When it comes to voting, Australians are increasingly inclined to say, "None of the above"
It's time to fix the system, yes it's time
The Tasmanian election is the latest example of how we are building ourselves a democratic parachute as we jump out of the plane, reinventing our political system as the wind rushes past our ears, trying to ensure ourselves a safe landing. To put it another way, in election after election, Australians are easing themselves away from a two-party system, trying to create a third force in their parliaments by way of the crossbenches.
The parachute analogy is meant to suggest the level of difficulty involved in this process, and we shouldn’t shy away from acknowledging the predicament that faces us.
In moving towards a three-body solution—a crossbench with the balance of power—there is a structural issue. The multi-party solution Australians are groping for does not fit in the Westminster box we have been provided, and it is going to require institutional change. We are going to have to rebuild the box.
The fact is, two-party logic is baked into how we do politics, and it is present in everything from the way in which elections are funded—with the legacy parties (parties in general) handed enormous advantages—to the very architecture of our parliaments, with a Speaker presiding over an adversarial-by-design forum.
As Guy Rundle noted on Monday after the result across Bass Strait, “Tasmania [now] has a European-style continental Parliament onto which Westminster adversarialism simply cannot be mapped.”
It is worth looking at the result in Tasmania to get a sense of just how true this is. Not only did the recent election deliver the biggest crossbench in the State’s history, there are now more crossbenchers than there are Labor members, a result that brings into question the whole idea of there being “major” parties who define the nature of our so-called two-party system.
Not only that, the election delivered a deeply democratic result. As Ben Raue at The Tally Room points out:
Now that the results have been finalised, it’s clear that this was a very proportional translation of votes into seats.
If we just start by looking at the 2024 results by party, they line up quite neatly
The translation of votes into seats was almost perfect for Labor, the Greens and the independents. A proportional seat share for the Liberal Party would have been one seat less than the actual result, which is a pretty small winner’s bonus.
The logic of calling an early election was to somehow ensure majority government, but the people instead delivered a third force that has more representatives than the supposed “major” party of Labor. Under what tenet of democracy does either major party get to say that they won’t work with this result or that “reform” is needed to reestablish the dominance of the major parties?
There is no such tenet; and yet here we are.
The Liberals went into the election warning of “chaos” and Labor echoed the claim as part of silly-bugger games they are playing to help justify their unjustifiable decision to not even attempt to form government themselves. Look at this Tweet thread by member for Franklin, Labor politician, Dean Winter:
This is a breathtakingly contemptuous thing for a member of a party that refuses to govern to say. Telling the people who have just delivered a given outcome that what they are doing is “bad for Tasmanians” is almost unforgivable. It is a doubly contemptuous when Labor are refusing to consider forming government themselves—even though a clear majority voted for someone other than the Liberals—because they don’t want to work with the crossbench (you know, the members of parliament people voted for) and because, as the tweet implies, they are hoping the whole thing falls in a heap.
Is it difficult to govern under these circumstances? Obviously. Is it chaos? Only if key players refuse to acknowledge reality and dishonour the actual result of the election.
Rundle is right to say that what is happening in Tasmania and other jurisdictions does not map onto a Westminster model, but that doesn’t mean we can’t reform the system we have in a more formal way than trying to stitch together our own parachute as we hurtle earthward.
It is worth noting that Australia’s parliamentary system is already a hybrid—the so-called Washminster model—and we have a long history of successful democratic reform, everything from secret ballots to compulsory voting. What the people are saying is that they want political parties—the broad political class—to lean into that tradition of innovation and reform our institutions to make minority government work— or at least viable—rather than dig their heels in and pretend nothing has changed.
The fact that the major parties are taking the latter course tells you everything you need to know about why their support is deliquescing.
Take a breath.
There is undoubtedly room for the major parties to improve themselves, to reestablish their connections with communities and build the sorts of electoral coalitions that might deliver majority government, but I suspect we are past a point of no return. In other words, even if Labor or the LNP could conjure the support needed to deliver a comfortable majority government in some future election, it is unlikely that that majority could be maintained, let alone entrenched. Party loyalty is a thing of the past—entirely the fault of the parties—and there will remain a floating one third of voters, or thereabouts, who will, from election to election, look for somewhere to land outside Labor or the LNP.
Most importantly, this floating third will track in unexpected ways, as the most recent Morgan Poll indicates.
This filtered out is as follows:
But here’s the kicker:
Such movements are driven by a complex mix of economic and cultural factors, but it is hard not to conclude that there is a significant demographic that is deeply dissatisfied with all major parties, including the Greens, and that the sort of support One Nation are gathering here isn’t One Nation support per se. It is more that the party is the beneficiary of a “none of the above” inclination amongst angry, disaffected voters.1
In other words, those voters will go to someone other than One Nation if they are offered a viable alternative, and the way things are going in Australian politics, that viable alternative is more likely to be provided by engaged community independents than Labor or the LNP.
As academic Allan Patience put it recently:
Both the Coalition and Labor parties have become sclerotic machines confirming the efficacy of the “iron law of oligarchy.” As that law predicts, they are focused exclusively on preserving the positions of leading party apparatchiks who are divorced from the realities affecting the lives of most Australians. Self-preservation and the perks of office, whether in government or in opposition, remain their primary concern. Their politics are almost entirely performative; rarely are they substantive.
A certain level of pessimism about the state of the world seems a sane response at the moment, but I still can’t help but get enthusiastic about some of our prospects here in Australia.
I would contend that there is a huge electoral bonus waiting for whoever is first of Labor or the LNP to accept the new three-party dispensation rather than pretend it isn’t happening. If one of these dinosaurs actually read the writing on the wall, got over themselves, stopped being so contemptuous of the voters who are consistently delivering expanded crossbenches, that party is likely to endow themselves with a long reign as the hub of an ongoing coaltion.2
I suspect, though, that instead of risking—as they would see it—a diminishment of their own power within the current system that would come from leaning into a multi-party system logic, they will instead try and rig the system against independents and smaller parties.3
The bottom line in all this is that whoever ends up in power is going to have to realise that the job is serving the people, not pandering to special interests and entering politics merely to be part of the staffer-advisor-safe seat candidate-junior ministry-minister-corporate lobbyist gravy train.
Australia is going through a cost-of-living crisis where the fundamental ability of ordinary people to earn a living that will put a decent roof over their heads and food on the table, let alone to have any leftover for relaxation or a nest egg for their children—even the ability to raise children—is under severe pressure. This is part of worldwide trend built on the massive inequalities that few governments will genuinely address and that is leading to a reemergence of forces we associate with the end of the Weimar period in Germany.
But how are our “major” political parties and political class responding?
Dutton’s Coalition—to the extent that such an organisation can even be said to exist—is doubling down on a fantasy policy of nuclear power which has nothing to do with solving our climate problems but with entrenching the supremacy of the fossil-fuel companies for as long as possible.4 They are shoring up this nonsense with whatever culture war they can get their hands on—boycott Woolies!—as well as, inevitably, the usual anti-immigration schtick that John Howard perfected.
Labor, meanwhile, are openly boasting about their commitment to the debateable policy of Budget surpluses (in deference to our local oligarchs and the preferences of the political class) rather using the nation’s wealth to seriously address the deep structural problems—entrenched over forty years of the neoliberal governance of which they are co-creators—that are leaving more and more people struggling.5
People are right to be looking for alternatives, but if that alternative is ever going to work properly, we need parliamentary reform. You can’t just have a crossbench whose only role is to vote down or amend policy brought forward by the major parties. The members of the crossbench need to more fully integrated into the process, with the ability to hold portfolios, so that they too can be held accountable by the parliament and the electorate.6 Voters themselves need to be better integrated into the system via meaningful citizens assemblies because democracy is first-and-foremost about self-governance, not just voting.
Change is happening organically for now, with people doing their best to sidestep the obstructions of the status quo. But we are reaching the limits of what can be done without serious reform.
Such reform should be central to political debate from this point forward.
This thesis paper on minor-party voting is a detailed examination of the issue. Thanks to analyst Brent Hodgson for the link and for his discussion on Twitter.
ACT Labor did so twenty-two years ago in the and have been in power with the Greens ever since. Not a bad run, is it?
This means that one of things we need to be on guard against over the coming months and years is any push by the vested interests of the status quo to undermine the legitimacy of our voting system. Pressure will be on to get rid of compulsory voting, I suspect, and even more radical changes will sneak onto the table.
Indeed, an early warning shot has already been fired, with Jim Reed, founder of Resolve Strategic that conducts the Resolve Political Monitor poll for The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age, calling for the end of preferential voting in federal election and replacing with a first-past-the-post (FPTP) system. His argument might be music to the ears of the “major” parties, but it doesn’t make any sense democratically:
The alternative to preference voting is a “first past the post” system where you simply vote “1” and nothing more. One person, one vote. Fair, simple and as elegant a solution as democracy itself.
It ensures you are using your vote carefully and positively to elect someone or something you actually want. The parties must rise to the occasion because they cannot win votes by default. It works elsewhere and our polling says that most Australians support it. This would truly take politics back to its roots.
Fair, simple, elegant…and wrong. Voting systems should reflect the plurality of voters’ intention, not just be a winner-takes-all grabfest like first-past-the-post.
Dutton seems to spend half his like jumping into planes at the beck-and-call of Gine Rinehart, flying places on a moment’s notice to say nice things about her at her birthday parties:
“Minutes after 3pm last Thursday, Anthony Albanese brought question time to a close, kick-starting the usual mad dash to the airport for interstate MPs. Peter Dutton and other senior Liberals were needed in Melbourne for two days of intense campaigning and media work around the crucial Dunkley by-election.
“But Dutton, rather than heading on an interstate hopper, went... west.
“The yet-to-be disclosed trip on Thursday night was so Dutton could be the star speaker at the private 70th birthday party for Gina Rinehart (another one). A source who attended estimated Dutton was at the event for about 40 minutes, before presumably getting on a red-eye flight to Melbourne where he appeared in a Friday morning campaign event.”
In setting it out this way, I am not saying Labor are as bad as the Coalition. From a progressive, left-of-centre point view, they clearly aren’t. But I am making a more general point about how Labor’s timidity, its capture by vested interests, is nonetheless undermining their progressive credentials and undermining our chances of serious economic reform.
This is something I will be talking about more through to 2025, but Ben Raue has a good discussion of some of the issues.
Enjoyed your article immensely TD, and 99.99% in agreement. Lots of things stand out by the para:
'The bottom line in all this is that whoever ends up in power is going to have to realise that the job is serving the people, not pandering to special interests and entering politics merely to be part of the staffer-advisor-safe seat candidate-junior ministry-minister-corporate lobbyist gravy train.' is true especially for the likes of the old guard of Albanese, Dutton & co. I can only presume there'll be more Teals/Indies like Zoe Daniels and Monique Ryan. Re: Zoe Daniels, I can absolutely not take any credit for her election to parliament, but I recognized early on after she retired by ABC and started tweeting & writing short articles that she had great intellect, a sense of fairness and world experience and might be angling for a move to something expansive. I can say I encouraged this by reading, commenting and retweeting to all 1000 or so followers (whoopy do) and she often replied. It was fantastic to see her nominate as an Independent and go onto win Goldstein. I can only say if anybody sees a person like Zoe Daniels who gives off 'vibes' that they might be putting their hand up for election, go ahead & give them encouragement. Cheers
Another great article Tim. Proportional representation is rarely discussed in the mainstream media (no surprises because it helps to mask the general unpopularity of both major parties).
Although I don’t see Australia likely embracing a completely party list proportional representation, I do think something like New Zealand’s MMP system with local members and List MPs being adopted. Alternatively a nation-wide system of multi member electorates could produce better outcomes. Either or it’s far better than the current system of single member electorates which see the ALP and Liberals forming large majorities with less than 40% primary vote.