Interim Australian election results, from the AEC (seat numbers from here):

While this is a preliminary result, with 4 seats still in doubt, it shows the fundamental unfairness of the Australian election system. The Greens, with 11.43% of the vote, got a single seat. Meanwhile, the Nationals, with 3.86% of the vote, got 7, while the Queensland LNP, with 8.95% of the vote, got 21. Describing this outcome as anything other than perverse, is, well, perverse.

An electoral system which distributes power in a way which bears no apparent relationship to the total vote cast is not just unfair and irrational, it is undemocratic. Australians deserve better than this – they deserve a properly democratic system. They deserve proportional representation.

The real irony here is it’s the bloke in the middle [Malcolm Turnbull] that’s probably the one completely sh*tting himself, because if this package fails to get through the Senate, the fallout against Turnbull by the public will be enormous. Every piece of bad news will become his fault in the mind of a huge chunk of the public – Labor will make sure of it. That better economic manager series we looked at earlier might become a nostalgic golden age for the Coalition.

It now appears that the legislation will be passed again by the House of Representatives – where no doubt all guns will be trained on the Opposition – and be returned to the Senate tomorrow while negotiations continue. It will probably pass after some more horsetrading, though that’s not certain. Labor will be dramatising the near miss, and putting all the blame on Turnbull rather than Xenophon and Fielding.

This is hardly a fabulous situation for the country, but the politics could hardly get any better for the government. A few points to make:

(1) There are currently no bills which have been rejected twice by the Senate with a three month interval so there is no available trigger for a double dissolution.

(2) In theory, Kevin Rudd could ask the Governor-General for a dissolution of the House of Representatives if the Senate rejects the legislation tomorrow, on the grounds that the situation is urgent and the government wants to seek the endorsement of the people for these measures. The composition of the Senate wouldn’t be changed, obviously, because you can’t hold a half Senate election at will, if my recollection of the constitutional provisions is accurate.

Possum’s measure of the trend of all the polls currently has Labor on 59% 2PP. Let’s go back to the bottom of the range for an assumed election result – 56%. The Liberal seats would still be falling like dominoes.

An election in the very near future isn’t a likely scenario, but contemplation of the likely outcome should be very frightening indeed for the Coalition.

(3) There are some indications, however, that the government is contemplating an election – whether double dissolution or not – later this year.

(4) It’s not necessarily PR that magnifies the influence of Nick Xenophon and Steve Fielding – but rather the election of Senators by state combined with PR.

(5) The Greens have come out of this episode looking good – as a responsible party prepared to allow the government to achieve its objectives with some tweaking. As opposed to Fielding and Xenophon whose calculation of their electoral chances seems to incline them to make as much noise and cause as much drama as possible. I’m inclined to agree that contra-deals and unrelated demands are undesirable – as Joshua Gans says, whatever the merits of Xenophon’s proposals, they really have nothing to do with the objectives of the legislation. I think the government consistently tries to resist this sort of thing, and I think they’re right to do so. No doubt a Senate with the balance of power held by The Greens would actually be both more favourable for Labor and for good governance as well.

(6) In the unlikely event that no stimulus package is passed, I suppose the neo-liberal anti-Keynesian mob would get an answer to the question of whether their default position of the government doing basically nothing is the road to recovery. It’s a little more complex than that, but as has been noted here, that’s the corner Malcolm Turnbull has allowed himself to be painted into, and all the noise from the free market mob is going to be poison for the Coalition.

(7) Malcolm had better hope that there’s no recession, because he’s pretty close to owning it if there is. I’m not the only one to make the point again and again that using Senate numbers to in effect take responsibility for legislation was a disastrous strategy for the Labor opposition, and it is one for the Coalition as well – as indeed some Coalition MPs from both ends of the ideological fence – ie Christopher Pyne and Nick Minchin – argued in their partyroom.

(8) If there’s any future for the Liberal party in the medium term, they need to be ground into the dust electorally first – it seems like there’s nothing else that will actually teach them the lessons of why they lost office. And we’re entering a period where their default message will have less and less resonance – possibly for a very long time.

Update: Courtesy of danny in comments, our attention has been drawn to a comprehensive post by Antony Green on the options for an election. Looks like I was right in thinking at point (2) that an election called now would have to be for the House of Representatives only. As Green notes, there are precedents, though such a call would be the first time an election was used to teach the Senate a lesson.

Update: Possum on why Turnbull was praying that Xenophon would vote for the package today, Sam Clifford assessing the role of the minors in Senate negotiations, and Bernard Keane on Xenophon.

But, if the Fin Review is to be believed, the significance of a 4% plus swing to the Greens hasn’t escaped the attention of ALP wonks. “Labor hardheads” are quoted by the paper as concerned by the vote in Fremantle, and the implications for the seats of Federal Ministers such as Lindsay Tanner, Anthony Albanese and Tanya Plibersek. “Labor strategists” are cited as concerned about a drift away among “left-leaning voters”.

This is hardly rocket science. Any modern managerialist ALP government is bound to disappoint at least some left voters after the initial euphoria of a Tory defeat has worn off. And the Greens nationally are going to have a much bigger profile with a balance of power role in the Senate and new Senators who may develop a high profile. The article, however, leaves us none the wiser as to how “Labor strategists” think their party should respond.

The Labor Party’s response in the past seems to have often taken the form of “Extreme Green” propaganda. Kevin Rudd’s current disposition appears to be to ignore Bob Brown and the Greens altogether (perhaps because putting together a Senate majority comprising the Greens, Xenophon and Fielding is an inherently unwieldy act) and concentrate his rhetorical fire on the Liberals.

But at a deeper level, the fact that a party with almost 12% of the vote in WA goes unrepresented in the lower House (making something of a mockery about claims that it represents “one vote one value” because single member electoral systems don’t really do that) should cause progressives of all stripes to rethink things. There’s always going to be immense hostility from the major parties and all sorts of entrenched interests to any form of pr in any lower House (and Tasmania crippled its own governance by a Lib-Lab deal to shut the Greens more or less out of its version of Hare-Clark).

But Kevin Rudd should perhaps be thinking long term here (as he claims that he does). Tony Blair probably did want some sort of arrangement with the British Lib Dems – as demonstrated by his reaching out to then leader Paddy Ashdown and the inclusion of Lib Dem MPs and Peers in several Cabinet Committees. In the British context, even preferential voting would have been a significant innovation, however, and it was a bridge too far for Labour.

If, as has been reported, Rudd also has some sort of dream of a grand and enduring re-alignment which would consign the right of politics to a permanently embattled position, the best way to achieve this would be through electoral reform which would enable the ALP and the Greens to work together in a much less adversarial fashion. However, it’s hardly something that our Prime Minister, whose reputation for caution appears well deserved, would propose.

I think it’s time that we the citizens started pushing for this. MMP in New Zealand came about basically because of enormous distaste and alienation with business as usual “better of two evils” big party politics. This seems to me to be something an organisation such as GetUp! could well campaign on (and perhaps attractive to them because it would negate claims they’re an ALP front). It’s not as sexy as some of their issues, but it’s undeniably important. I suspect that it would actually be very much in the interests of trade unions to support such moves, because the disadvantages of putting all their eggs in the Labor basket should already be starkly apparent.

Writing in the Centre for Policy Development’s Insight, Bill Bowtell takes a look at our electoral system:

Counter-factual history is entertaining, and no more than guesswork, but at the very least truly fair elections would have resulted in many more occupants of the Prime Ministerial throne over the last six decades. And in four out of five of these elections, the will of the people was to embrace the ALP rather than the conservative alternative.

Had the will of the people been implemented at these elections, whether to install governments of the left or the right, these governments would have been more reflective of the contemporary needs, aspirations and opinions of the Australian people who after all have voted for change ten and not just five, times since 1949.

It is therefore deeply wrong to blame the Australian people for the sclerotic timidity and lack of vision that has so often disfigured Australian politics and greatly delayed necessary reform by many post-war governments. Since 1949, the Australian people have voted for political change at almost every other election, yet their will has been denied by a complex system that does not reliably deliver a majority of seats to the side that wins a majority of votes.

This absurd contraption of single member electorates locks up and effectively disenfranchises millions of Australians in safe electorates, while showering largesse on a small number of voters in marginal seats. Over time, this has created a massively distorted imbalance in the national distribution of services and subsidies. This has counted against safe seat voters on both sides of the political spectrum – and especially voters in most rural and regional seats and the inner cities.