As I explained yesterday in part 1, Australia’s electoral system puts ideologically allied parties into direct geographical competition with one another, making co-operation difficult – as Labor and the Greens have discovered over the years. The Liberal and National (formerly Country) parties gradually built up a system of sharing seats and mostly avoiding contests, but it took many decades.
To understand the current fracas we need to understand something of the geography. Much of the recent commentary uses the electoral commission’s demographic classification of seats, but these appear to be updated only fitfully and contain some obvious errors (Casey and LaTrobe, for example, both in the suburbs of Melbourne, are labelled “rural” and “provincial” respectively; Fadden, on the Gold Coast, is counted as “outer metropolitan”). So I have rearranged them a bit, and created a new category of “middle metropolitan”, covering the urban areas that are neither distinctively inner nor outer.
On that basis, the seats currently held in the House of Representatives break down like this:*
| ALP | Liberal | Nationals | Others | Total | |
| Inner metropolitan | 20 | 1 | 0 | 6 | 27 |
| Middle metropolitan | 37 | 3 | 0 | 3 | 43 |
| Outer metropolitan | 19 | 9 | 0 | 1 | 29 |
| Provincial | 12 | 8 | 3 | 0 | 23 |
| Rural | 6 | 7 | 12 | 3 | 28 |
| Total | 94 | 28 | 15 | 13 | 150 |
The ALP, it can be seen, has a presence everywhere, although it is noticeably weak in rural seats. It is especially strong in the middle metropolitan area, which contains the largest share of seats. The Liberals have almost no presence in inner and middle metropolitan seats but are spread across the other three categories. The Nationals are essentially a rural party, with a handful of provincial seats. And the crossbench, which is mostly Teal and Teal-friendly, is basically inner metropolitan with a few seats elsewhere.
Without going any further, you can see that the popular image of “Liberals urban / Nationals regional” doesn’t hold up. Not only do the Liberals hold more rural and provincial seats than the Nationals, they also hold more of them than they do metropolitan seats (the first of those things has usually been true; the second is new). The Coalition has never been based on a simple division of labor between urban and regional areas: it works, when it works at all, in spite of geography not because of it.
You can also see the big problem that both Coalition parties have got, in that the parts of the country in which they are strongest are a declining share of the total. Urban areas are growing, rural areas are in relative decline. It would be theoretically possible to win a majority without any inner and middle metropolitan seats, but for practical purposes they need to break into those areas – meaning that the Liberals do.
What about One Nation? They didn’t win any seats, so they don’t appear in the table, but we can get an idea of their strength by looking at the 25 seats in which they reached second or third place behind Labor and the Coalition, helpfully compiled in a post this week by Antony Green. They correlate fairly well with the seats in which One Nation’s primary vote is highest, although there are some exceptions (in Brand, for example, One Nation had 12.8% on primaries, its eighth-best result, but could only manage fourth place behind Labor, Liberals and Greens).
Of those 25 seats, six are currently held by the ALP, seven by the Liberals and twelve by the Nationals. Seven are outer metropolitan, four are provincial and 13 are rural; just one (Burt, in Western Australia) is middle metropolitan, and none at all inner. In other words, the demographic profile of One Nation’s strength looks (not surprisingly) a lot like that of the Liberals and Nationals, and not at all like that of Labor.
Given the Liberal Party’s need to expand its metropolitan reach, one can imagine it coming to some sort of tacit understanding with One Nation, whereby it would focus most of its energies in the cities while One Nation tried to win regional seats from Labor and the Nationals. But no such option is available for the Nationals: they have nowhere else to go.
So George Brandis, writing at the weekend, was quite correct to point out that it is the National Party that faces an existential threat from One Nation, just as it did almost thirty years ago. It faced down the challenge then, but it may not be so lucky again. Then, although it was clueless in many ways, it at least seemed to understand the need to fight; this time, it has already given away most of its policy clothes to the far right.
But Brandis is wrong to say that the Liberals face no such threat, although theirs is a little different. They do indeed have the option of turning to the centre to try to win votes in the suburbs, where, as he puts it, “Barnaby Joyce has no appeal and Pauline Hanson is toxic.” But it’s precisely because they refuse to take that step, due to the philosophical shift that we discussed yesterday, that their predicament is so dire.
The Liberals seem doomed to do one (or both) of two things. Either they will focus their effort in the areas in which One Nation is strong, in which case they will be on the defensive just as the Nationals are, or they will campaign in the cities with a program designed to appease One Nation supporters, which will be electoral poison in the places where most Australians live.
In part three we’ll look at how they might escape from that dilemma.
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* Note that even leaving aside the classification issue, you can’t get these numbers from the AEC’s tables because it treats the LNP in Queensland as a single party. I have manually disaggregated it into Liberals and Nationals.
The World is Not Enough 