The LNP and Labor must stop acting like petulant children and start paying attention to what the electorate is trying to tell them
Let's get through this period of transition
My favourite quote from the last few years of Australian politics is the statement made to the National Press Club in the wake of the Albanese Government’s slipping into power after the 2022 federal election. Labor National Secretary Paul Erickson said that “I don’t accept that we are in some new epoch or new era where everything is different.”
Oh, Paul.
The country had just delivered government to Labor with the smallest primary vote in a hundred-odd years1; Labor lost their own safe seat of Fowler to right-of-centre independent, Dai Le; the Greens had picked up seats from Labor and Liberal in inner-city Brisbane giving them the most lower-house seats the minor party had ever had; Zali Steggall was returned for a second term in the seat of Warringah after defeating former Liberal Prime Minister, Tony Abbott, in the 2019 federal election; independent Helen Haine won Indi again, a seat the Libs used to hold with more than 60% of the primary vote; and five other independents, with no previous experience of political representation, won seats that were not only considered blue-ribbon Liberal seats for the last fifty years, but were the seats from which the Liberal Party, the colossus of post-war Australian politics, had drawn their treasurers and prime ministers and most of their funding.
But the National Secretary of the Labor Party didn’t “accept” that we might be in a new era.
I think we have to understand such pronouncements as the defensive response of people confronted with something they didn’t like and who think they can ward off the horribleness by denying its existence. I mean, the only time children chant sticks and stones will break my bones but names will never hurt me is at the exact moment that the names begin to hurt.
As far back as 2016 I had written, “Our dissatisfaction [with federal politics] is less likely to be reflected…in the emergence of charismatic leaders than in the rise of independents and small parties, and the concomitant dissolution of the LNP/Labor duopoly,” and here we are. The trend is continuing, not just at the 2022 federal election, but with the Tasmanian state election held last weekend, and I will come to that.
What we have to be careful of is not pre-empting the nature of the change we are seeing. We need to recognise that we are, indeed, in a period of transition, that it will have its ups and it downs, and that it isn’t simply a matter of landing on some grand, new settlement.
For now, the shape our politics is taking is a shift of primary votes away from Labor and the LNP such that those legacy parties account for about a third of the total vote each. This leaves another third floating2, looking for somewhere to land. That floating third won’t always land on precisely the parties and candidates we are seeing emerge now: it may even deliver one of the old parties majority government, as it did in 2022. But the trend seems to be that that floating third will organise itself in such a way as to continue to create a substantial crossbench, one that may well have the balance of power on an ongoing basis.
Where that floating third lands will depend on a number of issues, many of them local. Indeed, the nature of the proportional, multi-member voting system in Tasmania, for instance, seems to mitigate against the sort of community independents (“Teals”) who routed the Liberals at the last federal election and allows people to vote directly for, say, a Greens’ candidate, rather choosing an independent acting as some sort of compromise between the major parties.
Anyway, the point is, contra Paul Erikson, we are in a new epoch, and so one of the changes people face—particularly members of the political class and the legacy media—is a need to reframe political analysis, to rethink the way in which we speak about Australian politics. We need a different vocabulary to describe and interpret what is going on, and it begins with not saying the parliament is “hung” but that it is deliberative.3
It means recognising that a crossbench not signing off on every piece of major-party legislation is not an indication of instability but of parliament working as it should to find compromise amongst diverse views in service of the diverse electorate it represents.
We also have to recognise that these changes are being driven by voters themselves and that therefore there is no excuse for members of Labor and the LNP to ignore the will of the people by throwing up tired excuses as to why we must resist, at all costs, any move to minority government.
Chief amongst these tired excuses is the bogeyman of “instability”, the standard go-to of legacy media and parties at every election and that they double down on the more the electorate trends away from Labor and the LNP.
Liberal Premier Jeremy Rockliff warned constantly during the recent Tasmanian election of what he called the emergence of a "coalition of chaos". He said, "minority government is destabilising, it destroys confidence, it is bad for our state and it is bad for Tasmanians". He did everything he could to rig the result, increasing the size of the parliament and threatening to enact legislation that would expel from parliament anyone who changed parties or tried to sit as independent, and it was all to no avail.
Also, whenever you hear someone from the LNP or the Labor Party or the broader political class invoke the threat of crossbench instability, it is worth remembering that arguably the most unstable period of federal governance since the War was in the period between the election of Kevin Rudd and the election of Scott Morrison. The Liberals and Labor inflicted on the country the constant knifing of party leaders—Rudd, Gillard, Rudd, Abbott, Turnbull, Morrison—meaning a regular change of prime minister, be damned whatever else needed to be done in the country, because the parties were tearing themselves apart—could not govern themselves, as the saying goes.
In other words, the major parties, far from being the cure for political instability, were its cause.
Tasmanians responded to Premier Rockcliff’s whining about stability with a 15% swing4 against his government, only about 1% of which went to Labor, creating the biggest crossbench in the state’s history, with most of the swing going to the Greens and the Jackie Lambie Network (JLN). As analyst Ben Raue notes, “There had been a noticeable decline in the major party vote in the 1980s as the Greens emerged as a third force, but until 2018 the decline was quite slow. But the major party vote has declined from 83% to 66% over two elections.”
At this point, it looks like the Liberal Party will form a minority government in Tasmania, though part of the reason this is happening is because of the extraordinary decision by Labor to vacate the field. Although Labor leader, Rebecca White, left open on election night the possibility of staying in contention, she seems to have been overridden by the federal party executive.
Think about what this tells about how Labor in particular is responding to this reshaping of our politics around a more dominant crossbench. Basically, they are saying they would rather see the Liberals in power than form any sort of coalition with the crossbench, particularly the Greens.
Shocking, but not surprising.
Labor rusted ons, the parliamentary party itself, and a decent segment of the broader Labor political class are forever telling us that the Greens are not a serious party, that they are not interested in the hard work of actual policy formation, that they are not grown-ups and that therefore Labor should not deal with them. But what is less grown up than refusing to work with a party that actually ensures your majority at the federal level and that progressive voters see as a legitimate part of the political process, as a guarantor of the progressivism they perceive Labor to be abandoning and that is driving down Labor’s primary vote in the first place?
It is hard not to conclude that Labor is reluctant to form government with the Greens not because they fear instability but because they fear it will work. Rather than risk that, and for Tasmania to become another example, along with the ACT and the Gillard Government of a functioning minority government, they would prefer to drop out of contention all together and hand power to a feckless, unstable Coalition minority.5
Two-thirds of Tasmanians voted for someone other than the Liberal Party but Labor won’t form government with the crossbench the people voted for. Who is being childish here, not to mention, anti-democratic?
I agree with Guy Rundle: “Tasmanian Labor’s announcement on Sunday that Labor would not seek to form a minority government is a betrayal of historical possibility and audacity that could yield real lasting change and make this a historic moment not only in the state but in the Westminster system.”6
As I’ve said, we would be foolish to not recognise the difficulties associated with this period of transition in our politics, but that doesn’t excuse our political representatives from trying to make it work rather than pretend it isn’t happening. Despite the inherent difficulties in the process, my inclination is to be hopeful and positive about the change that’s occurring because it is being driven organically, by voters themselves.
The truth is all indicators suggest the trend away from the legacy parties will continue no matter how hard the major parties stamp their feet.
“Compared to 2019, Labor's primary vote dropped much less than the Coalition's, though Labor nevertheless recorded its lowest primary vote since either 1903 or 1934, depending on whether the Lang Labor vote is included.” (Link)
More like 30%.
“Despite this striking evidence of dissatisfaction with the two-party system, journalists reported the Tasmanian outcome as a “hung Parliament”. This is a nonsense way of describing the situation. A hung jury is one that can’t reach a verdict. An election in which no party wins an outright majority of seats is a verdict rejecting the idea that the Parliament, or at least the Lower House, should be a rubber stamp for the winning party (or rather for the leader of that party) in between elections, when the voters have a chance to switch one ruling party for another. For some years, Tim Dunlop and I have been pushing the term “deliberative parliament” to describe this outcome.” (Link)
This might be down to about 12% as the votes are finally tallied.
Make no mistake, the Christian right in Tasmania, led by newly elected Eric Abetz, has Rockcliff’s job in his/their sites.
Let’s not give up entirely on Labor changing their mind.
Rebecca White’s concession speech before all the votes have been counted suggests the ALP hates the Greens so much that they would be happy to suffer 4 more years of irrelevance on the Opposition benches than actually putting those differences aside to enact good and considered legislation. Such great vision! What does the party even stand for except as a vehicle to punch left rather than the common opposition.
Jeremy Rockliff’s ‘victory’ speech was embarrassing. 63 percent of the population chose another party and he claims the entire state for the liberals when the numbers do not lie.
The beauty of Tasmania’s electoral system to me is that no party can hide behind the single member preferential voting to hide their party’s deep unpopularity with two thirds of the electorate.
Great article Tim. I was in Tasmania on election night (I vote in Lyons) and White’s speech certainly left open the possibility of Labor forming government. Seems like she got rolled by the ‘faceless’ men in the ALP’s state administrative body. They seem to be too scared to want to govern. One wonders why the ALP bothers standing sometimes. The Rundle piece in Crikey was excellent, I thought. Such an opportunity for change wasted by a yet again gutless ALP.