A Party of Independents Sounds Like a Contradiction. It Isn’t.

One Nation is the wrong answer to the right question. Part six, on the People who step up, the party that is really a co-op, and why building one is the strategic move, not the naive one.

By Sue Barrett

This series has a name, and the name is an argument. One Nation is the wrong answer to the right question. The right question is the one ordinary people have been asking for years. Who and what can we actually vote for to replace a two-party system that has stopped working for us. One Nation’s answer is the wrong one, grievance with a scapegoat and a billionaire’s hand on the wallet. The real task was never just to say no to it but to find a better answer, and this week two members of parliament put one on the table.

So let me ask it straight. Have we found the right answer to the right question?

The party is Community Strong Australia, launched by Zali Steggall and Allegra Spender, and within hours the air was thick with hot takes about its name, its structure, and whether two MPs can hand-pick candidates. Almost no one asked what actually matters. What problem is this trying to solve, and for whom.

This series works through the system one part at a time: strategy, process, people, culture. This week is people. Not policy or machinery, but the human question underneath. Who steps up. Who we trust. How a scattering of individuals becomes something strong enough to hold. As it happens, that is the exact question Cathy McGowan stood up to ask this week on the other side of the world.

Where this comes from

McGowan was a featured speaker at the Caux Democracy Forum in Switzerland, and her session was titled with a question. What kind of citizens do we choose to be in a time of democratic uncertainty. She is where it started, in Indi in 2013, the first of the modern community independents, a seat no one thought winnable won out of kitchens and sheds. She lit the fuse Helen Haines and Zali Steggall carried in 2019 and the 2022 cohort after them, and has spent a decade, with Liz Migliorini, turning it into a national movement. She was in Geneva speaking about democratic renewal, not for Community Strong Australia, and she has not endorsed it. However, the through line is real. The question she has spent thirteen years answering, how do ordinary people take back a seat that belongs to them, is the one Steggall and Spender are now trying to answer at scale. Not a revolution. An evolution.

Strategic, not naive

Here is the part the hot takes skip, the part that decides whether you read this as a betrayal or a clear-eyed response. The field 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 calls it a stitch-up to freeze out competition. Monique Ryan, who has ruled out joining CSA, uses the same word and says the majors have only themselves to blame if people look elsewhere. Even Sophie Scamps, who has not joined, names the same forces, new laws built to freeze out independents and a seismic shift as the Liberals disintegrate and One Nation rises.

Then watch who is loudest in sneering. Tim Wilson would not even name the party he was dismissing, and said plenty in Canberra do not really stand for anything. This from the side that helped write the very laws that hobble every competitor outside the big two. They built the tilt, then feign bafflement that anyone climbs the slope, while the coverage chased the logo and skipped what the thing is for.

So, when three independents, two of them declining to join, all describe the same rigged field, that is not paranoia. It is the strategic reality, and the laws commence on 1 July 2026, locking the constraints in for everyone who comes next. There is a structural wall on top of the money. A Senate seat is generally won above the line on the ballot, and only a party can be there. A lone independent cannot. So, forming a party is not naive idealism. It is the opposite. Refusing to build the only vehicle that can contest the upper house, because it feels less pure, would be the naive choice. This is what strategic looks like when it stops being a slogan and starts costing something.

A co-op, not a party

Start with what it actually is, because almost no one read it. Under the draft constitution the members are the elected representatives and candidates, not a paying rank and file who preselect and direct. There is no leader, and none is built until at least ten MPs join. Candidates still emerge from community processes, not preselection. On the floor, members keep a free vote on everything except supply and confidence.

That is not a monolith. It is a mosaic, many distinct tiles each keeping its own colour, set together to make one picture. A tapestry, many threads still visible, woven into one cloth stronger than any single thread. The major party model is the opposite. It dissolves the individual into the brand, and your own colour gets painted over.

Here is my own read, owned as mine rather than passed off as the official story.

When I look at Community Strong Australia, I do not see a party. I see a co-operative, and a co-operative is something Australians already trust. We built them for a century and a half because the big players would not serve us, grain growers into CBH, people the banks would not serve into credit unions. Ever since the Rochdale weavers in 1844 the idea has been simple. People too small to matter alone pool what they have, share the expensive infrastructure, and keep their independence. One member, one vote, no one in head office telling the grower how to farm.

That is the shape of this. Community Strong Australia pools the costly machinery of campaigning, the data, the compliance, the Senate registration you cannot have as a lone independent, and leaves the candidate answering to her or his own community. And a co-op is not a diminished party. A party asks you to surrender your judgement to the brand. A co-op asks you to share your tools and keep it. One concentrates power at the top, the other distributes it and holds it to the members. On the one question this series turns on, who holds the power, the co-op is the stronger model. It is also the least leafy idea in the debate. Leafy is the knock on the independents, the charge that they are a thing of the wealthy tree-lined seats, Warringah, Wentworth, Kooyong. But the co-op was never the language of those postcodes. It was the language of the wheat belt, the dairy district and the working suburb, of people who organised because no one was coming to save them.

What happens when they disagree?

Now the fair challenge. A free vote on almost everything sounds less like a party than a caucus of convenience. What happens when two Community Strong MPs split on a hard bill, and the mosaic cracks into a mess the majors exploit.

The evidence cuts against the fear. Steggall and Spender have voted together about ninety per cent of the time across four years, and Steggall treats the gap, Spender is a little more conservative, as the point rather than the problem. Widen the lens and it holds. The Australian National University studied how the whole teal crossbench voted across the last parliament and found their cohesion was high on some measures higher than Labor or the Liberals, and they reached it with no whip and no penalty for crossing the floor. They were not ordered into line. They worked each question through and landed in much the same place. Where they split, they split openly and on substance, on amendments to the Fair Work Act and on the Gaza votes, the hard questions where thoughtful people genuinely differ. That is not a bloc cracking. That is considered representation, done in public.

When I sat down with Monique Ryan and David Pocock in 2024 to talk about how the independents work with the Senate, that was the whole texture of it, people reading the detail, consulting their communities, negotiating, and arriving at a position rather than being handed one.

Kos Samaras, who reads this electorate as well as anyone, goes further. The binding caucus, he says, is one of the things voters most dislike about Labor. People want passion, authenticity, a local champion, and you cannot be a local champion inside a machine that orders you how to vote. So the free vote is the feature, not a flaw. What holds the tiles together is not discipline but genuine alignment on the few things that matter, with room to differ on the rest. Values alignment without policy uniformity.

And the worry gets democracy backwards.

A healthy democracy is not the absence of disagreement. It is disagreement handled well, the patient work of building something everyone can live with.

When two of them differ, the answer is not to crack. It is to talk it out and reach a consensus, which never meant one person getting a hundred per cent. It means an agreement we can accept together and move on. Set that beside what passes for unity in the majors, the black and white shouting of question time, MPs reading lines they did not write and would not defend in private. That is not consensus. That is grandstanding for the donors, and voters can feel the difference.

Why now, and the ceiling

Because the alternative has a ceiling. A community independent can win a lower house seat with a few thousand neighbours and a kitchen table. The Senate is another beast. A New South Wales quota is around 700,000 votes. The four NSW community independents won just over 200,000 primary votes between them last election. One Nation took a Senate spot there with a touch over 300,000. Scattered, the independents cannot reliably reach the upper house. Pooled, they have a chance.

This is the people part, and the part we underestimate. We set the cost of stepping up so high, find your own money, build your own machine, learn it all before anyone backs you, that only the extraordinary or the wealthy can pay it.

A co-op is what lowers it, making independence survivable for people who are not already rich or famous.

The fair objections

The first one I have heard from people I respect. Warringah and Wentworth are two of the wealthiest seats in the country, so it is easy to talk about pooling resources when the resources are already there. What about the rest of us. I will not dismiss it, because it is the whole test, and I will not pretend the answer is finished. The party names this as its reason to exist, to extend the model beyond a handful of affluent seats into places where the new laws and major-party advantage have made grassroots campaigns nearly impossible. As Tim Dunlop puts it, it cannot survive in the leafy suburbs alone. The promise is real and the delivery unproven. No candidate from Frankston or Dubbo or Townsville has yet stepped forward to say this is what got me in. Until one does, it stays live.

The other concern is fairer, and I understand why it lands hard. People have flagged that Steggall and Spender, in these early days, can hand pick candidates. So here is where I have got to. What they started is the party, not the movement, McGowan started that in Indi in 2013. What was lodged with the Electoral Commission is a draft constitution, and a hundred-day consultation opens now, with registration not final until October. In the first months of anything new, before there is a membership base, someone makes the founding calls, and the only two with a mandate are the two sitting MPs. McGowan calls it finding your courage muscle. The real question is whether that gatekeeping is temporary scaffolding or permanent architecture, and the consultation is where we pin it down. Accountability runs both ways too. Steggall and Spender answer to their own electorates, and if they back a dud they wear it in public, sharper than a faceless preselection. And notice who has not joined, which answers the sneer that this is a takeover. Monique Ryan ruled it out on principle, Kate Chaney and David Pocock too, and Boele and Scamps are consulting their communities first. That is not a movement falling into line. It is a mosaic, every tile deciding for itself, and the ones who stay out prove the point as much as the ones who join. No one is being absorbed.

Reason over rage, and the limits of it

The party’s line is reason over rage, and the criticism it draws is that it talks down to angry Australians. The line is widely misread. It does not mean do not be angry. The anger is earned. Wages have gone nowhere for a decade while a handful got spectacularly richer off things that used to belong to all of us.

Peter Turchin calls it the wealth pump, money moved relentlessly upward until the society cracks. What it should mean is sharper. Refuse to let your rage be harvested by the people who caused it.

Alex Fein’s work, drawing on RedBridge, traces the network behind Hanson, including money from Gina Rinehart, who profits from fossil fuels and fights the taxes that would share the proceeds. The operation depends on keeping you enraged and pointing that rage downward, so you never look up at who holds the hose. Stay angry. Aim it correctly.

However, the party needs the rest of Fein too. You do not beat a story about power with a story about technocratic competence, still less a costed list of policies. People are drowning in hostile complexity and want someone who will visibly use power on their behalf. Reason over rage is a fine value and a poor pitch, necessary and nowhere near sufficient. Pair it with a real willingness to fight, for housing, for wages, for a tax system that taxes wealth and not just work, and it ages well. Tone is not the work. The work is the work.

The questions we ask everyone

We put the same five questions to Community Strong Australia that we put to One Nation, to Labor, to the Coalition, and to the Greens and any other micro party or independent.

1. What does this level of government control?
2. What is their record?
3. Who funds them?
4. Who are they accountable to?
5. What are they promising, and is it costed?

Run them honestly and no one comes out clean. The majors take corporate, union and resource money disclosed slowly, and answer to a binding caucus before they answer to you. Community Strong Australia inverts the accountability, free vote, answerable to electorates, then leaves the funding line blank.

That blank is the one I would put first. The website and the draft constitution are silent on it. From what I understand, Steggall has never taken Climate 200 money and does not now. Whether the party will cap donations, refuse certain industries, or disclose tighter than the law demands has not been stated, and I will not invent an answer to make the piece feel finished. The other open question is sharper. Now that these MPs sit inside a party that may benefit from the laws they have rightly attacked, will they keep fighting to unrig them. That is not a gotcha. It is the friction of squaring independence with a party, and the answer tells you whether this is principle or positioning.

We go where the voter is

The strategic point I keep coming back to, the one some Community Independent purists find hardest. We are not the audience that matters most. The volunteers who letterboxed and door-knocked and ran the kitchen-table meetings are not who this has to win over. The broader voter is, and most people do not think in movements. They think in parties.

Samaras says it without flinching. People did not vote for independents because they were independents. They voted for them because they were the only alternative on the shelf. The same logic explains a chunk of the One Nation vote, parked there only because there is nothing else. He has lost count of the people who told him, yes they are racist, but I have no other option. Give them a serious alternative with a familiar shape and a real foundation, and some move. So calling it a party, rather than some new word only insiders understand, is not a betrayal of the independent brand. It is meeting people where they are.

Where I have landed

So, for what it is worth, here is where I have landed. This is a good move, not perfect, not perfectly done, but the right direction. I am not thinking of it as a party at all but as a co-op, people pooling what they have built so their candidates still answer to their own communities.

So, let’s strip out the sentiment and look at it as a market. The incumbents, the major parties, are losing their grip, and the Coalition looks solid right up to the moment it splits down the middle, roughly where it is now. The angry, defecting voter has been left with nothing serious to buy, and One Nation has rushed to fill that gap.

A gap in the market is exactly what this is, and a viable choice you can buy into and trust to get the job done is critical for any buyer. Filling it is not idealism, it is strategy, and it works for both houses.

In the Senate, independents in large states like NSW and Victoria stay locked out without a party. In the lower house, scattered campaigns keep hitting a ceiling. A shared vehicle answers both. The honest comparison is never against perfection. It is against what we actually have, and against that, a thing more accountable, more transparent and more rooted in community is worth backing, provisionally, with both eyes open and the hard questions on the table.

Someone had to find their courage muscle and start the party as Cathy McGowan pointed out. This week, Steggall and Spender did. The hundred days are ours to use well, to pry the scaffolding from the architecture, to get the funding answered, and to insist the candidates who emerge look like the whole country and not just its harbour. That is not a reason to stand back. It is an invitation to participate and have your say.

Every solution begins with a conversation. This is one of the most important ones we will have. So let us have it properly, with the rage and the reason both, and let us not waste the asking on people who cannot even remember the name.

You know what to do.

Onward we press.

Sue Barrett is founder and CEO of Barrett Consulting Group, Democracy Watch AU and Before You Vote, and writes Every Solution Begins with a Conversation on Substack.suebarrett.substack.com | beforeyouvote.com.au © 2026 Sue Barrett

Resources

One Nation is the wrong answer to the right question series

Article 1: One Nation Is The Wrong Answer To The Right Question.

Article 2: The Smartest Political Conversation is Australia is Happening in the Comments Section

Article 3: You Want Straight Talking? Here it is. No Jet Required.

Article 4: Stop Being Naïve. Start Being Strategic.

Article 5: Monoculture Is Not Strength. It’s a Death Sentence for Economies and Societies.

This article was originally published on Sue Barrett