This is an instalment of Forget the Frontbench, a column interrogating politicians who wield power beyond the major parties.
The Coalition ahead on the two-party-preferred vote. The defection from Labor of Senator Fatima Payman, amid an outpouring of support. The success of The Muslim Vote in the UK, which should be “gravely alarming” to the ALP in Western Sydney (and yet). Le doux soulagement of the French runoff, in which no party won a majority, with power to be shared among a left-leaning alliance. A Newspoll showing Labor “bleeding younger votes to the Greens”.
If ever there were a week to start thinking about power-sharing, it was this one, with signs increasingly pointing to a hung parliament at the next election.
Our already record-breaking crossbench looks likely to grow, as the major parties fail to assuage the movements challenging them on key issues. Labor will be fighting to retain its majority regardless, especially if the Coalition picks off seats in the outer suburbs.
The usual warnings have come from the usual suspects, of course. “Minority Labor government with the Greens is a diabolical prospect”, warned The Australian, urging Labor not to “succumb”. “The minority government could just as easily be led by Peter Dutton as Anthony Albanese,” presaged former senator and “election analyst” John Black in the Australian Financial Review, a thinly veiled threat to minorities to vote Labor or else. Or as Dutton, never one to shy from an Islamophobic panic, put it: “It will include the Greens, it will include the green teals, it will include Muslim candidates from Western Sydney. It will be a disaster.”
Fearmongering over hung parliaments is nothing new; we hear it ahead of almost every election. But as the Australia Institute explores in a new discussion paper, this alarmism doesn’t align with the reality that Australian parliaments almost always involve diluted power… even if the major parties would rather we forget that.
“Parliaments are designed to share power,” argue Richard Denniss and Bill Browne, noting that power-sharing is common between parties, within parties, or across the upper and lower houses. All nine jurisdictions have experienced some form of power-sharing government over the past 20 years. Minority governments are far from unusual, especially at the state and territory levels — coalitions are by now unremarkable, with the Liberal-National one so ingrained that we give it a capital C.
It’s rare for any party to win a majority in the Senate, where crossbenchers usually hold the balance of power. The ongoing decline in the major party vote means we are likely to see more of this in the House of Representatives in the years ahead.
And while power-sharing is common in parliaments across the globe, independents are a “quintessentially Australian phenomenon”. As Denniss and Browne note, indies are more prevalent here than in other Western democracies with single-member electorates; 10 were elected to the House last election (they opt not to count Bob Katter and Rebekha Sharkie), while the UK, the US, Canada and New Zealand elected only eight between them — out of 1,595 possible electorates.
Browne isn’t sure why Australia is so into independents, although he posits that preferential voting may allow for a consensus candidate to emerge. Their research found independents with broad appeal have an edge over major party candidates, in that they are more likely to attract preferences, and can therefore win with lower primaries; most crossbencher victories occur in so-called “safe” seats, making the Mackerras pendulum an increasingly irrelevant tool.
But what surprised him in the data is just how frequent power-sharing arrangements are in Australia, with majority government making up just 57% of all days across all jurisdictions since 2004. “Minority government works, and often works well, even if it’s being talked down ahead of the election by major parties hoping to win a majority.”
One person intimately familiar with how power-sharing works is former independent MP Rob Oakeshott, one of the crossbenchers who helped Labor form minority government following the 2010 federal election — a government that became one of the most productive in recent memory.
“Our system is set up for power-sharing,” he tells me. “Indeed, it is more appropriate for power-sharing than the ‘elected dictatorship’ model the current LNP/ALP majors are offering. We can all see power has now gravitated to a smaller and smaller number of people around the PM’s office. At the same time, transparency and accountability are declining. Power-sharing reverses these trends, and better decisions flow as a consequence.”
Oakeshott isn’t surprised the major parties remain so averse to it. “There is a lazy convenience in less voices being involved in any decision, so if allowed, the big parties can and will default to an internal process over a parliamentary process.”
Convenient or not, power-sharing is a long-time feature of Australian parliaments, and it’s ludicrous for commentators to pretend minority government is something to be alarmed by.
The long-term decline in the major party vote ought to change how they approach independents and minor parties, not as one-off aberrations but as permanent features. After all, Julia Gillard’s government had the second-highest percentage of passed legislation, ranking only behind John Howard’s 41st parliament in which Howard won control of both the House and the Senate (a very rare occurrence).
The next federal government might include Greens, it might include teal independents, it might even include “Muslim candidates from Western Sydney”, as Dutton so disdainfully put it. But there is no reason to believe it will be a disaster, with plenty of Australian examples of how successful power-sharing governments can be, for those who wish to heed them.
Are hung parliaments better or worse for Australian politics? Let us know your thoughts by writing to letters@crikey.com.au. Please include your full name to be considered for publication. We reserve the right to edit for length and clarity.
