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.”