‘Going into politics has taught me I’ve got more courage than I thought’

In the sleepless hours before dawn on a midwinter’s morning in July 2021, a brooding John Spender dashed off a heartfelt email to his then 43-year-old daughter, Allegra. “Darling,” he began. “I finished this at 4 o’clock this morning. Some points for you to think about before we next speak. Please, call me today. Lots of love, Dad.”

What followed were more than 30 reasons why she shouldn’t run as an independent candidate in the seat of Wentworth at the next federal election. Topping the list was his concern that her “obvious wealth and privilege” would make her a target, that her work-life balance would become unmanageable, and that by “identifying as a planet change political activist” she’d lose any chance of a political career with a major party. “Those who crash always burn,” he warned darkly.

“Yeah, he was very negative,” she says now, laughing. “He was worried about the impact on me, the family and, you know, politics is a brutal game.”

John Spender was familiar with the sometimes crushing nature of political life, as the son of the formidable Sir Percy Spender, a federal Liberal minister credited as one of the prime negotiators of the 1951 ANZUS treaty. John later followed his father into parliament, holding the federal seat of North Sydney for a decade before being toppled in 1990 – ironically by an independent, Ted Mack.

But even without her father’s advice, Spender was having qualms of her own. A fortnight or so earlier, she’d been approached by a group of high-powered women who’d branded themselves the “Windies”, or Wentworth Independents, with the goal of ousting the sitting Liberal MP, Dave Sharma.

Led by Lyndell Droga, an eastern suburbs philanthropist and project manager, the Windies were on the hunt for their own version of Zali Steggall, the one-time Olympic skier turned independent MP who’d beaten former prime minister Tony Abbott in the seat of Warringah in 2019. They wanted a woman with deep local roots and an impressive CV who shared their core beliefs on the need for more integrity in politics, action on climate change and gender equality. Recruiting someone of Spender’s background, descended from the bluest of blue Liberal blood, would be a coup in a wealthy electorate once held by ex-prime minister Malcolm Turnbull.

Spender ticked all the Windies’ boxes, but initially rebuffed their approach. She was still grieving the loss of her mother, fashion designer Carla Zampatti, who’d died unexpectedly in April 2021 after falling down stairs at an outdoor opera event. And she loved her job running the not-for-profit Australian Business and Community Network, which links mentors from the business community with students from disadvantaged backgrounds. Her husband Mark Capps, an Englishman and Oxford graduate, was also unenthusiastic, having grown up, says Spender, “in a really private family”. Her prized Italian passport from her mother’s side would have to be sacrificed, given MPs can’t hold dual nationality. On top of all that, she worried about the impact it would have on her three young children. All in all, she wasn’t confident she was the right fit.

But powerful advocates were making the case otherwise, among them prominent Sydney businesswoman Jillian Broadbent, who’d been a close friend of her mother’s. Spender and Broadbent would discuss the pros and cons as they walked Sydney’s east coast track, starting at Zampatti’s grave in Waverley Cemetery and traversing some of the electorate’s most iconic beaches – Bronte, Tamarama, Bondi. Broadbent told Spender it was pointless waiting for the “right” time for her kids, that “kids can get by on fairly minimal input really”, and sought to bolster her confidence: “You have the skills; you don’t have to imagine that you have to be something extraordinary.”

Dr John Daley, former head of the influential public policy think tank the Grattan Institute and an old friend with whom she’d been exchanging policy ideas for years, also urged her to run. He sent her a report he’d written, Gridlock, in which he argued that the best solution to policy stagnation in Australia was to have more reform-minded independents elected to parliament. Spender’s half-brother Alex Schuman – her mother’s son by an earlier marriage and a former aide to NSW premier Gladys Berejiklian – was also a strong advocate. “Don’t feel this opportunity is going to be here forever,” he told her. “You are capturing a moment. You are also capturing a base that is just completely under-represented in the parliament – women who are mothers of school-age kids.”

Amplifying these voices was the spirit of her mother, who’d championed female empowerment all her working life. Born on a small, hardscrabble farm in northern Italy, Carla Zampatti had arrived here at the age of 11 with no English but enough drive and talent to carry her to the top of the country’s fashion, business and culture circles.

“I thought a lot about Mum,” Spender recalls. “She was someone who came from nothing and created great things. I looked at the stats of Liberal party women in the House of Representatives and I realised that in 1996, the year after I’d left school, there were about 22 per cent. And 25 years later, nothing had really changed. For me [this moment] was about women saying, ‘I’m just not going to stand for it any more.’ ”

The then prime minister Scott Morrison’s failure to take a serious target for reducing carbon emissions to that year’s climate conference in Glasgow was the final straw. Spender had another conversation with Lyndell Droga, then said: “Fine. If no one else will do it, I will.” She announced her candidacy in November 2021.

Six months later, as we now well know, Spender was swept into parliament along with five other independent, like-minded women, all first-timers – Sydneysiders Sophie Scamps and Kylea Tink, Melburnians Zoe Daniel and Monique Ryan, and Kate Chaney in Perth – robbing the Liberal party of six of its most prized seats. The media dubbed the women the “teal” MPs, in a nod to the campaign colours adopted by several of them and shorthand for their blend of “light blue” centrist economic policy and green environmental credentials.

Fast forward two and a bit years and Spender, the youngest of the group, has distinguished herself from the others with an unusually ambitious focus on economic policy. She plans to step that up this year with the release of her own green paper on tax, setting out options for fundamentally shaking up our byzantine tax system to ease pressure on pay-as-you-go employees, boost productivity and redress what she calls the “tragedy” of intergenerational inequity. It’s a high-stakes move, one that will thrust the member for Wentworth further into the national spotlight.

Brook Turner, author of the 2022 book Independents’ Day, which documented the rise of the teals, says each has had to “find their superpower” in their first term. “For Allegra, it’s tax.” Significantly, Spender considers herself “a classic small-l liberal” who sees the world “through a business lens” and identifies as a “community independent” rather than a teal. It hasn’t escaped the notice of opposition MPs that she votes more frequently with them – especially on issues like industrial relations – than do the other teals. Observes one former federal Liberal MP: “You don’t hear the teals really talking authoritatively about the economic policy challenges facing Australia, apart from Allegra.”

Many of her parliamentary colleagues will be watching closely to see how her green paper is received. Some consider it well-intentioned but politically naive to be releasing a major discussion on tax this close to an election, at a time when the national conversation is laser-focused on the cost of living. The green paper could burnish her reputation as a serious, reform-minded policy wonk; or it could leave her politically stranded, and bruised, if it stirs up the usual hornets’ nest of vested interests, which have scared the major parties off serious tax reform for the past 25 years.

“We haven’t got our settings right,” Spender says about tax, when I ask her why she’s sticking her head so far above the parapet. “Over the last decade, the households of those over the age of 65 have grown their wealth by around 50 per cent, while the households of those under the age of 35 have pretty much gone nowhere.”

John Daley, who’s been working with her on the green paper, believes it’s exactly the kind of long-term political issue independents should be tackling. “Many people are not going to like the answers – tax reform always has losers. But if you don’t talk about it, it’s not going to happen.”

‘Mum just had enormous guts, and I never thought I had that sort of guts. And going into politics has taught me I’ve got much more courage than I thought I did.’

Allegra Spender

If her tax gambit is one source of risk, at least it’s self-imposed. Not so the other dilemma she faces, fuelled by a conflict 14,000 kilometres away. The war in Gaza is a white-hot issue in Wentworth, which has the highest proportion of Jewish voters in NSW, at about 15 per cent. Some in that community are demanding much more overt support to Israel than she’s given thus far, and one senior Labor figure, active in Jewish circles, warns that she’s at heightened risk of losing votes by “trying to be everything to everyone”. It’s the kind of no-win issue that, on the flip side, is proving equally intractable for government ministers with large Muslim populations in their electorates.

Added to these challenges has been dealing with the aftermath of the stabbing attacks which cost six lives at the Westfield Bondi Junction shopping centre in April, propelling Spender onto the national TV news as she sought to comfort and support traumatised constituents.

Amid all this, Spender proclaims she’s found “much more joy in the job than I realised”. She’s also found a quality in herself she wasn’t sure was there. “Mum just had enormous guts, and I never thought I had that sort of guts,” she tells me. “And going into politics has taught me I’ve got much more courage than I thought I did.”

Allegra Spender opens the door to her home in harbourside Rushcutters Bay dressed in jeans, a plain black sweater and white socks. Nearby lies the country’s premier boating club, the Cruising Yacht Club of Australia, where a flotilla of luxury craft rises and falls on a choppy swell. We’re on the ground floor of a 1920s two-storey duplex which her mother and several girlfriends rented when they arrived in Sydney from Perth in the early 1960s. It’s simply furnished, and like Spender, devoid of showiness. She and Capps have lived here for 17 years, but will soon decamp to her early childhood home, a grand old Mediterranean-style villa up the hill in Woollahra, which was previously her mother’s and sometimes provided the backdrop for fashion shows.

Sitting with her legs tucked up on the sofa, Spender wears no make-up and almost no jewellery apart from her wedding ring. Her hair – which she says she usually cuts herself – is tucked loosely behind her ears. She’s earnest but quick to laugh, and far more fluent talking about ideas than herself. She was shy as a child, she concedes. “I’m still quite shy. But I like people, and you kind of get over it. I’m much less shy than I used to be.” Malcolm Turnbull, a close associate of her father’s who has known her since she was a girl, says Spender is genuinely modest. “Not self-effacing, but she’s not at all a narcissist.”

Until she had her second child, Spender used to paint, and above the TV hangs a well-executed portrait she’s done of herself and Capps. Another of her father hangs nearby. The couple have three children, a boy and two girls, now aged eight, 10 and 11. She’s insistent they not be named, even though they’ve been identified by media outlets in the past and were named in one of her own early speeches. Her views about protecting their privacy have hardened since then, setting her apart from many politicians but interestingly, putting her in line with Britain’s new Prime Minister Keir Starmer, who has also endeavoured to shield the privacy of his children.

“You won’t see a photo of the kids on Instagram or any of my social media,” Spender states firmly. “In politics, you are, literally, a target and the social media abuse you get is remarkable … They are not old enough to make choices about how they get involved. Their lives aren’t about me.”

Spender’s privileged background could have delivered her a much easier life than the one she’s chosen. But from early on, Zampatti was determined to drum the same work ethic into her three children that she’d grown up with herself. “The most defining feature of our childhood was working every single school holiday in Mum’s office, basically from the age of 10,” Spender says. “She couldn’t stand us lolling around in the holidays. She’d be like, ‘You’re capable – come and do something useful.’ She had this view that if you gave people jobs and they were successful at them, they felt good about themselves. I got that from Mum’s office.”

She and her older sister Bianca, along with Schuman, worked their way around every section of the design business: answering phones, collecting receipts, counting buttons and zips, helping to strip mannequins in the stores and move the stock around. Sometimes the girls had to walk the takings from the city stores to the bank, a journey recalled as “terrifying” by Bianca, who later went on to create her own eponymous designer label. “None of us rebelled against it,” Bianca says. “We were part of her team. It wasn’t asking us to do anything that she didn’t ask herself to do.”

Schuman describes their mother as “brilliant, a force of nature and not overly maternal; John tended to be gentler”. He says Spender was “always slightly dishevelled” in their mother’s eyes. “She was a little tomboy, not all that interested in getting dressed up or putting a comb through her hair.” Broadbent recalls Zampatti once complaining that Spender wasn’t wearing smart jackets at university. “But Carla, they’re students!” Broadbent protested.

Spender was a high-achieving all-rounder at the prestigious nearby girls’ school Ascham, where she became head girl and topped year 12. She still has a close circle of friends from those years, who maintain contact with each other via a WhatsApp group they’ve dubbed “Harried mums”.

Her friend from childhood, Nina Miall, recalls Spender’s fierce drive to succeed. On the day they received their HSC results, they travelled together to Bondi Beach to open them. “I was thrilled with mine; she got [a UAI] of 99.95 and was disappointed that she didn’t crack the 100,” Miall says. Spender laughs somewhat sheepishly when I tell her about Miall’s recollection. “Oh, god. There was a bunch of people in the school a year above us, [who] had gotten 100. I do think I’m competitive – Mum was competitive and so was Dad.”

‘I still remember looking across the table at her, and thinking, “Oh, you traitor!” But weirdly, it’s that honesty and integrity that I see her practising today in this political role.’

Nina Miall, childhood friend

Miall jokes that her friend “isn’t easy to dish dirt on. She doesn’t have a huge number of vices” – but Spender’s dedication to duty did lead to one awkward incident between them. One afternoon in their final year, Spender as head girl and Miall as prefect were assigned to uniform duty, checking the attire of younger students as they left the school gates. Miall abandoned the task, thinking it had become “a bit ridiculous”. A few days later, at a formal school lunch, it became apparent Spender had drawn Miall’s lapse to the attention of the deputy head. “I still remember looking across the table at her, and thinking, ‘Oh, you traitor!’ But weirdly, it’s that honesty and integrity that I see her practising today in this political role. The qualities that she had as a child are still so strong in her today. She sets very high standards for herself but she is terribly non-judgmental of others. And there is an inherent kindness in her personality, which has been there from a very young age.”

For her part, Spender says it’s “putting it a bit harshly” to say she dobbed Miall in. “But at the same time, a job needed to be done and she didn’t do it, and I wanted to be clear that the job needed to be done.”

The bookish Spender had an early infatuation with Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited, part-set in 1920s Oxford. Thus in 1997, after her father had been appointed ambassador to France, she applied to the University of Cambridge to study economics. After graduating, she joined the London offices of global consultancy firm McKinsey & Company, where she met Capps, an engineering graduate with an entrepreneurial streak, who’s held senior executive roles with Google and Uber and now works for online design platform Canva.

Miall shared a London house with the pair after university, and recalls Capps being a master at devising spreadsheets to apportion household bills. “They are both incredibly high-powered, and very, very well organised.”

Spender, who also has a master’s in organisational psychology, left McKinsey’s after two years, dissatisfied with the transitory nature of consulting. She took a job with the British Treasury before joining a team trying to reform the operations of a major teaching hospital, King’s College hospital in London. In between, she and Capps took off to Kenya for a year, where she advised banana growers on how to expand their markets, while he worked with the local dairy industry. She found it frustrating working in an environment where she didn’t speak the local language, but describes the overall experience as “wonderful”.

Despite turning her back on consulting, she took enduring lessons from it. One was to “really identify the problem you are trying to solve because so often you go off half-cocked”. Another was the obligation to dissent: “if you think something’s not right, it doesn’t matter if you are a junior or senior, you have to speak up.” In her own office, she’s deliberately set up a contest of ideas. “I’ve got people who are more left-wing, and people who are more right-wing. And I want that tension. I want to hear from both sides of the argument, because if you don’t know the counterfactual, then you are probably making the wrong decision.” (RedBridge Group pollster Kos Samaras describes Spender’s office as one of the most professionally run he’s come across.)

Spender’s dinner parties would sometimes become debating events as well, according to Bianca. Guests would be given a hot topic of the moment then placed in teams “for” or “against”. “Very weird,” jokes Spender, confirming her sister’s account. “We’ve always been into organised fun.” Don’t come expecting gourmet food, though. “Mark and I will serve you something that we cook all the time, you’ve probably eaten it before if you are one of my friends, but you come because you are there to hang out and have fun. Sometimes we’ll play board games – we’re a pretty daggy lot.”

In 2007, Spender returned from her decade abroad, with Capps. She began working on a women’s health pilot project before agreeing to take over as managing director of her mother’s fashion business, which employed about 150 people. “I think that means she’s held a substantially more senior corporate role than anyone in the Commonwealth parliament, by quite a long way,” says ex-Grattan Institute head Daley. In 2013, she also became chair of the Sydney Renewable Power Company, a post she resigned in 2020.

She and Capps began trying to start a family, but for three years were unsuccessful. Bianca, who has two children, offered to act as a surrogate. That was “a huge offer”, Spender says, “a ridiculous offer, because she was so sick when she had her babies”. In the end though, Spender underwent IVF and “got lucky” on the second round, with the other two pregnancies following naturally.

In 2016, against Zampatti’s wishes, Spender left the family business to fulfil a long-held desire to work in the not-for-profit sector, volunteering for education startup Stronger Brains before becoming chief executive of Australian Business and Community Network. “I never wanted fashion to be my life’s work,” she says. It was probably the only time she defied her mother on a matter of significance.

By the time she was running for parliament four years later, her father had come around. Hugely proud after she was elected, he longed to be in Canberra to watch her first speech, delivered on August 1, 2022. But by then he was gravely ill with lung disease. Spender is close to tears as she describes how he watched it live-streamed from parliament instead. John Spender died two months later, at the age of 86.

It’s 8.30am on a weekday and, flanked by volunteers in their light blue T-shirts, Allegra Spender is standing at Five Ways in Paddington, a small, bustling corner of her electorate. She’s skipped her usual five- to 10-kilometre morning run and set up an A-frame sign on the pavement: “Allegra Spender’s Pop-Up Office – Come and chat to your federal MP”.

Even her opponents acknowledge Spender is phenomenally good at working her electorate (full disclosure – I have a couple of extended family members who remain involved). She engages commuters, coffee-seekers, dog-walkers and parents heading up the road to the nearby childcare centre. Several of the younger women are desperately unhappy about the exorbitant cost of childcare, which she raises in parliament the following week.

Natalie Dupe and her husband Tom, waiting on a nearby bench for the city bus, want to know how effective she is, if she’s not part of the government or a major party. She gives them a variation of her stock answer: that the independents get much more constructive answers out of the government than the opposition or the backbench; that much of their work is away from the limelight, trying to get amendments through to improve legislation; and that their advocacy shifts the agenda. She cites giving Labor the “courage” to legislate fuel-efficiency standards as one example, something for which she and other independents (together with the Greens) campaigned strongly.

Over a 13-hour day, Spender dashes between meetings, mostly on foot and by train. There are meetings with Lifeline, with venture capitalist Craig Blair of Airtree Ventures, and with a group which connects local families with newly arrived refugee families. A high-flying tax expert drops in for a briefing. In the afternoon, she and her staff war-game ways to run a citizen-assembly-style forum on tax reform options.

At her final stop, a dimly lit bar at the Potts Point Hotel in the heart of the old Kings Cross red-light district, she hosts one of her regular “politics in the pub” events, this one with Wayside chapel pastor, Jon Owen. Wentworth might be one of the nation’s wealthiest electorates but nearly half her constituents are renters, and the housing shortage and cost of living are hitting hard. She tells them the best antidote to the pernicious “three Ps” – polarisation, post-truth politics and populism – is community engagement. “So keep the pressure on me!”

On Sunday evenings, she and Capps hold a family logistics meeting to plan the week ahead. Equal sharing of family responsibilities is personally important to her, a cause she’s championed in parliament, backing incentives to encourage both members of a couple to take their full paid parental leave.

On the Monday of every parliamentary sitting week, she’ll rise before dawn to drive her eye-catching cherry-red Model 3 Tesla down to Canberra, often accompanied by her chief of staff, Joe Fowles, and media adviser, Peter McEvoy, a former executive producer of ABC TV’s Q&A. (She’s at pains to have it known the family’s other vehicle is a more humble “Santa Fe – with hail damage”.)

Fundamental to the way Spender operates is close monitoring of opinion in her electorate on significant or divisive issues. When Labor first announced a redesign of the stage 3 tax cuts to skew benefits more to lower-income earners, she was sceptical. It was a misreading of the local mood. Her office ran an online poll, indicating 70 per cent support for the redesign, and she changed her stance. “I got a better sense of how Wentworth felt,” she concedes. “A key factor was the high proportion of people who identified as better off under the original proposal, but felt the change was appropriate.”

This approach infuriates her Liberal critics, including Sarah Swan, the Liberal deputy mayor of Woollahra Council. “If politics is only about following, we may as well get rid of politicians and poll the community on every single issue,” Swan says. “It’s important to consult, but our community also expects our federal representative to lead.” Spender’s response is succinct – and pointed. “I agree it’s the job of politicians to lead but it’s also my responsibility to listen and engage … and in safe seats, the Liberal party doesn’t listen at all.” (Swan also accuses Spender of fence-sitting over a controversial bike lane slated to run along Oxford Street, one of the electorate’s major arteries, into the city; Spender says she’s in favour of the bike lane as a matter of principle, but doesn’t think it’s her role to get embroiled in the design.)

Her core instincts are to find common – or at least overlapping – ground on an issue and then, in a businesslike way, solve it. The war in Gaza does not lend itself to this approach. There was community backlash in early March after she, along with the other teals, signed a letter calling on the government to restore funding to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine refugees in the Near East – if no alternative to delivering urgent aid to Gaza could be found (Labor had temporarily suspended funds after Israel claimed some UNRWA employees had been involved in the October 7 Hamas terrorist attacks). Shortly after, Spender’s
invitation to speak at a Jewish charity event was withdrawn, and opinion pieces for and against her were run in the Australian Jewish News.

The Liberal candidate for Wentworth, Roanne Knox, tells Good Weekend that Spender’s signature on the UNRWA letter “felt like a huge betrayal for our Jewish community”. The president of the ultra-conservative Australian Jewish Association (AJA), Dr David Adler, accuses her of crossing a “red line” by being seen to support UNRWA (which the AJA regards as intertwined with Hamas) and wants her to write to Foreign Minister Penny Wong and withdraw her endorsement of the original letter. A senior Labor figure with strong Jewish ties says Spender faces the challenge that “this is the only socially progressive electorate in NSW where being pro-Israel wins you votes.”

Spender has since aligned more with the perceived interests of Jewish voters. In June, she was the only teal not to sign a letter in support of the International Criminal Court, when its prosecutor announced it was seeking arrest warrants for Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as well as Hamas. She and fellow independent Zoe Daniel (who, as the member for Goldstein in Melbourne, also has a sizeable Jewish constituency) issued a joint statement calling for urgent action to address anti-Semitism in Australian universities, and Spender lobbied hard for the appointment of an anti-Semitism envoy.

Recently, she was the only teal to vote against a Labor motion on the recognition of Palestine, teaming with Coalition MPs and the Greens (the latter objecting to the motion’s proviso “as part of the peace process”). She says she fully supports a two-state solution but that the “continuous politicisation” in the parliament is wreaking further harm. “My bigger focus has been on combating anti-Semitism … and right now, working out how to build greater social cohesion,” she says. She denies her relationship with the Jewish community has fractured, insisting “it’s very good, particularly with the leadership.” She says she’s tried reaching out to a couple of Labor backbenchers with large Muslim constituencies to see if bridges could be built between their electorates but that so far, it’s come to naught.

It’s near impossible to walk the middle ground on this issue without incurring a political price. A stronger pro-Israeli stance risks alienating those outraged by the death toll and suffering in Gaza, but to do otherwise risks losing support among some Jewish constituents, with Adler going so far as to say, “It’s a vote-changer.”

On the afternoon of Saturday April 13, Spender was at her family’s holiday house at Great Mackerel Beach, a one-and-a-half-hour drive north of the city, when calls started flooding in about a murderous rampage at the giant Westfield shopping centre in the heart of her electorate. With her was Nina Miall and their combined children. “I was just trying to keep the five kids quiet while she gave interviews to Sky News and took calls from the PM,” recalls Miall, a curator at Queensland Art Gallery/Gallery of Modern Art.

“People were looking to her for guidance.” There was a blizzard of calls with police, local MPs and other authorities, as everyone tried to work out if this was a terrorist attack or a more random, shocking crime.

‘Someone once said to me that leadership is sense-making, and that has stuck with me. Helping to make sense of things, even when they are senseless.’

Allegra Spender

By dawn the following day, Spender was at the site of the carnage, having left her kids with Miall. Hearing from friends that they didn’t know how to speak to their children about the event, Spender mobilised staff and volunteers to assemble a primer on it, and to ensure it was disseminated urgently through schools, youth groups, sports and religious organisations. She stationed herself near the growing floral tributes for eight hours that Sunday, and for a couple of hours daily over the following week, and encouraged PM Albanese to visit the site post-haste. In parliament, he praised her handling of the tragedy. “It was very fine representation indeed of her local community.”

“Someone once said to me that leadership is sense-making, and that has stuck with me,” Spender says, reflecting. “Helping to make sense of things, even when they are senseless.”

Spender won her seat on preferences at the last election, helped by tactical voting by disaffected moderate Liberals, Greens and Labor supporters. The Liberals are seeking to blunt that alliance at the next federal election by endorsing Roanne Knox in Wentworth, a teal-like candidate who’s a party moderate, a former Wall Street management consultant now running her own tween fashion business. Some in the party believe it’s too late. “That ship has sailed, they should have run Knox at the last election,” says one former party heavyweight. “The fact that Allegra doesn’t feel like she has a home with us tells you everything that’s wrong with the modern Liberal party.” Moderate Liberals consider her “the one that got away”.

Next time around, Spender will have the advantage of incumbency, parliamentary experience and a well-oiled volunteer machine that augments the operations of her electorate office. Eager donors stepped up on a wave of anti-Morrison sentiment last time, and she raised just shy of $2 million, of which $701,776 came via the Climate 200 group founded by Simon Holmes a Court. Independents have historically been hard to dislodge once they’re established, and Malcolm Turnbull thinks it’s a mistake to attribute the May 2022 teal wave solely to anti-Scott Morrison sentiment: “I don’t think so, nor do most of the people who voted for them.”

Anything could happen between now and the next election, of course, and how the local community believes Spender has responded to Gaza could play a significant role in her prospects. That said, if she does manage to hold off a Liberal challenge and assuage Jewish voter unrest, there’s a growing likelihood she could find herself part of a crossbench determining which party holds power. Should that eventuate, Turnbull believes the teals could try to cut a deal and land themselves a ministerial post.

“I think it would be in the national interest if the teals evolved into a more organised bloc, if not a party, so that if there’s a hung parliament they are able to effectively negotiate with the larger parties rather than being picked off one by one.”

The teals have never operated as a bloc, as Spender’s lone pursuit of tax reform illustrates, though they often work collaboratively. Spender won’t countenance the notion of a cabinet post in any case, saying it’s not why she got into politics. Like the others, she won’t say how she might jump if a hung parliament eventuates, either. “The first thing would be to see what the numbers mean … and then it depends on what you can negotiate, seriously.”

Stepping up environmental protections and campaigning hard on renewables to drive down carbon emissions remain top priorities for her. She opposes both Peter Dutton’s nuclear plans and the extent of Labor’s gas expansion proposals, saying she “never expected to see the major parties almost on a unity ticket” on gas. The reignition of the climate wars, she says, is “a horrible version of Groundhog Day”.

Spender’s family wealth has not been used against her in the way Turnbull’s was against him, though that might change, depending on what kind of Pandora’s box her green paper opens up. She and Capps have extensive financial interests, including three houses in Australia and one in the UK. Collectively, she and other family members poured $4 million into her mother’s charitable foundation last year. She acknowledges she will “never be the person who pulled herself up by her bootstraps”. She once felt guilty about that. “[But] at a certain point, you accept what you’ve been given, and say, ‘How do I make the best use of it?’ I hope what I have done with my life shows that I’m not just someone who has taken it all for granted.”

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