Other politics
Opinion polls
Opinion polls suggest that One Nation’s success in South Australia would be replicated federally.
The rise of One Nation, its success in South Australia, and interest in the coming Farrer by-election (May 9) seem to have led to a greater than usual flow of opinion polls. Pollsters’ confidence has been boosted by their success in predicting One Nation’s primary support in South Australia: the three polls closest to the election were within one percentage point of predicting the One Nation vote (23 percent).
The common media story is about voters’ move from the Coalition to One Nation, a move easily seen in the chart below which compares three federal opinion polls in March this year with the outcomes of last year’s election.
According to the polls the Coalition’s primary vote is down by 11 percent, while One Nation’s vote is up 20 percent. Note that this means there has been a net 9 percent gain by parties on the far right. Accounting for that 9 percent swing, opinion polls suggest that Labor has lost 4 percent, while the category “other” has lost 5 percent.
Not too much notice should be taken of that swing from “other”: opinion polls have unavoidable biases against very small parties and independents. For example the “other” category includes 2 percent for Palmer’s “Trumpet of Patriots”, which has probably transferred to One Nation in opinion polls.
This 9 percent swing to far-right parties, combined with Labor’s 4 percent loss, should be of concern to anyone who is apprehensive about the prospect of parties on the far right commanding a parliamentary majority in the 2028 election, or even a blocking coalition in the Senate.
Because the Liberal party is particularly weak electorally, and cannot contemplate the idea of a centrist coalition, an electoral outcome that gave the Coalition and One Nation a majority would almost certainly see One Nation and the National Party controlling the policy agenda. The economic management of a Coalition-One Nation government would be even worse than that of the Howard-Abbott-Morrison governments, that have left the country so badly structurally weakened, struggling to cope with the Trump-induced global crisis.
William Bowe’s BludgerTrack still has Labor on a TPP lead of 53:47 over the Coalition (and Labor would have a little higher lead in a Labor:ON contest), but that can be whittled away. For now most voters are blaming Trump and for the fuel crisis, but according to polls reported on Poll Bludger, between 14 and 24 percent are blaming our government. As food and other prices rise and aren’t seen to be closely linked to fuel prices, we can expect a stronger torrent of lies and misinformation directed against Labor and independents.
The washup of the South Australian election
The South Australian election results suggest voters want something more attuned to their needs than Labor’s risk aversion and the Coalition’s negativity.
The outcome and what it reveals
While the South Australian election count was remarkably fast in revealing victory for the Malinauskas government, it has been remarkably slow in determining the final seat count, such has been the tightness of some of the contests.
There is still one seat – Narungga in the Yorke Peninsula – where the One Nation lead over the Liberal Party is still too slim to provide a clear outcome. The table of election results, shown below, assumes that One Nation has won that seat, but that means they will still have one less seat than the Liberals in the Legislative Assembly. The Liberals will have the glorious honour of being named “the opposition”, a quaint Westminster convention, which comes with a few minor perks.
In the Legislative Council it’s a different story: it appears that in this election One Nation have won 3 seats while the Liberals have won only 2. Labor has probably won 5 seats and the Greens have won 1.
Antony Green’s Election Blog has some observations on the final counts, and on the election overall.
When we dig into seat-by-seat outcomes in South Australia, observing the disruption of One Nation and the associated tightening of margins, we can assuredly assert that the idea of a “safe seat” is going the way of cash and gas cooktops. This is relevant not only for South Australia but also for the Commonwealth and other states.
Crispin Hull sees much wider consequences for the parties in his post Gutful. Fed up. What to do about it. This election cannot be seen as a ringing endorsement of Labor. It certainly wasn’t a “let’s give the other lot a go” either. People are dissatisfied with the ways governments are performing, and with the ways political parties are reacting to that dissatisfaction.
Hull describes the shortfalls in governments’ performance as seen by the electorate:
Voters now want government to fix things; to do things; to get involved in helping people with health, education, housing and the cost of living; and to stopping big, rich corporations and individuals exploiting people to gain even more wealth that they do not need.
Voters have witnessed declining government services and growing inequality as the top end of the private sector grabs most of the wealth, evades and avoids taxes, and rips off consumers. That is the inevitable consequence of downsizing, outsourcing and deregulation. Voters say they are fed up with waiting times, gap fees, poor public education, congestion, job insecurity, unfair taxes on labour and unfair tax breaks on the already wealthy.
Labor governments, basking in large parliamentary majorities (which they misidentify as popular support), have become complacent and hyper-cautious. Coalition oppositions are even worse, because they simply oppose anything Labor does or proposes, without offering alternatives, pushing a “small government” agenda when people are crying out for effective and capable government, funded by a fairer tax system that requires the well-off to pay their share. As for One Nation it’s sufficient to observe that grievance is no basis for good public policy, but they give the impression that they are prepared to have a go.
Tipping and the Coalition
Another issue that has crept up on our politics is the nature of political parties. We didn’t have to think about that in those glorious days when about half the population was a little on the left and voted Labor, and the other half was a little on the right and voted Liberal.
That two-party structure started to unravel around 70 years ago, and is now in a process of decay that political philosopher Tom Schelling called “tipping”.
The term “tipping” is generally misunderstood. It refers to the way voluntary organizations can slowly die, and it has been in full display in the Coalition, particularly the Liberal Party. Menzies used to refer to the party as a “broad church”, but in the Howard years it shifted somewhat to the right, as some of the most progressive members resigned or lost their seats. That meant the remaining relatively progressive members now found themselves on the fringe, further from the party’s centre which had moved to the right. And so on went the process, until only a hard core remained. The process is illustrated in the diagram alongside.
Federally the “tipping point” probably occurred back in 1996, when Howard replaced Hewson. The party was much broader than it is today, but it was on a path to the right, and those who follow Schelling would realize that the process is unstoppable, unless there is some drastic reform.
This process is accentuated when a party develops its ideology around its parliamentary representation, which tends to shrink to a nucleus of true believers.
Some say that that’s where ideologies should develop, because those members of parliament represent the people who voted for them. Others say, however, that the party’s ideology should be developed by the broader party membership – an argument that justifies the US system of primary contests with large franchises.
It’s a discussion we need to have, but we’re ducking it, possibly because journalists and so many of the political commentariat have invested so much in the idea of a two-party system. If political ideologies are to be shaped only by elected members, it seems almost inevitable that many more independents will be elected, or that one or more new parties will arise to fill the gap on the ideological spectrum.
A “bipartisan” setback for independents
The government has knocked back a proposal to increase the size of Parliament. This has the smell of a dirty deal to maintain the high parliamentary hurdles faced by independents.
In response to a question from “opposition leader” Angus Taylor, Albanese has ruled out the prospect that the size of the federal Parliament should be increased.
The idea of increasing the number of parliamentarians from the present 150 representatives and 76 Senators has been under consideration by the Joint Standing Committee on Electoral Matters, who were asked to look at the idea by Special Minister of State Don Farrell.
Detailed cover of the issue is in the roundup of 11 October last year. The basic argument for expansion is that our House of Representatives is the same size as it was when it was last expanded in 1984, while over those 42 years our population has risen by 70 percent. It’s an issue about the workload of members and about their representativeness: the more electors per member the less accessible they are.
Taylor’s pressure on the government to kill the proposal is in the Coalition’s puerile populist language: we don’t want more of those beastly politicians, do we? and it’s so expensive, in these tough times, to pay them.
In fact it’s really about a “bipartisan” deal between the two old parties to maintain their oligopoly. As explained in that October post, independents have better chances in smaller electorates which have more contained communities. As a case in point, consider the problem faced by Michelle Milthorpe, independent candidate for the coming Farrer by-election. That electorate stretches 600 km from Albury to the South Australian border, from relatively populated regions to the arid zone. Its size and heterogeneity make it almost impossible to identify one strong community of interests. If it were divided into two electorates, one would probably return an independent and the other a member of the National Party.
The other consideration relates to the Senate. Our constitution requires that the Senate should be half the size of the House of Representatives. At present each state has 12 Senators, 6 being elected each cycle. That means the threshold for a quota is 14.3 percent (100/(6+1)). If there were 7 Senators elected, the threshold would fall to 12.5 percent (100/(7+1)). It is probable that One Nation’s 23 percent vote in South Australia has influenced views in all established parties. This also means that the Greens will not have an easier task in holding their Senate numbers.
Andrew Hastie’s heresy
Andrew Hastie’s comments on capital gains taxes and his criticism of One Nation won’t have won him many friends in the Coalition’s depleted ranks. Even more significant than the specific policy issues is his approach to criticizing the government.
To those who have assured themselves that the Coalition has positioned itself as One Nation Lite, Andrew Hastie’s comments on the ABC’s Insiders last Saturday have come as a shock.
During his one-on-one interview with David Speers he criticized Trump’s approach to the Middle East, particularly his disregard for and disrespect towards America’s long- established allies. He made clear his feelings towards those in the Coalition who believe it should move closer to One Nation: to Hastie One Nation is out to destroy the Coalition and to dominate politics on the right. He suggested that many multinational firms operating in Australia are losing their social licence: in this regard he floated his ideas on a tax on gas companies. And he wasn’t prepared to rule out reforms to capital gains tax and negative gearing provisions.
These points have commanded most attention. On their own they could be woven into a story about a rebel in the Coalition ranks, but it’s worth spending a few minutes listening to the interview to see where Hastie is coming from. They’re on the Insiders site, in a block from 12 minutes through to 35 minutes.
In the broader context of the whole session these comments aren’t so radical. Hastie followed the party line of opposition to renewable energy, even though this is the least economically defensible of all their policies. He had awful trouble defending the Coalition’s ridiculous idea that subsidies for transport fuels should be paid for by cutting payments for the home battery scheme. He even suggested we should develop coal-to-liquid technologies, a process with high CO2 emissions.
He acknowledged that One Nation poses a danger to our democracy: “we either fix the system or it’s torn down by people like Pauline Hanson”. In a message clearly aimed at Liberal Party strategists he warned that One Nation’s politics align closely with those of the MAGA movement – a movement that doesn’t go down well with Australians.
But his separation from the MAGA and One Nation isn’t complete. In words less provocative than Trump’s, and without mentioning tariffs, he asserted a case for policies to bring back manufacturing activities to Australia – a case that seems to be based more on self-reliance rather than the imagined employment benefits of tariffs. He hasn’t backed away from his views on immigration, captured in his earlier statement that we find ourselves to be “strangers in our own home”. If that’s not a dog whistle to those who seek a return to White Australia, he should state what he thinks our immigration policy should be.
Those small deviations from the Coalition party line don’t make him a heretic. But where he does differentiate himself from Coalition spokespeople is in his reasoned approach to issues. Rather than blaming all of the nation’s difficulties on the government – this terrible Labor government – he acknowledges those areas where, in his opinion, the government is performing well, while he suggests that his party could do better. He respects the Labor Party as a rival, not as an enemy. And he speaks in plain language.
By example he is challenging his party colleagues to come up with clearly-explained policies, rather than falling back on bullshit, lies, sophistry, obfuscation, misinformation and disinformation.
That’s his heresy.