The sound of three hands clapping

Further comments on why we need to rid ourselves of two-party politics

Many ingenious lovely things are gone,
That seemed sheer miracle to the multitude,
protected from the circle of the moon
That pitches common things about.

—WB Yeats

In my book Voices of Us, I made the first serious attempt to explain how the community independents’ movement had accelerated the dissolution of the two-party glue that has traditionally held our politics together. Over the last three years, I have been refining that analysis and adjusting it in light of the massive upheavals in world politics, particularly in the United States.

Since 2022, my argument has been that there is a floating third of Australia voters who are no longer strongly tied to any particular major party and that this floating third will land differently and unpredictably from election to election. In 2022, they ripped the heart out of the Liberal Party and voted independent in record numbers, allowing Labor to crawl into majority on a tiny primary vote. A continuation of that trend at the upcoming election would likely see Labor go into minority, and many are predicating this. But it wouldn’t take too much change in the voting intentions of that floating third for Labor to once again squeak across the line in their own right.¹

It is important to say that this potential undermining of the two-party dominance is healthy. It points to the deeper stability of national representation.

It is also important to say, as Cathy McGowan did in my recent conversation with her, that what is happening isn’t only about getting independent candidates elected. The way in which this process is reinvigorating political engagement at the community level is part of a long arc of democratic transformation. In fact, as things stand now, 1 in 5 voters have a community independent standing at the upcoming election. This is unprecedented and it is important, and whatever the results of the next federal election, this evolution will not stop.

The two-party system has gone from being a source of national political stability to the source of much of what ails us. I am making a case that smashing the two-party system is the key to a better country. But I also want to say that how we get there matters.

You can choose the American model or the Australian model. You can become so pissed off with the way the establishment and business-as-usual politics has fucked up your country that you hand over the reins to a criminal cohort who happen to hate the same people as you do and burn the whole thing down.

Or you can choose the Australian model and rebuild your democracy, and your parliament, community by community from the ground up, working with representatives to keep the best of what we have had in the past and to fix what needs to be fixed. Ultimately, you have to bring the spirit of community—the feelings of engagement and joy—that gets independents elected in the first place into the parliament itself so that diversity, engagement, and deliberation are institutionalised in the heart of government.²

What exactly is wrong with the two-party system?

The two-party system presumes an electorate more homogenous than the one we actually have. In the 1970s, political scientist Don Aitkin could write without fear of contradiction that “the shape of Australian politics has been largely unchanged since 1910” and assert that “the causes of this stability are to be found in the adoption, by millions of Australians then and since, of relatively unchanging feelings of loyalty to one or other of the Australian parties.”

That homogeneity and loyalty no longer exist, and the change is not just reflected in the gradual collapse of the first preference votes for the major parties—particularly Labor—but in the fact that, from election-to-election, fewer people than ever vote for the same party. The 2022 Australian Election Study (AES) reports: “In 1967, 72 percent of respondents reported that they had always voted for the same political party during their lifetime. In 2022 the same figure was almost half that—37 percent— suggesting that voters are much more likely to change their vote from election to election, rather than to remain loyal to one party.”

And yet, the two-party system remains the lynchpin of our politics.³ It holds together, not just an array of institutional structures and practices, but a mindset that binds how we even think about politics.⁴ To switch (mix) metaphors, this system is the final sluice gate through which power in our country is funnelled. The influence pedalled by corporations and the various lobbying groups who work for them only work in the way they do because of the primacy of two-party politics.

The system also determines the sort of media we have and makes the fourth estate complicit in a system that does as much to mislead ordinary voters as it does to inform them.

Nearly every ill of Australian democracy as it now operates is the fruit of the poison tree of the two-party system.

Zoe Daniel put it strongly at her Press Club address on Wednesday:

For decades Australians have been told a lie that has shaped our politics, our media, and our expectations of government. We’ve been told that only the major parties can govern. That they, and only they, can solve the problems we face.

But as I ask my constituents when I go door knocking around my electorate of Goldstein, let me ask you in this room – do you feel like they’ve been solving them?

Is the tax system fair? Is housing more available and affordable? Has climate action been strong enough? Are women safer? Is life getting easier for families?

I can tell you their answer is almost always ‘no.’

In fact, a voter at one focus group said – “It’s a choice between shit, and shitter.”

A paradox arises and it is the crux of the problem with our two-party system.

As the community becomes more diverse and less rusted on to one or other of the major parties, the parties themselves converge. Ever since Hawke and Keating threw Labor’s lot in with capital and undermined the power of organised labour—with organised labour’s approval—and went full neoliberal, the policy differences between the major parties of the two-party system have run together. As the AES points out:

The previous 2019 election saw major differences between the parties on taxation, with Labor proposing to introduce a range of tax changes if they won government; by contrast, the 2022 election saw very few differences between the parties on economic policy.

…Despite concerns about China’s growing military strength and the war in Ukraine, national security was mentioned by only 5 percent as the most important issue, reflecting the largely bipartisan approach of the major parties to foreign and defence policy. (Emphasis added.)

We even had the incredible situation where Tasmania Labor was happier for the Liberals to form government than to form a government of their own with the Greens and independents. This was a position also taken by the leader of Queensland Labor and then-premier, Steven Miles. Anthony Albanese, too, is on record saying he won’t form government with the help of the Greens on the crossbench, so presumably he, too, is happier to hand power to the Liberals than to the crossbench.

I’m sure some people are screaming that he is just taking a position in the lead up to the election, and sure, maybe that’s the case⁵, but this is increasingly the argument we hear. We have to at least acknowledge that even the rhetorical use of this threat tears strips off the essence of our democracy, which is that the parliament represents the will of the people. How dare politicians even say they won’t work with a crossbench the people have elected.

There is another element to this.

Convergence leads to corruption. The parties to the two-party system no longer act as a check and balance on each other because they agree on so much.

What’s more, they are increasingly protecting their own positions at the centre of the political system challenged by minor parties and independents who have growing community support. We are seeing this clearly now as the Labor and LNP will likely stitch up a deal on campaign finance reform, making it harder for their pre-eminence in the system to be challenged by independents and the like. We see it in other matters too, including environmental policy.

As I discussed in Voices of Us, there are more and more examples of state capture, of government departments and agencies, as well as the major parties, acquiescing to the demands of large players in various sectors at the expense of the common good. We see the politicisation of public services so that, at least at the SES level, managers and department bosses happily fall into line with their political masters, the most egregious example being #robodebt. We see the mainstream media either playing the dead bat of false balance or openly allowing themselves to be agents of political mischief (again, see the report of the Royal Commission into #robodebt).

You can certainly make the case that, despite this convergence, a Dutton-LNP government would be worse than an Albanese-Labor government—and I would agree—but this lesser-evil position misses a much bigger point.

We no longer have to choose between these two options.

Feel the liberation of that!

In the meantime, politics as practiced by and presented to us by mainstream institutions gets dumber, angrier and less useful, even as communities themselves reinvigorate the process. Differentiation between the major parties is—as they converge on major policy—increasingly a matter of tone and temperament, forcing politicians into extremes of rhetoric on “hot button” issues like immigration, gender and identity more generally. Or else, dressing up capitulation as competence. That this all heads in an anti-democratic, anti-progressive, rightwing direction is the inevitable outcome of the fact that a substantial sector of the political class and the corporations that fund it are steeped in class warfare, patriarchy and often racism.

The lesser of two evils is still evil, as the kids say.

The media is part of this and we end up with the ridiculous situation where the same outlets that bend over backwards to normalise every illegal, fascist thing that Donald Trump does will also try and convince you that the community independents are a threat to democracy.

This sort of hypocrisy should not just appal us; it should clarify for us the nature of the power that the two-party system holds in place and why we need to break it wide open.

The last three years of parliament have been a proof of concept. The independents have comported themselves with honour and people have noticed. The community independents movement has continued to grow and more and more people are seeing past the lie that Zoe Daniel highlighted, that only the major parties can govern. Voters no longer believe that, and they are no longer fearful of the notion of a minority government in which the crossbench has earned the balance of power.

Honestly, hold your nerve. There is no downside in wresting back control of the country from a two-party system that has outlived its usefulness.

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1. Matters are volatile enough that we have to allow for the possibility of a Dutton minority or majority government, though on current figures either option, especially the latter, seems unlikely.

2. More on this in a future post, though I’ve been banging on about it in different forms for a while now.

3. I emphasise the word “system” because it is important to see the way political power has functioned in Australia as a by-product of class divisions that were institutionally entrenched from the beginning of Federation and that have yet to be dislodged. As Dean Jaensch puts in his book, The Australian Party System, “Labor and Liberal parties dominated the elections, the legislatures and the policy-making processes in 1910. They continued to do so over half a century later. The disruptions within the parties, the kaleidoscopic developments of the late 1930s and early 1940s, the formation of the Country Party and the intervention of a multitude of minor parties, changed the immediate party contests and the party environments at specific elections, but the Labor versus non-Labor pattern reemerged.”

It is a two-party system. The argument is not against parties per se.

4. And the closer you are to that process, as for instance the mainstream media is, the more tightly you are bound by its logic.

5. I’m not actually convinced.