Party like its 1899

How the two-party system took over our parliament and why it's time for a change

I do not see the slightest necessity for creating two hostile parties in the dominion parliament. We look to that body to exercise cool, calm, and deliberate judgment on every public question coming before it, and we should not so constitute it that its time would be occupied in fighting about who should be in office and who should not. As far as the dominion parliament is concerned, I think the system of party fighting might be obviated.

—Lieutenant-Colonel Smith, a delegate at the Constitutional Convention, March 9, 1891.

The more voters turn away from two-party dominance, the more the status quo doubles down and seeks to protect itself. If we are going to respond to this in a useful way, it helps to understand how we got to the system we currently have, to better understand how change might be possible.

It’s my two-party system and I’ll cry if I want to

Parties, as I’m sure most of you know, are not mentioned in the constitution, and their subsequent dominance has arisen despite the wishes of many of the founders. In other words, the idea that minority government is somehow perverse or otherwise undesirable is ahistorical nonsense, and in many ways, the rise of independents honours the original intent of our constitution. It is the major political parties that are the uninvited guests of our parliament, not the crossbench.

In moving beyond two-party dominance—as we have been slowly doing for the last forty years, accelerated somewhat after the 2022 federal election—we are really unearthing a vision of the country that was there from the beginning; one in which the parliament itself, rather than the parties, was key to our governance.

The rise of independents is an opportunity to reinvigorate the primacy of the parliament, to reclaim the power that has been centralised in the executive via the mechanism of the major parties. As Vida Goldstein, for whom Zoe Daniels’ federal seat in Melbourne is named, noted as long ago as 1913:

Study has convinced me that party government is a system that is entirely out of date, one that does not suit modern conditions. It is a cumbersome, unbusinesslike method of running the country. It simply means a shameful waste of public time and public money, and it does not always mean that we get the best man for the position. I think the time has come to devise some better method for carrying out public business. In the very interests of the country, we must break away from party.

Kent, Jacqueline. Vida: A woman for our time (p. 186). Penguin Random House Australia. Kindle Edition.

In discussing this unearthing project, I want to direct you to an excellent article by Matthew Lamb, who sets out in some detail the deliberations of the various Conventions that helped establish our constitution.¹

A pre-history of Australia’s two-party system

Lamb takes us through the arguments that arose during those meetings of the 1890s and explains the ways in which the founders tried to reconcile the party politics of the states with their ambitions for a more elevated politics in the proposed new federal parliament. In this, they understood a non-party system of governance as what Lamb calls the primary paradigm, a genuine parliamentary model, even if circumstances eventually conspired to make the secondary paradigm, the party system—in particular, the two-party system—dominate. Lamb writes:

The main concern with the influence of party government – during the conventions themselves, but also within the proposed federal constitution – was the incompatibility between party government and responsible government. A party politician is responsible, first and foremost, to their party, and in practice they avoid being held responsible to the parliament, housed as it otherwise is by members who are, in turn, responsible mainly to the opposing party. The governing party is therefore ruling mainly on behalf of their own interests and not in the interest of the whole; this state of affairs is thereby incompatible with the idea of a federation, which thus makes of the constitution a ‘heap of absurdities.’

All of this leads Lamb to conclude that the triumph of the two-party paradigm has completely constrained how we think about what is possible in our parliamentary system, and that we have been, in effect, trained to misunderstand the nature of our own democratic governance. He makes the excellent point:

At each federal election there is some concern that neither of the two major parties may get a majority of the seats, and so we are told that we risk a ‘hung parliament’.

But this phrase has no corollary in the real world.

After each federal election the parliament always retains its capacity to function, the seats still work for sitting on and the chamber still works for deliberation. It remains always ready to be activated by the will and imagination of all elected members.

In the circumstance of a major party not getting a majority of seats, then, what does not retain its ability to function is the two-party system, with the members of each party unwilling to enter parliament and make an argument without the outcome being known in advance. It would be more accurate to refer to such a situation as a ‘hung party system’.

What the more conventional phrase does is deflect a fault of the party system onto the parliament, and unjustly so.

So how did this secondary, party paradigm become so dominant?

Without going into all the details—which are fascinating, and which involved ongoing disputes about tariffs, or free-trade versus protectionism more generally, as well as restrictions on non-white immigration—the origin of our two-party system arises in large part from the successful formation of the Australian Labor Party (ALP).

Essentially, once Labor came into existence and showed its viability, the independents and non-Labor parties combined in 1909 into a single force—a so-called fusion party—in order to counter what they, rightly, saw as the growing power of the ALP. Historian Frank Bongiorno notes:

At the federal election in April 1910, two parties faced each other for the first time in an Australian national election. Winning majorities in both chambers, Labor became the world’s most precociously successful labour or socialist party. A crowd estimated at 30,000 packed into the street outside the Age office in Melbourne to view the results as they came in, beaming with joy and cheering each Labor victory heartily. ‘The Democracy of Australia has indeed spoken,’ declared Melbourne’s Labor Call, ‘and with no uncertain voice. The Fusion Party has been scattered to the four points of the compass, and the Labor party is in full possession of the field.’

Bongiorno, Frank. Dreamers and Schemers: A Political History of Australia (p. 193). Schwartz Books Pty. Ltd.. Kindle Edition.

I wouldn’t want to give the impression that this development was all bad, or that it was seen as some sort of failure at the time; far from it. The point is more that it set in train a narrow way of thinking about governance that still haunts us.

Political scientist Ian Marsh argues that this “settlement” was underpinned, across the parties, by values that he characterises as “liberal egalitarianism”. Whatever its shortcomings in recognising issues of gender and race, it was, in world terms at the time, a system committed to a radical conception of equality built upon an idea of freedom in which the role of government was to provide the circumstances for, in the words of political philosopher TH Green, “citizens as a body to make the most and best of themselves…”

This positive view of the freedom to achieve a worthwhile life stands in stark contrast to the negative view, still dominant in the United States, where rights are conceived as a freedom from government interference. Australia’s positive view of freedom held until recently when it was undermined by the neoliberal revolution of the 1980s and 1990s.²

In practical terms, Marsh argues, “fairness was interpreted to require equal levels of per capita grants for each State irrespective of its contribution to income, and pensions for those who, through no fault of their own, were poor. This was a coherent program which both Labor and the newly established Commonwealth Liberal Party incorporated in their programs or platforms.”

He says, “This provided the substantive foundation of the two party regime.”

Marsh also describes the way in which the structure of the Labor Party helped cement our understanding of how governments were supposed to work. He calls the ALP a “novel mode of political organisation” in which a “mass party shifted a number of functions from the legislature to the party organisation.” He argues that this “new concept of political party is probably the single most important factor explaining the emergence of the two party system.”

Under this novel form, “policy and electoral activity were…linked to an extra-parliamentary organisation” which thus “constrained and disciplined parliamentary candidates in new ways…”. This ultimately challenged the non-Labor parties, the fusion of other groupings and independents, to respond in kind, and Marsh notes that while “the differences remained great” Labor’s “refusal to qualify or compromise the electoral and agenda setting role of the organisation or its disciplinary control over MPs obliged the non-Labor groups to adopt practices and approaches that produced a parallel outcome, if by different means.”

It was this new conception of party, parliamentary procedure, and policy making which “provided the procedural foundations for the two party system.”³

And here we are.

Between then and now, the ALP has remained reasonably constant, though its approach to party discipline has led to splits at federal and state level. The non-Labor side of politics has gone through various iterations, and the formation of the federal version of the Country Party in 1919—now the Nationals—and the postwar formation of the Menzies Liberal Party, and ultimately the Coalition between these two parties has both changed the nature of our two-party system while also leaving it, paradoxically, intact.

Until now, whatever crises have emerged within our two-party system have been solved within the same two-party framework, and this speaks to the way in which in the minds of the political class in particular find it difficult to think outside that particular box.⁴ But there was a sort of mass-party logic to the two-party system that no longer holds and the loss of relevance of the legacy parties, as their base dissipates and their primary vote shrinks, means that we need a different way of thinking about our governance.⁵

In particular, the underlying values of “liberal egalitarianism” as the idea that has connected the major parties is evaporating. They may have had different means to achieve those egalitarian ends, but they shared those ends in common. Now, Labor’s resort to neoliberalism and the Coalition’s increasing shift to the tactics of far-right populism and anti-science irrationality leaves a vast, shifting centre of ordinary interests unrepresented.

It is that shared commitment to fairness and equality that we need to rescue from our past and it is just not going to happen within the two-party system.

I wouldn’t go so far as someone like Simone Weil, who in her famous jeremiad against political parties called for their abolition. But she nonetheless nails the problem, and tell me this doesn’t still ring true:

Just imagine: if a member of the party (elected member of parliament, candidate or simple activist) were to make a public commitment, ‘Whenever I shall have to examine any political or social issue, I swear I will absolutely forget that I am the member of a certain political group; my sole concern will be to ascertain what should be done in order to best serve the public interest and justice.’

Such words would not be welcome. His comrades and even many other people would accuse him of betrayal. Even the least hostile would say, ‘Why then did he join a political party?’–thus naively confessing that, when joining a political party, one gives up the idea of serving nothing but the public interest and justice. This man would be expelled from his party, or at least denied pre-selection; he would certainly never be elected.

We don’t have to call for abolition, but it is important to recognise that simply allowing one of two parties to share almost total control of the federal parliament between them on an alternating basis, in perpetuity, is a recipe for corruption, increasing the likelihood that vested interests will be favoured over the will of the people. Which is exactly what is happening now, as is evidenced by shortcomings in everything from housing to mining policy, from aged care to unemployment benefits, policies that have a direct effect on the quality of life of the nation.⁶

If we want genuine accountability back in the system, that positive liberty, we first have to believe that there is a viable alternative to the two-party system. That system may have embedded itself in our parliament—as well as in our consciousness—but it is useful to recognise that there is nothing sacrosanct, or even constitutional, about a two-party dispensation.

Look at history, and don’t fall for the lie that there is no alternative.

Recognise that when the current-day beneficiaries of the two-party system argue that minority government inevitably leads to instability, what they really mean, as Matthew Lamb has pointed out, is that it leads to instability in the two-party system, which is a very different thing.

What we should be trying to protect is not the two-party system, but representative parliamentary deliberation acting in the name of a fair society.

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1. Matthew tells me he has in mind a book on this topic and I would love to see it happen.

2. See my book, Voices of Us, for more discussion of this transformation.

3. See Marsh, Ian. Beyond the Two Party System: political representation, economic competitiveness and Australian politics. Cambridge University Press. (Note, for some reason Marsh doesn’t like hyphens, and I have transcribed as per the book!)

4. And yes, of course, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!”

5. The Fraser Government’s blocking of supply and the subsequent sacking of the Whitlam Government undermined the idea of shared legitimacy despite political differences. Our polity has never really recovered.

6. Weil makes another point that might’ve once seemed extreme but again rings true when you think of what has happened to the GOP under Trump:

[T]he essential tendency of all political parties is towards totalitarianism, first on the national scale and then on the global scale. And it is precisely because the notion of the public interest which each party invokes is itself a fiction, an empty shell devoid of all reality, that the quest for total power becomes an absolute need.