Breakthrough in the Senate

With only a handful of seats in the House of Representatives still undecided from this month’s election, it’s time to turn our attention to the Senate, where counting takes a while to catch up – partly because it’s given a lower priority, and partly because of the insanely large ballot papers that staff have to deal with. (Check all the official figures here.)

While the size of Labor’s victory in the lower house speaks for itself, the Senate result is in its way even more striking. To understand why, a bit of history is in order.

As regular readers will have heard before, the norm in Senate elections is that states and territories split evenly (3-3 and 1-1 respectively) between left and right. Since the Senate was enlarged in 1984,* deviations from that have been very rare. Prior to 2013 it had happened only six times in eight elections (or 64 possible cases), and never more than twice in one election.

Moreover, when it did happen it was often a result of parties preferencing across ideological lines. In 1990 in New South Wales minor right-wing parties preferenced against the third Coalition candidate; in the same state in 1998 the Coalition preferenced against One Nation, and in Victoria in 2004 Labor preferenced Family First ahead of the Greens.

Things changed briefly in 2013 when, with a big Coalition victory and minor parties having learnt how to game the system, group voting tickets delivered a forest of strange results. That resulted in 4-2 right-left splits in four states (New South Wales, Queensland, Western Australia and South Australia). It also provided the impetus for reform of the group ticket system, and that plus the subsequent double dissolution returned things more or less to normal.

In 2019 the right won four seats in Queensland (three Coalition plus a One Nation), with everything else splitting evenly. In 2022 it was the left’s turn, winning Western Australia 4-2 and also winning both seats in the Australian Capital Territory, the first time a territory had departed from the norm. The result was a Senate that split 39-37 left-right, as discussed in my preview.

With that background, we can understand the extraordinary nature of the current result. Although it’s not finalised, there’s general agreement among people who’ve studied this more closely than I have (here’s Kevin Bonham, here’s William Bowe and here’s Ben Raue) as to the most likely result in each state. And that is that, in addition to the ACT again electing two from the left, four of the six states will split 4-2 in favor of the left – and it’s not impossible that five will, leaving Queensland as the only holdout.

New South Wales, Victoria, Western Australia and South Australia all look like electing three Labor senators, two Coalition and one Green, although in Western Australia and (to a lesser extent) Victoria there’s a chance that One Nation could get ahead of the third Labor candidate. Tasmania could go the same way, although it’s more likely there that Jacquie Lambie (who often votes more like a left senator anyway) will beat either the second Liberal or the third ALP candidate. Only Queensland will clearly split three-all (two Labor, two Coalition, one Green and one One Nation).

Most startling of all, in the ACT Teal-ish incumbent David Pocock has topped the poll, beating both major parties and winning 39.8% of the vote, or almost 1.2 quotas. The ALP, rather humiliatingly, will need his surplus to elect its senator, while the Liberals are way back with just over half a quota. (The Northern Territory, however, as usual shows no departure from the norm, with the two major parties having quotas on primaries.)

The previous landslide election, John Howard’s victory of 1996, showed nothing abnormal in the Senate, but this time Labor has won the jackpot. If the above results are all confirmed it will be the most left-wing Senate in living memory, with 31 Labor seats (one of them held by Fatima Payman, who sits as an independent), 12 Greens (also including one independent, Lidia Thorpe) and a Teal facing off against 27 Coalition (23 Liberals and four Nationals), three far right (two One Nation and a Trumpet of Patriots) and two Lambies (one of whom now sits as an independent).

Even counting out the two defectors that’s a clear Labor/Greens majority, 41-35; Labor would have to miss out on all of the currently doubtful seats to fall short. And because of six year terms, that majority is likely to stay in place until 2031 unless the opposition can make some very big inroads next time.

Less usefully, even without the Greens Labor would have half the seats if it could get all of the rest of the crossbench on side – Teal, defectors, far right and Lambies – and if the Liberals miss out on their second Tasmanian seat then that would become a majority. But the chance of that ever mattering, with Coalition and Greens voting alone against everyone else, would seem remote.

More likely, Labor will again find itself often by-passing both Greens and others and taking advantage of the fact that it will enjoy a solid majority in conjunction with the Coalition, since the major parties share many interests that unite them against the crossbench. Whether or not that makes for good public policy is another question.

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* The enlargement took effect in 1984, but the first election for six senators in each state was in 1990, since 1984 elected seven per state to bring the Senate promptly up to full size and 1987 was a double dissolution. I have also ignored the 2016 double dissolution in the statistics.