Spender and Steggall have power to handpick teal party candidates

Teal independents Zali Steggall and Allegra Spender have insisted their nascent party, Community Strong Australia, will remain leaderless despite both MPs having the right to handpick candidates.

Senior Liberals were quick to attack the new party on Thursday, with shadow treasurer Tim Wilson telling journalists he couldn’t remember its name and defence spokesman James Paterson mocking the fact that only two of the parliament’s six teals had joined the network.

Addressing the media for the first time since this masthead revealed the party’s name and structure, Steggall said she hoped Community Strong would “mark a new era of Australian politics where we focus on communities, we give them a voice and a clear seat at the table”.

However, the two MPs faced immediate questioning over the party’s structure and their history of fiercely defending their independence. The pair repeatedly said the party featured a “community-up rather than top-down” model, but accepted they had the power to select candidates and accept new members.

Under the party’s constitution, “members” are elected representatives and candidates, not the typical model employed by the major parties in which paying members meet and vote on policies and preselect candidates.

Steggall said the 1400 volunteers who had worked on her campaign did not want to be members of a political party because it would “put constraints on them”.

Steggal and Spender said candidates would need to have proven engagement with – and the support of – their communities to be awarded membership.

The MPs said the major party model was flawed because voters didn’t know who was controlling the Liberal Party – historically, their primary political opponent. Steggall said voters could not say who had more influence between Opposition Leader Angus Taylor and Federal President Tony Abbott.

“Community Strong will not have party power brokers behind the scenes. We won’t have those kind of influences. As Community Strong MPs, [we will be] directly answerable to our community.”

The pair left the door open to challenging Labor-held seats at the next election and taking money from fundraising group Climate 200, though they said their party was a “distinct proposition” from the organisation.

Spender on Thursday played down the idea the party was being formed because of changes to campaign donation laws that have been observed as punitive to independents, and spoke-up the possibility of independent voters having a “voice in the Senate”.

In NSW, where four of the six teals hold seats, a spot in the Senate requires around 700,000 votes. However, with preferences, it is possible to qualify with a lower turnout. At last year’s election, Greens senator Mehreen Faruqi was re-elected with just under 560,000 votes and One Nation received a spot with just over 300,000 votes.

The four NSW teals currently in parliament received just over 200,000 primary votes collectively at the last election. Other candidates running under a Community Strong banner could bolster those figures in the Senate, but the viability of successfully winning a spot in that chamber for NSW remains untested.

The party was almost immediately lambasted by senior Liberals, with Paterson saying: “I wish them all the best, but if they can’t even convince the teal MPs in parliament to join their party, I think they’re going to really struggle to convince Australians to vote for their party.”

Teals Nicolette Boele and Sophie Scamps both welcomed the party, but have held off on deciding whether to join, while Monique Ryan, Kate Chaney and Senator David Pocock have already ruled themselves out.

Meanwhile, shadow treasurer Tim Wilson said he was “not the least bit concerned” about a party he could not remember the name of.

“There’s plenty of people in Canberra, in lots of parties, that don’t really stand for anything,” Wilson told journalists. “It seems to me that whatever this party is called, it’s just front-running for the Labor Party.”

Wilson lost his seat in 2022 to a teal independent, Zoe Daniel, but won it back on a slim margin last May.

Asked if the party was a threat to the Liberal Party, Wilson said it was not, adding: “Nobody seems to be able to state what they believe in, except for themselves.”

Steggall brushed off Wilson’s comments, saying: “I think Tim Wilson probably has bigger things to worry about … what does he stand for? He’s often bandied around as a moderate. There’s nothing moderate about his voting pattern or what he stood for.”

Spender rejected claims, by critics of the community independent movement, that they had been vindicated by Thursday’s announcement given they had long accused the teals of being a quasi-party.