The Sydney Morning Herald: 11 November 2022
Few were seasoned activists. Others had crossed party lines. A 20,000-strong volunteer force with unseen social, familial and digital links proved pivotal to the success of the “teal” independents in May’s federal election.
And what they lacked in experience, they made up for in number. Climate 200 calculates 20,000 Australians participated in the 23 community-backed independent campaigns to which it contributed, not counting the largely non-urban campaigns to which it did not.
Linked by networks of trust – social, familial, digital – they constituted the nine-tenths of the iceberg lurking beneath the surface of the community-backed independents movement. And they would prove every bit as fatal for the Coalition ship of state.