As we get closer to decision time, I’ve been reflecting on the idea of “stability” that seems key to the rural Independents’ choice or choices.
I watched last week’s Q&A on repeat – I turned it off last Monday when the first question was a stupid iteration of the Penberthy Line – ZOMG! It’s so undemocratic for Independents to decide! (Note to #qanda – lose the balance of Young Liberal/Labor/Green/CEC/Whoever hacks idea and the extremely unspontaneous questions based on MSM or partisan talking points, please). I ended up watching it partly because I was curious about Jessica Rudd.
That’s by the by – I found John Keane’s comments interesting. Keane, the author of an acclaimed history of democracy, has recently taken up a Chair at Sydney University. Aside from the fact that he seemed to have caught the “must be witty for Qanda” virus, what he had to say was quite different from the usual issues of the day fodder we get.
Among other things, Keane said:
I think this is a black swan moment in Australian politics. I think that we’re at the end of the road of stage managed two party politics. It has collapsed in every other Westminster model. This is the last one where it has collapsed…
In part, that reflects the point made here at LP a while back about the fact that all Westminster parliaments in the major countries where they’re part of the political fabric have no majority, and that’s something that is inconsistent with the political model they were designed to achieve – after single member constituencies were entrenched in the Third Reform Act in 1886.
Keane goes on to discuss the end of industrial era and modernist politics, which is perhaps a structural cause of the breakdown of the prevalent political mode. Mark made some quick observations about that on the Monday after the election. It’s a big theme, and one to which we should return.
If we think back to the last term, it’s difficult to argue against the proposition – just on the surface – that stability wasn’t much in evidence on either major party side. Labor had two Prime Ministers, the term itself was truncated, while counting John Howard, the Libs went through four leaders.
All sorts of narratives abound about what this means.
But let’s make one point – in one way, the election result makes sense as a rejection of partisanship itself. Think about the fact that for a large part of the term the Liberal party struggled to get over 35% in the polls, and then things massively swung around to a position where Labor struggled to get much above 35%. Both parties had a blip upwards at the start and in the middle of the campaign, but one thing we can say is that there was a very large proportion of voters throughout the term – probably close to a third – who were to greater or lesser degree disattached from a partisan identification with the majors. That was disguised a bit by the Kevin07 hegemony, but its rapid erosion and then failure to resolve into a Coalition majority proves the point.
So, beneath all the froth and bubble, there was a lot of instability bubbling along.
Whether or not a post-partisan Labor minority government could change things, I don’t know. It won’t be a land of milk and honey, but it’s worth thinking about, nevertheless.
NB: This is not a general thread to discuss anything to do with the hung parliament, or negotiations about the formation of a government. Please just don’t leave a comment here because it’s the most recent post. Any general comments should go on the most recent roundtable or please comment on a topical thread if what you have to say is germane to it.
Any comments I consider to be off topic will be deleted.
NB: This is not a general thread to discuss anything to do with the hung parliament, or negotiations about the formation of a government. Please just don’t leave a comment here because it’s the most recent post. Any general comments should go on the most recent roundtable or please comment on a topical thread if what you have to say is germane to it.
Any comments I consider to be off topic will be deleted.
Given the current situation, I thought this was amusing…
http://imgur.com/nPFkK
@2 – Given what I just said, how is that on topic?!?
I’m not sure “Black Swan” really fits here – most of Australias politics pre ww2 has examples of some pretty uneasy alliances that formed coalition governments.
OK, so independents holding 5 (or is it 6?) seats is unusual, but given that 4 are ex-National party or associated with them, the narrative of Australian political history that contends that we have the ALP and everyone who opposes the ALP is pretty much intact.
Add to that the idea that black swan events are supposed to be entirely unpredicted, but the polls (possibly for the first time) showed the Green vote holding up until election day instead of dissipating on the long march through the cake stalls. That was unprecedented.
@4 – Yes, perhaps that wasn’t the best choice of words on Keane’s part.
But what interests me is the underlying volatility in the electorate. That’s been taken to another level, I think.
This strikes me as along the same lines as the folks who reckoned the Liberals were destroyed post 2007 (and, no doubt, some commentators were saying the same about the ALP post 1996). Without electoral reform to ensure the HoR is representative, normal programming will resume in 2013. Stage-managed, notionally adversarial politics will return as soon as one of the two parties* manages a majority.
* Assuming that the Liberal-National-Liberal/National-Country Liberal-WA National five-party coalition is actually a single party.
Kim @3
My apologies – should have been posted in the roundtable. (If it’s any excuse, it was because I found it elsewhere under the topic (hung parliament!)
@7 – No probs, Stupot, thanks for clarifying.
@6 – yes, the missing ingredient is electoral reform.
But it will be interesting to see if we do have majority government next time, if public support for whichever party proves any more enduring.
The other option, and you’re gesturing to it with the fact that there really are five parties in the Coalition now, is further splintering of non-Labor unity – if Labor gets the gig, I suspect the Liberals’ worst nightmare is lots of Coalition members acting as de facto independents, constant floor crossing, etc.
well said.
Good on you for parsing Keane’s comments for some sense, Kim, I couldn’t get past his litany of terrible one-liners and insufferable delivery.
Though I find the “first day of the rest of our democracy” meme quite an alluring one, I am a bit more circumspect. The proof will definitely be in the pudding of the next three or so years. Australia has certainly had widespread disillusionment with its major parties before.
Perhaps, however, we are seeing the first, almost-inchoate tendrils of a global political response to the oncoming threat of climate change, and the limits of capitalism as it has heretofore been practiced.
But I dunno, that seems awfully ambitious to me once typed!
@10 –
It was a bit of a trial, to be sure, patrickg!
Pardon me if I’m being naive. But (excluding 2004 to 2007) hasn’t there consistently been a hung parliament in Australia since the Democrats got the BOP in the Senate in the 80s? The big deal this time around is that both houses lack a party majority, rather than just one.
Parallels with Canada and the UK should be treated with caution, especially with regards to their upper house. The Canadian senate is appointed by their GG on the advice of their PM. UK has the House of Lords. Neither is elected, unlike our senate – and their powers to block bills are far less. In a manner of speaking, their parliaments became hung only when their lower house became hung.
Australia may be ahead of the curve, rather than behind.
DaOoSG, a government is formed by the party or parties that can muster 76 or greater votes on the floor of the House of Representatives. Lacking a majority in the Senate is not a hung Parliament.
With regards to the Senate, the Australian Senate was designed to be something more like the US Senate than other Commonwealth/Westminster systems. No comparison should be made with … actually, anywhere, really. Rigid party-line votes mean that the Australian Senate isn’t like anything that I can think of.
We can use electoral reform to both increase stability (Ex: Direct election of prime minister) or to make the house of reps more representative at the potential expense of stability. We might also increase stability by extending the parliamentary term.
The interesting question is how much stability is desirable? Most of us would agree that changing leaders every few weeks – but 11 years of John Howard?
That is entirely possible Alister @ 6, but given that the Indies have made a great start forcing the majors to reform internal parliamentary procedures as of today, (and before parliament has even sat!!!), I’d say this augers well for a perpetuation of “volatile politics”.
Assume the Indies succeed with a 3 year government (presumably Labor) and their influence provides reforms to the greatest benefit, and that is accepted as a fundamental positive change by a significant number of non-rusted on voters, [despite the rabidly partisan spoiling influence of the media ( ie Rupert M et al)]: could it not be possible that political mode 2 becomes stronger, that more and more independent members (and Greens) get elected?
Such “instability” becomes the new accepted “stability” of minority government? 4 Indies achieved all this reform, think how we’d go with 10 or more?
The trend to independents in country seats has inexorably chipped away at the National’s numbers for some time, and this is a naturally occurring support for political mode 2.
(I must confess to loving this theory of NP oblivion, and how they will (must?) suffer more and more when people inevitably make odious comparisons of NP impotence and uselessness compared to the Indies)
More Indies to replace the National Poltroons!
John D, stability is overrated.
Yeah, I’m with you Kim. I have come around (belatedly) to accepting that the two party thing isn’t doing it for a large number of people now.
Take Denison for example: 4 way split.
In Melbourne, the ALP lost where used to win with 75%.
In Ballarat, the Libs have declined from 50% to 33% since 1996.
In Kooyong (once the Liberal mothership), the Libs primary vote at 52.6% is at its lowest on record (I’m pretty sure.)
One size fits all no longer works. Diverse social and economic conditions open way for finer-grained candidature.
Me (and Arbib) got no idea what goes on in Kennedy, but obviously Kattar does.
Alliances and coalitions are trending up in importance. If this means that polarised LCD politics loses out then that’s good. But I suppose the downside is the potential for flaky or dangerous populists to flourish?
Peter @ 15, it’s possible, but I think it’s unlikely. It’s bloody hard for an independent to get elected. It was hard enough for Adam Bandt to win Melbourne, and that was on the back of a great campaign in 2007, lots of work and support, and the sitting member retiring. And to get sufficiently lucky to return a hung parliament would be a neat trick – a reasonably small swing to Labor (even only in Queensland) would see them with a majority in their own right.
The problem, I think, is that electoral reform isn’t in the interests of Windsor, Katter and Oakeshott. While the Greens (and possibly Andrew Wilkie) would be in favour, that’s not yet enough.
Hmm – Kim highlights a new instability and patrickg:
I have to admit to a certain nagging feeling of “this time, it’s really different” underlying the result. History being a different country etc. but the “social credit” movements gained substantial primary votes without
gaining seats during the depression and perhaps the Greens are a bit like that: volatility being the norm rather than the exception, and the last 30 years being unusual?
I wish I had a broader understanding of the political history of minor parties to put the current situation into context.
@20 – I’m not sure that past history is that good a guide to The Greens – at least the past history of minor parties. The difference with them is that they’re the first one to come along in many years with a relatively coherent ideology, social base and a desire to be a major party. The last one like that I can think of was the ALP!
@19 –
I’ve made the point quite often that there are lots of versions of more proportional systems that preserve a component of single member representation and thus the possibility for Independents to hold seats – ie NZ’s MMP.
However, no one does seem to have it on the agenda at the moment.
We should put it there!
Kim – I brought up the Social Credit movement because while they were notionally on the right of politics, they did have a relatively cohesive set of policies based around the writings of C.H. Douglas (although from my limited understanding a lot of the economic philosophies that remain ended up with the League of Rights, along with the conspiracy theories and anti-semitism).
Without the great depression, Douglas might have been forgotten but there were champions of his ideas in quite a few countries in the Commonwealth and you occasionally hear snippets of it if you listen hard at regional shows and expos. In fact, the first time I came across it was a few years ago in regional QLD.
I guess the parallel I see is that we have a crisis (in this case environmental rather than social/economic although it will rapidly head that way too), and in response we can see a kind of confusion – a channeling of confusion into easily exploited social issues that Howard (and then the ALP) successfully used in western Sydney, although even those voters appear to have become unpredictable as having their hot button social issues addressed in public still doesn’t ease that gnawing chasm that economic unpredictability fosters.
So, I see whisps and tendrils of a cohesive new narrative being written in super fund reports (gah! where did the money go? I’m supposed to retire on it!), on scarifying doom-n-gloom about climate change (will my house either be under water or will I no longer be able to afford to light and heat it?) and in $1.30+ a litre petrol that threatens to forever extinguish the middle class. Damnit I’m scaring myself!
With the major parties effectively abandoning the idea of making any progress on any of those fronts, it’s little wonder that people might be open to angry protest votes, to punish incumbents or to informal vote in record numbers.
Which I gather is why the social credit movements were successful, for many of the same reasons.
@23 – Ute Man – I believe Social Credit became a government party in some prairie provinces in Canada. Don’t know much about it though.
There’s a bit in Wiki (although as usual the references are far better). But, lets for arguments sake take these various Howard era policies and compare them to this:
Social credit wiki page
a. First home buyers scheme
b. Private health insurance rebate
c. Childcare rebate (I think this is the most obvious one)
I’m beginning to think that the reason Howard was misunderstood on the right (why does he subsidise?) and on the left (why favour private over public but distort the outcomes?) is that he (perhaps unintentionally) had absorbed a lot of the ideas of “Compensated Pricing” and set about implementing them, in the face of neo-liberal decimation of the middle class.
Which is now off-topic I think, but perhaps frames the idea that economic volatility fosters political volatility and governments end up doing irrational things to compensate, although this can only work for a limited time before the electorate simply throws its hands up.
(sorry – a clarification)
What if volatility is actually the norm (and modern volatility can be tracked to Don Chipp, say), and embodied in 5%+ primary votes for parties and personalities of dissent. The ALP becomes “the norm” – steadfastly shovelling neo-liberal progression in the face of their own supporters, and Howard pushing a Christian centred social credit worldview in the face of his supporters, resulting in neither party managing to satisfy their own core voters but instead surviving on capturing dissenters from the other side. A recipe for volatility?
Fascinating to think about.
Ute Man, how was John Howard a proponent of social credit, or “Christian centred social credit” as you put it?
An obsession with keeping an easy access to cheap money doesn’t a Douglas créditiste make. The various Canadian SC parties were ostensible originally based on real interventionism and hatred of the ‘money power’. That’s a kind of populism that is easily conflated with socialism (sometimes rightly).
Howard was really a low-mortgage-rate big government conservative. That easy money was all a magical byproduct of the Protestant free enterprise work ethic in his worldview, not redistribution or interventionism by ideological malcontents. Both genuine social credit policy and the mere appearance of creditism is anathema to that kind of government.
Yep, the social credit stuff (insofar as it harked back to Henry George) did have some resonances with socialism – in Australia with people like Frank Anstey and the whole labour movement campaign against “the money power” which was sort of a populist left alternative to Marxist socialism.
I’m with Nickws, though, I don’t think there’s a lot in common there with John Howard
I think nickws that the point of my overlong rambling was that Howard managed to capture and hold dissenting voters long enough to disguise the underlying volatility in the electorate.
That volatility was something that the Social Credit movements used to capitalise on. That the big government
social conservative we normally picture Howard as, had some rather curious policies that don’t fit the mould of a big government social conservative and definitely weren’t neo-liberal, and those policies were coincidentally very much like the concept of compensated pricing which was central to Douglas’ economic thought.
The Greens appear to me to be the biggest winners out of a dissenting/volatile vote in the last election. I can only assume it’s a completely different set of dissenters though as I’d hardly expect a Howard battler to switch their vote to green.
@29 –
Yep, and at the same time he had to do some fairly Herculean work in holding his own side together. Worth observing here that the Coalition under Howard was more often than not behind in the polls.
Me thinks that’s ambitious call and one that only becomes a reality when we have a series of similar results. I agree there seems to be a trend to less polarised political voting but on the otherhand the public is pretty well conditioned to accept the two party model and vested interests certainly prefer the status quo.
May we all live in interesting times…
Well, I do think it’s very easy to read just about anything into the Howard agenda.
Lot of blank slate ideology there when you remove the man’s desire to build a new electoral coalition that would run Australia forever.
(The Social Credit parties in the Canadian provinces mostly ended up becoming members of the orthodox centre-Right establishment, so I think the Canadians here—Down and Out of Saigon?—would see the basic partisan similarity between Howard and late era SoCred conservatism.)
In NZ the establishment of a proportional electoral system for the house of reps actually led to greater political stability.
It’s interesting to note that there was considerable pent-up demand for 3rd parties in NZ, and in fact the last vote under under the 2-party system (same as Britain’s “First Past the Post”) also returned a hung parliament.
Now, of course, every parliament is hung, and every government is a coalition, and there’s usually a couple of weeks of milling about after the polls close, but everyone’s used to it now, and no-one says “have another go!” if the result is close.
Nickws wrote:
That is true too, but I still find the parallels curious.
Kim wrote:
Definitely.
I suppose you could say that throwing the Nationals under a bus was really a rejection of social credit ideas too. Bob Katter is probably the closest thing we have to a modern day social credit adherent, as most of the “old style” national party probably had sympathy for a lot of the ideas (contra to the idea that they are agrarian socialists).
We shouldn’t get too apocalyptic about things for a while yet. One tied election doesn’t mean anything has ‘collapsed’.
For all sorts of reasons, people now have lower expectations of government. Moreover to the delight of neo-cons everywhere, government now plays a much less intrusive role in most individuals’ lives than used to be the case; decades of privatisation and corporatisation have seen to that. Consequently most people don’t care much any more who’s in government, for the very sensible reason that it makes little practical difference to them in areas that matter.
Nevertheless there is a lot of resentment of the major parties – I mean even people not paying attention get the shits eventually about rank incompetence and constant dishonesty – and it’s satisfying to give them the finger by voting for an independent or minor party, safe in the knowledge that it will not change anything much. But there’s still not much emotion or passion invested in the vote – how many people have we seen demonstrating in the streets trying to influence the independents? In lots of places the country would be at a virtual standstill until the deadlock was broken but here everyone shrugs their shoulders and just gets on with the things that are actually important.
Should we continue to live a charmed life as a nation, this detachment from politics will probably continue, resulting in less and less support for the major parties (or the collapse of the Westminster model, if you will). However a true national crisis that refocused people’s attention and persuaded them the identity of the government really matters could well see a return to two party politics.