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Will Australia’s Independents Form a Political Party?

New campaign finance laws put the Community Independents Project at a crossroads.

One of the most interesting democratic movements of recent years has been Australia’s Community Independents Project. The movement is a grassroots initiative, built on an intimate understanding of local concerns, and sharing political organizing tactics. Although its origins were in a rural electorate, the movement has had its most success in the country’s wealthiest, well-educated seats, where suspicion of the Liberal Party in its formerly safest seats has grown.

Yet the movement now finds itself at a crossroads about how to proceed, with several independents elected via the model contemplating forming a political party. Were they to do so, it would present the next stage in the fracturing of Australian politics. It also may prove an enormous risk to what has made the movement appealing in the first place. 

The impetus for the discussion on forming a new party has come from Australia’s new campaign finance laws. These laws introduce caps on donations and campaign spending, alongside stricter disclosure rules. To compensate for lost private revenue, established parties would receive tens of millions of dollars more in public funding. While the laws were ostensibly designed to reduce the influence of big money in politics, they also serve to significantly raise the bar for new political entrants, creating considerable advantages for incumbents. 

This financial squeeze is now pushing independent MPs to confront whether they can remain structurally independent or not. While their political appeal is rooted in being outside of the tribalism and negative incentives of political parties, forming a party would unlock access to the donation structures and administrative funding that the new laws deliberately reserve for registered parties. This places independents in a bind. 

Yet the discussions may also be due to an ideological space opening up within Australian politics, as the Liberal Party has lost the ability to think clearly about what kind of party it is, and how to communicate with the public.

The Liberal Party was formed in 1944 as an amalgamation of the country’s conservative and liberal political forces as an attempt to counter the strength of the Labor Party. The post-World War II ideological environment in the West made it easy for such a party to be coherent and remain together – as to be a conservative was to work in defense of liberalism. However, without the grand ideological battle with the Soviet Union and through the emergence of radical new political entrepreneurs like U.S. President Donald Trump, this commitment to liberalism has........

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