Do the teal independents always vote with the Greens?

We have been alerted to some political advertising that claims to show that teal independents are voting with the Greens Party over 70% of the time.

We cannot say for sure whether this is true or not, and likely no one else can either because that sort of information is not currently recorded anywhere, officially or otherwise.

Currently, the only votes that are officially recorded in any detail are called divisions, which are formal votes that involve our representatives moving to one side of the chamber or the other and having their names officially recorded. These types of votes happen far less often than votes “on the voices”, which is when our representatives shout “aye!” or “no!” and the loudest side wins. “On the voices” votes are only recorded by whether they pass or not, so there is no official record for how each individual politician voted in them or whether they were even present at the time.

This means that, if true, the proposed 70%+ agreement figure between teal independents and the Greens Party must be based on division data.

So the question then becomes: are the teal independents voting with the Greens over 70% of the time during divisions?

To answer this question, we can look at a particular teal independent MP’s voting record on They Vote for You and select the “Compare their voting record with someone else’s” option. As well as providing a number value for the level of agreement with other MPs, these comparison pages also provide a list of the policy areas on which the different representatives tend to agree or disagree.

Alternatively, since the question relates to the Greens Party, we can pick a single Greens MP to make the comparison. Here, we’ve chosen Greens MP for Ryan Elizabeth Watson-Brown because at the time of writing this article she had the highest attendance record of the Greens MPs, had never rebelled against her party and entered the House of Representatives at the same time as several of the teal independents in 2022.

To help give some context to this comparison, we’ve also included how Ms Watson-Brown’s record compares to Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s and Opposition Leader Peter Dutton’s.

At the time of writing this article, this comparison showed that the Greens Party were actually voting more consistently with the Labor Party during divisions than with the teal independents in the House of Representatives. 

But before we form the conclusion that the Labor Party and Greens are always agreeing with each other, it’s worth looking at the situation in the Senate. For example, here’s how Greens Senator David Shoebridge was voting compared to Leader of the Government in the Senate Penny Wong (Labor) and Leader of the Opposition in the Senate Michaelia Cash (Liberal):

As you can see, in the Senate there seems to be significantly less agreement between the Greens and Labor and slightly more agreement between the Greens and Coalition.

So what does all this mean? 

While different teal independents do seem to have voted with the Greens Party between 66%-76% of the time during divisions in the House of Representatives at the time of writing this article, this figure actually appears to be smaller than or roughly equivalent to the level of agreement between the Greens and Labor. However, this should not be taken as evidence that the Greens and Labor are always voting together, as the two parties’ agreement levels are significantly lower in the Senate.

In other words, while comparing the level of agreement between representatives can be useful, we must remember that it only tells part of the story and may be a wildly inaccurate representation of what’s really going on. So we should always use these figures cautiously.