tony Abbott and abiding hatred of the ABC. He took to the pages of the newspaper to announce that the teals “play the electoral system for a sucker” through their insane project of asking for votes without belonging to a party. In Greg’s world, showing up to an election booth next Saturday and placing a first-preference vote for a teal independent is akin to blowing up Parliament House with five tonnes of TNT.

“When preferential voting worked, it forced every voter to choose between one of the two main parties, while registering a protest vote along the way if they liked,” he writes. “The Westminster system relies on a party, or coalition, hammering out internal compromises to present a coherent program. Single-issue independents are the absolute opposite of this.”

Never mind the fact that Australia has a tradition of independent MPs stretching back to Federation. Or the fact that there are several independent MPs in Parliament right now — including a Tasmanian MP who has been there since 2010 and grows his support with each election. Greg wants you to know that you are setting an Australian flag on fire by numbering your voting slip in the order of your preference.

Or Paul Kelly, former editor of The Australian, who suggested the teals are tricking voters by hiding their real intentions: obtaining and exercising political power. “The purpose of the independents is to deny either party a governing majority,” Kelly writes. “Their purpose is to empower themselves – the crossbench. That’s what the entire project is about – it’s about power.”

That’s correct, Paul. You’ll find that many people do get into politics with the goal of exercising power. You could even say that the whole crazy game of politics is actually about deciding who exercises power, and who benefits from that exercise. 

On the flipside, he worries that the people of Kooyong will be very upset if they end up outside of a major party and unable to influence politics in line with their interests. That may be true. But it’s clear that huge swathes of traditional Liberals don’t feel their views are being represented within the party anyway, relegated to the backseat by moderate MPs who are cucked day in and day out by the party’s more powerful conservative flank.

Now that it’s clear at least two seats are likely to be lost to the teals, the commentariat has moved through the stages of grief to the last stop: acceptance. In a piece on Thursday, also in The Australian, vengeful Sky News phantom Peta Credlin says: who cares? 

Sure, it sucks the Liberals are losing seats that have formed impenetrable fortresses for over a century, but it’s a sacrifice they should be willing to make to keep the battlers on their side.

The biggest risk, Credlin says, is not “losing one or two wealthy seats to the green-left” but losing the “quiet Australians” living in regional and outer-suburban seats who turned out for the Coalition in 2019. It’s clear that Scott Morrison agrees on some level, given he is staying as far as is humanly possible from the teal seats under threat, and — if reporting in the Sydney Morning Herald is to be believed — deliberately inflaming debate about trans kids to win some of those conservative votes. In short, Credlin says, the Liberal Party must abandon its rich base to achieve its final form.

But whichever way it spins, we can be sure of one thing: we’re in for some very exciting little meltdowns on Election Day. And that’s what it’s all about.

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