Australia's zeal for teal has faded. Yet climate could still sway this election

Eco matters have fallen down the agenda since 2022 but, a week before the polls, voters are still looking for alternatives to the main parties.

- Maddison Connaughton

Everywhere you looked, there was teal - volunteers wearing teal hats and T-shirts, crammed into a pub in suburban Melbourne on election night 2022, holding aloft teal signs and banners. There was even a limp arch of teal balloons strung across the makeshift stage in the beer garden.

The colour - a mix of the blue from Australia's rightwing Liberal party and its Greens - had come to symbolise an insurgent movement of independent political candidates challenging the country's political duopoly, and what they saw as the conservative government's refusal to take the climate crisis seriously.

Climate loomed large in that election, with memories of Australia's black summer of 2019/20 - when bushfires burned through an area the size of the UK - still raw. Inaction on climate had become a flashpoint, embodied by an image of then prime minister Scott Morrison holding up a lump of coal in parliament.

It was late when Monique Ryan, a paediatric neurologist, finally made her way to the stage to address her teal sea of supporters. Standing before them, she offered a confession: "I didn't write a victory speech."

Ryan had launched her campaign for one of the country's safest and most affluent conservative seats just a few weeks earlier. Her candidacy - as someone with no political experience or national profile - was at first greeted with a smirk. The Liberals had comfortaby held this seat, Kooyong, for nearly 80 years.

But the ballots told a remarkable story. Ryan had pulled off what many thought impossible. Not only had she taken Kooyong, she'd also toppled Australia's treasurer, Josh Frydenberg - a man many believed would one day be prime minister.

"We started this because we wanted action on climate change, and we felt it was the most important challenge of our time," she riffed. "The government wasn't listening to us ... so we changed the government."