It’s party time for these two teals. Now they must find some movers and shakers

June 27, 2026 — 5:00am

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Zali Steggall likens Australia’s newest political party to a Boeing 747: “The jumbo jet has taken off and we’re taking on passengers.”

It’s odd to reach for a metaphor of such large dimensions. The party has just two MPs. Steggall and Allegra Spender. And no other members, unlike the customary “mass party” model.

They’re both teals with wealthy Sydney harbourside electorates, hardly representative of Aussies doing it tough in a cost-of-living crisis.

As for passengers, who would board such an experimental aircraft? “We are pretty much now two years out from the next election, and so it takes that long to build a movement, to have success,” says Steggall.

Redbridge’s Kos Samaras says that while it’s too soon to have any real polling, he’d expect the Community Strong Australia party to have single-digit support in its first poll outings in the next weeks.

“Voter awareness is practically non-existent” judging by Redbridge’s near-daily focus groups conducted in recent days, he says. And, by Friday afternoon, the new party had a mere 74 donations, Steggall tells me.

“Well, it is day two,” she says, reasonably enough. It was only announced on Thursday. “One Nation has been going for 30 years; we’ve just hit the starting line.”

All fair. But Steggall and Spender’s Community Strong needs to get “as much attention and cut-through as One Nation,” according to Samaras. “They have no risk that they won’t be re-elected; their challenge is to grow.”

Indeed, their seats look safe. It’s striking that the Liberal Party has given up on reclaiming their electorates, traditional heartland Liberal bastions previously held by prime ministers.

Steggall defeated Tony Abbott in Warringah in 2019. Spender beat Dave Sharma in 2022 to claim Wentworth, the seat previously held by Malcolm Turnbull.

They are among seven Liberal strongholds seized by so-called teals: economically conservative, socially progressive community independents. One, North Sydney, was abolished in a redistribution. The Liberals managed to reclaim the Melbourne seat of Goldstein. So the teal tally in the House is now five.

The evidence that the Liberals have given up on........

© The Age