Respect slipping, but for whom?

Laurie Oakes has a regular column in News Ltd publications on a weekend…

Australians know that a deadlocked election has left the country without a government and the situation is serious.

Australia has been “without a government” for the past six weeks, why is the situation suddenly serious now? Is there some evidence that the procedures for sorting out the situation will not work this time?

But the three non-aligned MPs who will play the key role in deciding which party governs have looked about as serious as kids in a toy shop.
In the days following the election – and particularly at the National Press Club on Wednesday – Bob Katter, Tony Windsor, and Rob Oakeshott were suddenly at the centre of things and loving it.

Because they’re the only ones that would enjoy being taken seriously for the first time since they’ve entered parliament. Also, kids in toy shops, they’re actually being very serious, about having fun, which is pretty much what you do when you’re a kid. These three are serious about wielding their influence, which is what you do when you’re a member of parliament.

Every thought bubble from an independent became a headline. Whatever they said, no matter how flaky, was soberly reported – even Oakeshott’s nonsense about unity governments and Kevin Rudd possibly serving in the foreign affairs portfolio under prime minister Tony Abbott.

Once again it’s the politicians’ fault that the media has no sense of perspective.

But plenty of punters recognised it as tosh, and said so on talkback radio. You could feel respect for the so-called Three Amigos slipping away.

Because talkback radio audiences are a perfect sample of the opinion of all Australian voters.

AND by week’s end, as a result of their antics, the independents were getting the blame for the lack of progress in forming a government, even though it had nothing to do with them.
Talks could not begin in any meaningful way until the make-up of the new House of Representatives was clear. The hold-up had nothing to do with grandstanding by the independents and everything to do with the slowness of vote-counting by the Australian Electoral Commission.
But people were asking: “When will this circus end?” And it was the activities of the independents they had in mind.

Are we still talking about talkback? Did any of the presenters explain to the panicked callers that this was the reality? Or that the AEC always takes this long to finalise the last seat counts, just that no one normally notices as the result of the election is clear?
Or are we talking about people in the media doing the talking? If so, did those doing the writing and the talking provide a reasonable viewpoint or were they just fueling the News Ltd campaign, as identified by many people including Laura Tingle, to undermine any minority Labor government that may form?

Andrew Wilkie, the former intelligence analyst and Iraq War whistle-blower elected as an independent in Tasmania, and Adam Bandt, the Green who won the seat of Melbourne, have been rather more circumspect.

Wilkie has only been confirmed as a winner in the last couple of days and Adam Bandt is a representative of a party that has an existing presence in the federal parliament, that is already taken seriously as a political force. Is this a surprise?

The truth is that preparations for the horse-trading that will give us either a Labor or Coalition minority government are well under way.

So why not say that in the first paragraph rather than the tenth?

The decision by Abbott to allow Treasury to cost Coalition policies and then brief the independents on their impact on the Budget bottom line was a significant breakthrough.

Breakthrough by who? If you answered, the Labor party and independents for applying heavy political pressure on Tony Abbott, you might make a point.

It means the cross-bench group who have to make the choice that voters failed to make last Saturday will at least do so on the basis of proper information about both parties and their programs.

That it will. And since you agree it’s important for them to have this information, instead of putting any delays down to them, perhaps you could look in the direction of the person or people who have been holding back this relevant information.

Abbott’s agreement to the process also suggests that Greens leader Bob Brown and others are wrong in suggesting the Liberal leader’s aim is to force Australians back to the polls.

Abbott’s agreement, after days of looking like he’s got something to hide, after being called out on that point by the independents themselves, oh yes, that agreement. And how do you think it would look going to another poll if they were still refusing to release their costings to scrutiny? I don’t think this means what you think it means.

“Nobody wants another election,” a shadow minister said yesterday.”We’re all tired.” The parties are also broke.

Really? You need an unnamed source to tell you that, after five weeks of campaigning, some politicians are a little tired? How long have you been in this game for?

So, while Abbott has been less fawning than Gillard in preliminary dealings with the cross-benchers, he is no less keen than she is to win their support. Negotiations begin in earnest next week.
In the meantime, there are a few things worth keeping in mind.
Abbott claims the coalition should form government because it received around 500,000 more primary votes than Labor. Gillard says Labor should get the nod because it got a majority of votes after preferences.
But these arguments are simply spin for ears of the independents.

Pretty stupid spin if you ask me. I’d think the independents would be all too aware of the myriad of considerations they need to weigh up to decide who gets to have their confidence in the House of Representatives. Perhaps the questions of competence and fiscal responsibility might be a part of it?
Could it be that this is actually spin directed elsewhere, perhaps to the electorate to manage perceptions of legitimacy? Even if you don’t agree with that, is that at least a possibility?

Tasmanian Governor Peter Underwood, who had to sort out a hung Parliament situation in that state earlier in the year, wrote that “the total number of votes received by the elected members of a political party is constitutionally irrelevant to the issue of who should be commissioned to form a government”.
All that matters is “who can form a stable government”. In other words, support in the Lower House.

Again, why wasn’t this at the top of the piece?

The Coalition claims it will have 73 seats at the end of the count, ahead of Labor on 72.
But Tony Crook, the West Australian National who defeated Wilson Tuckey, is included in the Coalition total – and Crook himself has said he is “clearly an independent” and will not sit with the Coalition.
That would seem to put Crook in much the same position as Bandt from the Greens, who is supporting Labor.
In which case, Gillard and Abbott can be viewed as having a starting point of 73 seats each.
Abbott has good reason to be less lovey-dovey in dealing with Windsor, Oakeshott and Katter than Gillard has been. According to a Liberal source: “He doesn’t want to be seen by his Coalition partners crawling to three National Party rats.”
Coalition disunity, papered over when Abbott became leader, would quickly re-emerge if he were seen in any way to be kow-towing to the trio and granting them concessions the Nationals have failed to win.

Would re-emerge? It already has.

Abbott needs to ensure that any deal he does with the independents is not seen by the Nationals as contrary to their interests.

That’d be pretty hard as the independents represent, better than anything else, the irrelevance of the National party. Any deal done with a bunch of former Nationals to form government makes the current Nationals look pointless.

Abbott’s excuses for initially refusing to let Treasury cost his policies for the independents were ridiculous.

So how does this link with your earlier comment about a “significant breakthrough?”

First, he claimed that “it is very difficult for the public service to understand opposition policy with the same insight and depth that it has of government policy”.
In that case, why did the Howard government introduce a Charter of Budget Honesty that requires oppositions to submit their policies to Treasury for costing in election campaigns?
Excuse No. 2 was to claim that a leak a few months ago indicated corruption in Treasury. This from the party that, until the forged email scandal last year, had the notorious Godwin Grech as its own highly placed Treasury mole.
Gillard’s sudden enthusiasm for parliamentary reform – one of the things the independents are keen on – exposes her own hypocrisy.
During the election campaign she rejected outright proposals to improve Question Time, even though they were similar to ideas she herself had put forward when Labor was in opposition.

So, having established that both major parties are blatantly hypocritical, how does that impact on the current circumstances, where we have neither party with a majority in their own right? Do you think many of those talkback callers are clamouring for more hypocrisy?

Now comes the crunch. The leader who signs up three independents will be prime minister. The sooner the better.
Until that happens, cross-benchers in the Lower House will revel in their unaccustomed relevance – and envious Senate independents like Nick Xenophon and Steve Fielding will do their best to gatecrash the party.

Now comes another crunch; with the existing political world being turned upside down, with new entrants in the debate reveling in their unaccustomed relevance, who will meet this challenge and who will be left to gatecrash the party?

Separating Reality from the Literal

Cross-posted this from my tumblr – i’m planning on making more use of the institute’s space so i thought i’d use this to blow the cobwebs off

This morning i tweeted

TBH, the line “Der! Australian ppl din’t vote for a hung parliament” is like the “Der! You don’t elect a PM but a local member” line.

Someone asked me to expand this beyond 140 characters…

The “you don’t elect a PM by a local member” line is from the Labor party’s leadership spill earlier this year. The line was used as a reply to people who felt they had been denied an opportunity to vote on Kevin Rudd/Kevin Rudd’s government. Of course, by the constitution, we don’t have a system that directly elects the head of our federal government – we have a system where 150 electorates each elect a representative to the house of representatives and the prime minister is the leader of the party that can secure a majority of members of the house of representatives.

This literal translation however fails to take into account the reality of contemporary electoral politics, i.e. that many people do vote for a party because of the assumed leader(s) of that party. I’m sure many people voted Liberal or National between 1996 and 2005 because they wanted John Howard to be prime minister and in 2007 the Labor party ran a campaign that was heavily focused on Kevin Rudd as their leader and candidate for prime minister.

Similarly, it is true that no one voted for a hung parliament.* Each of us as individuals made a decision to vote for one party or candidate to be our representative in parliament. However, it is usual for people to try and interpret election results one way or another. In any kind of representative system, i would argue, at some level this is necessary – when we elect members to the HOR we expect them to make decisions on behalf of us with the proviso that we get to review their performance roughly every three years. A consequence of this is that politicians, as part of their job, need to learn to “read” their electorates.

Similarly, i think it also makes sense to interpret elections to examine the general mood of the electorate – elections can put in a context, to give them some meaning and relevance. When doing this, one must be careful not to make wild or unsubstantiated assumptions and to always be open to having assumptions and interpretations challenged.

Looking at the results of this election;

- The Labor party has lost enough seats to not have a majority
- The Liberal/National coalition haven’t gained enough seats to have a majority in their own right either
- On the raw primary votes, the third largest party, the Greens, have increased their national vote by about 3.7% to around 11.5%
- The combined Labor, Liberal, and National vote in the HOR is currently at 82.05% compared with 85.15% in 2007, 84% in 2004, 80.53 in 2001, 79.28 in 1998, and 86.01 in 1996
- Likewise the Senate votes are 2010 74.28%, 2007 80.24%, 2004 79.76%, 1998 74.99%, and 1996 80.12

Those results, combined with the polling we had seen before the election, leads me to feel it’s fair to observe that Australians were dissatisfied, on the whole, with the major parties to a greater degree than we have seen in a while. Based on that, a HOR with neither major party having a majority is probably a reasonable outcome.

Even if you disagree with my conclusion, i don’t think it’s entirely accurate to say that there is no such thing as a national mood and that each electorate only votes for a local member without consideration for how that will determine who forms government. Whatever system is used to elect a government, discussions of that system should be held in context of the overall perception of the system, not just the technical/literal aspects.

*although i guess you could argue that some people might have voted to try and achieve a hung parliament – the bottom line is that there isn’t a box to tick labelled “hung parliament.”