On 5 November 2025, around 2 pm Australian time, Zohran Mamdani was elected the mayor of New York. Newsrooms across the world went into Defcon 1, finally the misbegotten hand-wringing of what will happen for the man formerly known as Prince (Andrew) got knocked off the breaking news list. I am sure that there were celebrations in the British Royal household. There definitely were celebrations in my household as I could finally get over the gag reflex I had been suffering for the better part of the last two weeks on hearing the name of the former Duke of York.
So why does the unlikely mayoral win in New York matter to Australia? New York is some 16,500 kilometers away from Australia even if it has an economy equivalent to that of Canada. Yes, you read it right – the gross domestic product of New York is $2.32 trillion, almost the same as Canada.
What happened in New York mattered because conviction matters – and in an infinitely corrupt, jaded and cynical political ecosystem, we may just have a tiny spark of hope.
Mamdani is an unlikely winner; born in Uganda, he is son of an Indian academic, Mahmood Mamdani, and filmmaker wife Mira Nair (Monsoon Wedding, Vanity Fair and Words with Gods) and a practising Muslim to boot. He won in the city with the largest number of Jewish people outside Israel and epicenter 9/11 tragedy – which is so inextricably linked in the modern psyche to Islamic terrorism.
He won, in my humble opinion, because he was radically truthful and ferociously brave.
He was radically truthful about himself, the motivators that drove him and what needs to change to make New York a better place. In a world where everything is ‘spun’ and over-produced and moderated by risk management, he became an authentic voice as he embraced the good, the bad and the ugly – neo-liberalism has not been working for a while, so let’s give something else a go.
He was brave enough to say what is happening in Palestine is wrong. In fact he credits his political awakening to Palestine; seeing the manifest hypocrisy of the west, he understood that freedom for all humanity did not come with exclusion clauses. He has always been vocal that the Palestinian conflict started long before 7 October 2023 and creating the largest cohort of child amputees and orphans in the history of humanity is categorically wrong.
Mamdani may be a young fresh face to an international audience, but he has been in the political traps for some time. He has been representing the 36th state assembly district encompassing Astoria and Long Island City in Queens since 2019. He is a member of the ‘State Socialist in Office’ and a member of the Muslim Democratic Club of New York. He hid none of this information during his campaign – he didn’t make himself smaller or flex himself to pretzel to appeal to the largest possible group of voters. He let his integrity and platform stand for itself.
People voted for him. People voted for a man who had a fraction of the funds the other party political candidates – Andrew Cuomo and Curtis Sliwa- had. He won despite a relentlessly negative and misinformation filled campaign that had people power and engagement at the heart of its campaign.
His campaign team stepped up the door knocking game several notches, but unlike Kamala Harris or Hilary Clinton – the Mamdani team spoke truth to power. There were no word salads or evivocations. You can only win the door knocking stakes if your campaign is energised on truth and integrity batteries and nothing else.
Mamdani broke every heuristic in political campaigning and walked into the New York mayor’s office having proven that politics does not need to be the domain of the hopeless cynic.
Australia had a similar Mamdani moment during the 2022 federal election – eight independent women candidates swept into the lower house of federal parliament. Hailed as the new force in Australian politics, they were socially progressive members with fiscally conservative backgrounds and they took aim at blue ribbon Liberal and National seats, and won.
Independents are not a new phenomenon in Australian politics; we’ve had them for quite sometime. The first independent to be elected into the Australian federal parliament was Alexander Paterson representing Capricornia in Queensland. This seat still remains with the maverick Bob Katter, but the Community Independents were supposedly different.
The movement was pioneered in Victoria by Cathy McGowan, who flipped the seat independent from Sophie Mirabella in 2013, with sister Ruth McGowan. It requires a community group to form ahead of an election, understand the concerns raised by people in the community through surveys and kitchen table conversations, and support a person in the federal campaign. The methodology is quite formulaic with checks and balances in place to prevent anyone from taking the piss and ensures support from its community engagement centre – Huddle.
Somewhere between the fanfare of 2022 and the 2025 federal election, the Community Independents movement lost its shine and therefore its appeal. There are still eight Community Independents in federal parliament, Zoe Daniel from Goldstein lost to Tim Wilson in Goldstein with 175 votes and Nicolette Boele won the seat of Bradfield with 26 votes. Net net – the community independents are no better off than in 2022 as all of them had to depend on preferences to get in.
It could be argued that the 2025 election was materially different to the 2022 election with the potential for Prime Minister Dutton scaring the hell out of Australians. Most of us were still suffering from Post Traumatic Scott (Morrison) Disorder, but the Teals failed to consolidate community sentiment. And having watched the campaigns closely, I think the Teals failed exactly for the reason Mamdani won; Mamdani pinned his colours to the mast and was very clear on who he was and what he stood for while the Teals played politics.
Starting with Allegra Spender; it was completely understandable that she put out a statement in the days after 7 October that she stood in solidarity with the hostages, but her unflinching support of Zionists in the face of atrocity after atrocity became unbearable. She soon took to locking the responses to both her X and Instagram feed as time went on, and she lost support from those she needed the most – young people who are being told that there was no genocide happening in Gaza while watching children being murdered online.
To this day I cannot understand how the Teal doctors had nothing to say about doctors and medical professionals being killed at a rate of two per day in Palestine. What happened to the medical fraternity? What happened to the feminists when pregnant mothers were being killed or having C-sections forced on them without anaesthetic?
The formula for driving community engagement through kitchen tea conversations also failed in a post COVID lockdown world. The kitchen tea conversation methodology is a deeply rooted Anglo-centric concept born in the Country Women’s Association tree of communication and influence. It didn’t do so well in the cities where this kind of engagement falls short because 30 per cent of Australians are no longer white nor do they come from the country. The Community Independents needed to pivot to engaging with multicultural associations and failed to do so.
The electorate wants conviction. The electorate needs engagement. The electorate is desperate for a change and not culture wars. Like Daniel Andrews who kept winning elections in Victoria never mind that the Murdoch press threw everything at him including the kitchen sink, Mamdani has shown us that the world wants and needs conviction leaders. Mamdani has shown us that when everything falls, the truth will always stand tall.