A number of Senators have left, most notably Steve Fielding. Of the departures from the major parties, perhaps the most significant is Nick Minchin; Crikey has the valedictory speeches of the departing Senators, many of which are worth a read. Nick Xenophon remains, but his influence is much diminished.

Bernard Keane predicts that the results of the new Senate makeup will be hard to predict.

What do you think?

UPDATE: Andrew Bartlett’s view.

What it also shows (again) is that Julia is a master negotiator. Doing what Rudd was pretty loathe to ever do she actually got involved with negotiations with Senators and got the job done.

Let me be bold and say this right now: we will have a price on carbon before the next election*. It will be a shitty, God awful, drag-down, knock them out negotiation, and then Julia will get involved and the deal will be done. This is a woman who knows how to work with people, and most of all she bloody well likes to win.

By the way, the summary of the NBN business case, released as part of the deal, spends three out of the 36 pages discussing its risk management policies. I suspect they may have considered the odd piece of wet weather – one of the easiest risks to quantify – in their cost estimates (earlier LP post here).

For those who might not be aware of how this works, if you vote “above the line” (that is, if you put a 1 in one of the parties’ or grouped and ungrouped candidates’ box), then your preferences are allocated according to a ticket lodged with the Electoral Commission.

There is also the option of voting “below the line”, but that can be a bit of an ask where there are up to 84 Senate candidates to number sequentially (I think that’s the largest number this election – in NSW).

There’s a lot in them to digest, but commentary so far has focused on two aspects:

(a) The ALP has given its preferences straight to The Greens in Victoria, atoning for the 2004 debacle which saw Steve Fielding elected;

(b) The Democrats in the ACT have preferenced the Liberals ahead of The Greens. No doubt they’ll not poll well, but in a contest where The Greens have some chance of defeating the incumbent Liberal, every preference is potentially important.

Elsewhere: An Onymous Lefty.

Update: [by Kim] Lots of easily scannable detail from William Bowe at The Poll Bludger.

To put it mildly, though, it’s hardly helpful, and it’s illustrative of the despicable tactics which the globally interconnected forces of reaction are prepared to employ.

This issue isn’t directly canvassed by Nate Silver, but he has written a very interesting post at FiveThirtyEight.com on the chances of the Climate Change Bill receiving 60 votes in the US Senate (which it will need to survive a filibuster) – recommended reading.

While Nick Xenophon is straight from the Brian Harradine school of independent Senators, at least the bloke seems to understand how to negotiate to achieve the best result he can get. Fielding, at the moment, is turning the passage of any particular legislation through the Senate into a coin-tossing exercise. The sooner the Senate numbers change to remove him from his current position of influence, the better off we will all be.

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.

We are sending a clear message that Australians need this boost. As a uni student I need help to buy my text books, my mother is a single parent who needs help and my brother is heading into year 12 and he needs it….

Think about how much difference this bonus will make to you and your families…

The group page also provides information on how to lobby Senators.

Very interesting indeed.

Elsewhere: Terry Flew.

Elsewhere: The Age:

Australians planning to spend Prime Minister Kevin Rudd’s promised $950 bonus on holidays, new drum kits, Wii games, tattoos and weekend-long benders have flooded into a new Facebook group.

At Catallaxy, Jason Soon thinks we’re “luvvies”. Quelle surprise! No doubt John Greenfield will be along soon to show off the calibre of intellectual debate Catallaxy is renowned for all over the intertubes.

Update: 465333 members as of 1.30pm Saturday Brisbane time.

I wouldn’t be at all surprised if Steve Fielding was tipped off about this – it might contextualise his about face on voting for the alcopops tax and the Medicare Levy changes.

This is the fiscal policy two step following up the Reserve Bank’s 1% cut in rates – which is still a tad contractionary.

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.