The launch of Community Strong Australia was a strategic move to position independents so they can offer a positive alternative to the two-party system.

Last week, Zali Steggall and Allegra Spender launched Community Strong Australia. Within hours, the commentary was fixing on the party’s name, its structure and whether two MPs could hand-pick candidates. Almost no one asked the question that matters. What problem is this trying to solve, and for whom?

The problem is real and it is structural. For years, ordinary people have been asking who and what they can vote for to replace a two-party system that has stopped serving them. One Nation offers an answer – grievance with a scapegoat attached and a billionaire’s hand on the wallet – and it is the wrong one. The task was never simply to reject One Nation. It was to find a better answer. Community Strong Australia is an attempt to do so; it deserves to be assessed on those terms rather than on its branding.

This is the part the early commentary has skipped, and it is the part that decides everything. Building this party is strategic, not naive. Begin with the field it is entering, a field that was deliberately tilted. The donation and spending laws Labor and the Coalition passed in February 2025, in the final months of the last parliament, were not neutral housekeeping. Steggall has called them a stitch-up to freeze out competition. Monique Ryan, who has declined to join the new party, uses the same word. The laws commence on 1 July 2026 and lock the constraints in for everyone who comes next.

On top of the money sits a structural wall. A Senate seat is........

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