01/05/2025
You know this makes sense!!
This is a post for very intelligent people. That doesn’t include me. I’m a bit of a thickie.
The evidence that I am a bit d***y stems from the way I think about politics and the mechanism of parliament as a means of making change.
For a start: I understand Australia is a democracy, and the principle of democracy is majority rule. To me that means that what best represents the will of the people is a force-of-numbers argument.
The Australian parliamentary system backs me up here. There are 150 seats in the lower house, meaning that if you win >76 of them, you get to go to the Governor-General and say you have the majority, so can therefore form a government.
I get that sometimes a major party can fall short of that 76-seat-minimum number, and in that situation usually rely on cross-benchers like independents or minor parties to pledge to support their government with “confidence” (allowing them to call themselves a government) and “supply” (promising to let them spend from the treasury).
(The alternative is Labor/Liberal forming a “grand coalition” and we really do not have a tradition of doing that in Australia).
When minor parties and independents are in the position to determine who gets to be government, we call this “having the balance of power”.
When a government is in minority, EVERY SINGLE BILL they wants to pass in the lower house has to be negotiated EITHER with the cross bench *or* the Opposition in order to be passed through the lower house before heading to the senate for another review.
EVERY.
SINGLE.
BILL.
It means that either a very small handful of people who represent a fraction of the electorate have the power to obstruct the government’s agenda, OR the government has to negotiate in the opposite ideological direction to what their own party want them to do.
Imagine Peter Dutton is elected as PM of a minority Liberal government on Saturday - with confidence and supply provided by Bob Katter and a couple of One Nation reps.
That would mean for EVERY bill, Dutton would have to placate and deal with the kooky priorities of representatives whose interests are either hyperlocal (Katter’s infamous priority of stopping crocodile accidents is a case in point) or ideologically VERY marginal and out of step with the vast majority of Australians (One Nation rejects the science of climate change and is going to this very election promising to abolish climate action by government).
Independents and minor parties LOVE the idea of having the balance of power, because they cannot - by their nature - rustle up the 76 seats required to form government. 76 electorates do not agree that crocodile accidents are Australia’s priority. 76 electorates do not share the hardline views of Pauline Hanson. So existence as an obstruction that has to be negotiated before every single bill is something they dream of as exerting power over the party in government.
My understanding of politics is pretty basic. The idea of a few people who represent a small fraction of the electorate fancying themselves imposing their views over the vast majority isn’t a democratic sentiment. It’s called aristocracy or oligarchy and Australians DO NOT like it. A few people considering majority views unimportant because they consider themselves inherently superior is not how we roll.
Consider: One Nation gets around 10% of the vote. In our scenario where Pauline Hanson has the balance of power and decides to order PM Peter Dutton around over a piece of legislation to get her ideal outcome, there are 90% of the electorate who did not vote for her wondering why the hell they are obliged to be governed by the views of an unrepresentative hardline minority. The half of Liberal voters who see themselves as being in the political centre would revolt! Dutton would haemorrhage support, his government would fall and as the centre reasserted itself, the next (Labor) government would prioritise quickly stripping away the legislation passed under Dutton/Hanson rule in line with majority values.
So either Dutton commits political su***de, or just drops the whole legislative proposal, because it’s not worth doing if Hanson mutilates it to suit herself.
Let’s consider another scenario. Dutton’s in minority government, and there’s a catastrophe - a pandemic, a war, some horrific event. Decisions have to be made quickly… but before Bob Katter will approve emergency legislation, Dutton knows he will have to go to Katter’s office and discuss crocodile accidents for two weeks.
This scenario is not going to “push” Dutton to be more hardcore on crocodile policy. It’s going to send him to the Labor Party to negotiate a conclusive and rapid resolution entirely without his influence. And the political problem there is that people start to think: hell, if they need Labor to make the government functional, I might as well vote Labor.
If this sounds familiar it’s because this is exactly what happened - in the opposite direction - when Julia Gillard was PM of a minority government between 2010-2013.
There are people who INSIST that it was a great victory to “push” Gillard’s government into accepting a minor party’s terms around environment policy. They conveniently forget that her popularity cratered, the centre abandoned her and the *first thing* Tony Abbott did after winning an outright majority in the Liberal landslide of 2013 was shred the carbon tax legislation she’d spent her political capital on negotiating.
The political fallout of that sent climate action in this country back YEARS.
Sure, the Gillard minority government did legislate some major reforms like the NDIS, but because it lost power so quickly, the Liberals inherited those reforms and badly implemented or deliberately sabotaged them.
This is the political danger of governing without stable majority support. Achievements don’t stick because the political foundation wasn’t strong enough.
But I’m a thickie. I base my analyses on observed patterns, studied histories and observable, repeated examples. The old unionists who mentored me as a young person said in activism, you always had to keep looking over your shoulder, because “if the people aren’t behind you, the revolution’s not happening tomorrow”.
I understand that when you have an appetite for change, democracy can feel slow and cumbersome. Why you would then place as many obstructions in the way - like independents and minor parties - to a legislative agenda that travels in the direction you want to go is beyond me.
I, for one - a simple soul - have a “theory of change” that comes from my trade union background: you add your voice TO the biggest group advocating for change in your direction, and - rather than fight it - lend your strength to it.
In this way, you build a greater momentum than a smaller group will ever be able to achieve… and you get where you want to go faster than you could have ever imagined.
