The Senate, and other final thoughts

As promised, a word about today’s election as regards the Senate. (Yesterday’s general preview is here.) Forty Senate seats are up for election, six in each state and two in each of the two territories. As I think Malcolm Mackerras first pointed out many years ago, the norm is for each to split evenly (3-3 or 1-1) between left and right.

Last time there were two deviations from that: Western Australia split 4-2 in favor of the left, with three Labor, one Green and two Coalition, while the ACT gave both its seats to the left, one Labor and one a Teal/Green-ish independent, David Pocock. If the 2022 result is repeated this time, the new Senate will have 41 left (28 Labor, twelve Greens [see note below] plus Pocock) against 35 right (29 Coalition and two each for One Nation, Trumpet of Patriots and Jacquie Lambie Network).

The good news for the Coalition is that the Western Australian result is unlikely to be repeated; it will probably fall back to 3-3. The bad news is that the Lambies, who should again win a Tasmanian seat, have moved steadily to the left and have often voted with the government; in effect it could now be said that Tasmania splits 4-2. Other possible deviations from the norm are Queensland, where the right has a chance at a fourth seat (three Coalition and one One Nation), as happened in 2019, and Victoria, where the right could possibly drop to two.

There’s also the question of the balance within the right, with some talking up the prospects of One Nation adding substantially to its tally. (Here’s Bernard Keane on the topic.) Critical here is the role of preferences: as I touched on last week, major party preferences are more important in the Senate than in the lower house because they’re distributed not just when candidates are eliminated, but also from the surplus votes of elected candidates.

With the decline in the major party vote it’s become increasingly difficult for either Labor or the Coalition to win three seats in a state; Labor managed it last time in WA, as did the Coalition in New South Wales and South Australia, but they’ll be hard pressed to repeat the achievement. That leaves an opening for the far right, which last time grabbed seats in Queensland (One Nation) and Victoria (Trumpet of Patriots, then called the UAP).

So the Coalition is striving for a close exchange of preferences with One Nation, to ensure that one of them, at any rate, gets that final seat in every mainland state. In effect, One Nation would stand in the same relationship to the Coalition that the Greens do to Labor. But whereas Labor spends a lot of effort (far too much, in my view) in distinguishing itself from the Greens, Peter Dutton’s Liberal Party shows no sign of trying to draw much of a policy or ideological line to separate it from One Nation.

For that more than any other reason, I think it is necessary that the Coalition be repudiated in the strongest possible terms. Several of Dutton’s predecessors have helped to open the door to fascism in Australia, but none so wide as he has. It is important that he should pay an electoral price for that, and that his party be given the incentive and the opportunity to strike out on a different tack.

Many people have been in varying degrees disappointed with Anthony Albanese’s government and expect that it would do better if it were obliged to rely on the Teals or the Greens for a majority. That seems to me a reasonable hope, and the further the Coalition vote falls the less likely it is to eventuate.

But I don’t think anyone should risk supporting the Coalition in order to clip Labor’s wings. As the United States constantly reminds us, one absolutely vital ingredient in the survival of democracy is the presence of a sane and grounded centre-right party. We do not currently have that, and our priority should be to try to get it back.

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NOTE added Sunday: I should have mentioned that the party totals given for the Senate refer to the parties that senators were originally elected for; one each of the Labor and Greens senators (Fatima Payman and Lidia Thorpe respectively) actually now sit as independents.