Why Australians citizens are ahead of the political class when it comes to electoral reform

A response to George Megalogenis's Quartlery Essay

George Megalogenis’s new Quarterly Essay is called Minority Report: The New Shape of Australian Politics and it is worth your time. What follows is not a formal review but a response to the issues he raises. We agree on a lot, but in the end, we see the matter from quite different perspectives and that provides an opportunity for a productive discussion.

Ostensibly, as the title suggests, GM’s essay is about the rise of independents within the Australian political system, or more broadly, the way in which Australia is moving towards a crossbench of independents and minor parties holding the balance of power after the 2025 election. He explains the shift in demographics that has underpinned that trend, and a considers whether what happened at the 2022 federal election was a one-off or the first major step in a permanent realignment.

A key part of the essay’s value, for me, lies in the insight it offers into the thinking of that part of the political class who aren’t comfortable with these changes and who would prefer we return to two-party dominance.

In fact, in my head, as I read the essay, and reread it, I started calling it Majority Report. It began to feel like the smartest guy in the room explaining to me that yes, there are reasons for what is happening, but in a perfect world, we would return to the status quo ante.

This is fine, of course, though I think it misses some important nuance in what is happening on the ground. The essay is a quantitative examination of the situation—full of interesting and important statistics—but that methodology leads to some heavy-handed aggregation, none more obvious than the unexamined use of the collective noun “teal” throughout. For anyone who has watched this movement grow, who has spoken with those who have made it happen, what shines through is that the transformation in the seats won by the community independents isn’t just that they were voting against a party system and party candidates they felt had abandoned them; it is that they were voting in favour of a different way of doing politics through candidates they genuinely admire.

This positive aspect of what is happening in our democracy is almost absent from the essay and it is a huge blind spot that goes to the heart, not just of GM’s analysis, but of how the political class is still trapped in a two-party mindset that doesn’t only document the change that is happening but serves to undermine it.

One thing I really liked about GM’s analysis was that, unlike so many others, he acknowledged the uniqueness of Australia’s circumstances. His analysis is offered through an understanding of Australian institutions and demographics and this is so much better than the endless tripe we get about “Trumpism” and other imported frames.

He writes, “The majority of those who turned against Scott Morrison’s blokey government created a new independent female centre in the cities; by contrast, in the UK the Tories lost ground to the nationalist right. Where former Liberal voters elected Zoe Daniel and Allegra Spender to the House of Representatives, their counterparts in the UK sent Brexit town crier and Donald Trump supporter Nigel Farage to the House of Commons.

“Australia’s protest vote sits in a global category of its own at the moment because it aims to force change on the system, not disrupt it.”

Hear, hear.

Minority Report to my way of thinking is the author wrestling with himself about his preferred outcome for our politics, and he presents an erudite and interesting argument. This section, early in the essay, gives a good sense of what I mean about his trepidation:

I should declare that I had some sympathy for the view in 2010 that Australia would be better served by stable majority government. One of the reasons was the narrowness of the all-male crossbench. But my main concern was the incentive that minority government provided for Oppositions to make Australia ungovernable, and for my profession, the media, to fixate on opinion polls. Now I am not so sure. A volatile minority government may be the lesser evil when compared to the narrowly cast and ineffectual governments of the past decade. Then again, the combinations of parties and personalities that can make a hung parliament unworkable are seemingly endless. Is this what the Australian people intended when they broke the two-party system at the last election?

Megalogenis, George. Minority Report: The New Shape of Australian Politics; Quarterly Essay 96 (p. 7). Schwartz Books Pty. Ltd. Kindle Edition.

There are other hints throughout the essay about GM’s unease with the changes he documents, and nearly every reference to minority government is framed as problematic or threatening. The opening sentence is “The sword of minority government hangs over the major parties,” and it sets the tone throughout. At one point GM writes, “A parliament that looks more like the people it serves carries the promise of new ideas to test an economic model that has outlived its usefulness and a social model that still falls short of our egalitarian ideal. But it also risks forming into a new gridlock if the major parties and crossbench are in direct competition for seats – namely, Labor versus Green, and Liberal versus teal.”

My issue here is not that this is wrong, per se, but that it frames the matter in way that normalises this obstructionism. If there is in fact gridlock, it will be because the LNP and Labor choose not to accept the spirit of minority government, or the will of the people, and that is what should be highlighted.¹

In fact, GM is well aware of where the blame lies, but he never takes the next step. If, as I’ve suggested, we take him to be the articulate analyst and spokesperson for a key section of the political class, the essay reveals not just the unease the transformation of our politics is causing amongst that political class: it speaks to their unwillingness to seriously contemplate how we might make a more diverse and deliberative parliament work.

As voters, this professional unease should concern us or at least alert us to the hurdle we collectively face in trying to make our system of governance more responsive to our needs. Obviously, the status quo will protect itself—as I have argued endlessly over the years—but the resistance to change goes much deeper than just the self-interest of the LNP and Labor, into the mindset of even the wisest and most enlightened members of the political class.

Anyway, by the time we read the final paragraph of the essay, GM has reached a definitive conclusion. He has wrestled with exactly the issues I have raised and has landed on, however reluctantly or modestly, what I would call the key insight:

My opinion, for what’s it’s worth, is that a hung parliament offers perhaps our last best chance to restore purpose to our politics – and policymaking. But that will depend on whether the members and senators elected to the forty-eighth parliament respect the will of the Australian people to keep our politics anchored in a problem-solving centre.

I couldn’t agree more with this, but it didn’t stop me from finding this conclusion jarring given the tone of the whole essay: I wasn’t convinced that this was where he had landed. And it was interesting, therefore, to hear his ongoing doubts emerge much more strongly in the interview he did with the 7am podcast, where Megalogenis made it clear that he still wasn’t convinced about the efficacy of minority government.

“Whilst I'm probably not as terrified of a hung parliament this time around,” he said, “I think in the long run, you need to have a contest around the centre in Australia. So, you need two very, very strong major parties. So I don't think in the long run, this [minority government] is a good thing, but it's good to give them all a kick up the backside….I'd still like to see a system where the majors can agree on the problems we want to solve and then have an argument about what the best way to solve them.”

Again, there is nothing wrong with this, of course, but it does backtrack the conclusion of the essay itself and, most importantly, undermines GM’s own analysis, and I find this fascinating. If the country really has changed in the ways he documents; if the trend away from voting for the major parties that began in earnest around 2010 continues, how could a two-party system with its roots in a time of much more national homogeneity ever properly represent the new country GM himself so expertly documents? How could a two-party system built on patriarchal, colonial, Christain values of another era ever properly represent the diverse nation Australia has become?

There is a related matter here, and GM writes early in the essay that “The revelation is in the splintering of the conservative vote,” but this misses the other driving factor: the convergence that has occurred between the major parties on key issues.

Once Labor, under Hawke and Keating, bought into the neoliberal project, that convergence was set in stone and it undermined the fundamental divide between the parties, opening a space for a third force to eventually emerge. As Elizabeth Humphrys argues in her book, How Labour Built Neoliberalism, Labor’s use of the Accord and through it, the subsuming of the working class into what she calls the corporate hegemony of Australia’s ruling class, changed not only the Labor Party but the country. She writes, “the implementation of vanguard neoliberalism occurred through a ‘positive’ corporatist project centred on working class sacrifice in the national interest.”

The social contract—Medicare, superannuation etc—was central to Labor’s convergence on corporatism, Humphrys argues, and “In the process of constructing and implementing the social contract, the unions helped execute key aspects of the neoliberal transformation. These changes included real wage decline, structural adjustment through industry policy, the suppression of industrial action, and the re-regulation of the industrial relations system in a manner that weakened organised labour’s position. The Accord, and thus neoliberalism, was not a process enacted only from above, as it involved the consent and active involvement of the trade union movement.”

It is the failure of this convergence to deliver that people are reacting against now and why they increasingly see the two-party system as a two-headed monster that doesn’t have the best interests of the country at heart. Both parties are increasingly in thrall to various vested interests—particularly the mainstream media, the banking and mining sectors—as the neoliberal project undermines the ability, even the will, of Labor and the Coalition to address seriously issues around cost of living, housing and climate change.

Labor has been left particularly adrift, and Albanese’s timid leadership has served to further divide the parliamentary party from its progressive base, again opening a space for alternative candidates to the left and the right. The LNP has chosen to move themselves ever further to the right.

Is this an omelette that can genuinely be unscrambled?

As things currently stand, there is a floating one-third of voters—and growing—who are willing, perhaps eager, to vote for someone other than the LNP or Labor.² In any electorate, if a minor party or an independent can get their act together, a significant number of people will support them. The impediment to their success is as much to do with the ability of community organisations to raise funds and campaign against the machine politics of the major parties as it is any fear of the instability of minority government.

On that matter, voters are way ahead of the political class.

Megalogenis does a great job of explaining how the national electorate has fractured, how it is never likely to reunite in a way that makes the two major parties make sense, and yet he can’t quite commit to the electoral logic of that analysis. He is far from alone in this scepticism about the workability of minority government, and yet here we are.

The real risk for Australia is that we fail to recognise the opportunity we have created for ourselves to avoid the anti-democratic mire that so many other countries find themselves trapped in. The further risk is that although the two major parties and the interests they represent can no longer command what MG would call the centre—can no longer muster enough support to justify any claim to national unity—that they will continue to have just enough power and bad will to act as a permanent spoiler on a more deliberative parliamentary alternative.

I wouldn’t pretend to know how this story ends, or even how it continues, but wishing for some new dominance of a reformed two-party system seems exactly the wrong answer to me. It ignores the positive aspects of what has been happening in communities over the past decade-and-a-half and fails to properly recognise the extraordinary transformation that has occurred and how citizens themselves have driven it.

Maybe instead of worrying about instability we should lean into that new community energy and find ways to institutionalise it rather than wish for the return of a system that is beautifully designed for a world that no longer exists.³

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I want to direct you to some other things I have written about this topic. Obviously, there is my book, Voices of Us: the independents’ movement transforming Australian politics, but you might also find some value in these recent essays:

1. We see this normalisation all the time throughout the mainstream media, where such disruption—which actually amounts a rejection of the electorate’s intention—is normalised as business-as-usual politics. Often, this tips over into the idea that minority government and voting for independents is illegitimate, never more clearly than in headlines like this one that appeared over a recent (quite good) article by David Crowe in the Nine papers.

“Teals” is lazy terminology and “they” didn’t fucking steal anything.

2. As the Australia Institute has argued, there are no safe seats anymore.

3. I am half-borrowing a quote from Eric Hoffman.