CLANCY OVERELL | Editor | CONTACT
With the major parties beginning to slowly unveil the policies that they will be taking to the 2025 Federal election, questions are beginning to arise about what will become of the cross-benchers who were swept into Parliament as a final insult to Scott Morrison.
On the night of the 2022 election, it became clear that voters in the Liberal Party’s coastal blue-ribbon seats were not fucking around.
With former Prime Minister Tony Abbott already losing his seat to the independent candidate Zali Steggall in 2019, the same model of fundraising and community organising was once again emulated in the final days of Scott Morrison’s comically incompetent reign.
The result was six more blue-ribbon Liberal seats being snapped up by female independents, all of whom had spend most of their lives working in medicine, finance or law.
These were professional women who didn’t appreciate seeing the leader of a major political party – that they’ve voted for their whole lives – belittling women on a national platform, or discrediting climate scientist as leftie lunatics.
The loosely alligned indepedents became known as the Teals (a mix of green and Liberal blue) – and their success has liberated hundreds of thousands of voters who no longer felt like voting for a populist right-wing government made up of populist Christians who waste time fighting meaningless culture wars in an effort to appeal to a non-existent silent majority that Sky News has convinced them exists.
One of these liberated voters was Palm Beach GP, Dr Jenny Flynn.
As a 64-year-old mother of three adult daughters, Dr Flynn has worked hard to raise a family of ambitious young women who don’t have to face the chauvinism she copped in medical school forty years ago.
She’s not exactly a communist, but she’s made a fair bit of money of the years and is well aware that she’s got it better than most.
She also doesn’t think that homosexuals were sent from hell to convince children to mutilate themselves. On top of that, she believes that burning fossil fuels at an accelerating rate for 200 years might not be that good for the environment.
That’s why the Teals were her pick in 2022.
But something has changed over the last few months, as the Liberal Party prepares themselves to take back power in 2025. The mouth-breathers appears to have moderated. With an interesting and refreshing approach to energy policy, as well as the willingness to begin pre-selecting females as candidates. These climate-change denying misogynists mights win Jenny back over!
“They’ve modernised quite a lot under that tall handsome man from Queensland!” says Jenny.
“I’d just prefer if they called me a doctor, instead of a doctor’s wife”