Two weeks ago I participated in a very interesting panel discussion at the Brunswick Ballroom in Melbourne on the future of the two-party system – a topic that we’ve touched on here a number of times.* Last week Rachel Withers, who moderated the discussion, referred to it in Crikey in the course of arguing that politicians, and Liberal leader Angus Taylor in particular, should not be obliged to set out beforehand what coalitions they might be willing to enter after an election.
As readers will know, the topic of a potential coalition between the big-C Coalition parties, the Liberals and Nationals, and One Nation has been of interest to the media and shows no signs of fading away. And Withers is not suggesting that Taylor and the rest be given a free ride in terms of their responsibility for One Nation’s rise. On the contrary, in her words:
We need to know why Taylor refuses to rule out preference deals with One Nation, given that’s how parties tell voters who they approve of. We need to know whether he repudiates the party’s often racist rhetoric, and whether he is going to walk back his One Nation-like proposals … We need to know what he thinks of a Liberal president who sounds increasingly like a One Nation billboard, and far-right members who argue One Nation values are Liberal values.
But should that accountability extend to being asked to rule out (or in) a coalition with One Nation? Withers argues that doing so is “a hangover of a fading two-party system,” and points out (quite correctly) that in genuine multi-party systems, as we see in much of Europe, voters understand that parties can’t dictate terms in advance but have to deal with the parliament that the electorate gives them. Sometimes that will involve strange alliances.
I agree that our media are much too addicted to “gotcha”-type questions that try to elicit unreasonable commitments from politicians. But I’m not entirely convinced that this is an example of it. Even if Coalition leaders are not able to give a categorical answer to the question of hooking up with One Nation, they should be expected to say something intelligible on the subject – and their inability to do so is a symptom of the ideological crisis that they face.
A multi-party system, in my view, would not be a bad thing. But we are still a long way from that position. Compare, for example, Latvia, which goes to the polls in a couple of months: its last election saw seven parties from across the spectrum enter parliament, with the largest of them winning only about a quarter of the seats. Even the United Kingdom, whose electoral system is even more hostile to minor parties than ours, is facing the possibility of five or six parties being serious players in its next parliament.
In Australia the surge in One Nation support threatens a situation where three parties have comparable levels of support, none of them able to win a majority on its own. But that is quite different from a genuine multi-party system: with each party having only two possible partners, it seems not unreasonable for it to be asked which of them it would prefer to see in government.
And in many countries a multi-party system reduces in practice, at least to a large extent, to a contest between two broad alliances of parties, with perhaps just a couple of small parties realistically able to shift from one to the other. (Sweden, which also votes later this year, is an example.) Our Liberal-National Coalition is an extreme version of this; the Nationals (then the Country Party) once had freedom of movement, but federally and in most states they have become a permanent adjunct of the Liberals.
Even with only three effective parties, a party faces a number of potential decision points: a fully-fledged coalition is different from an agreement to prop up a minority government, which in turn is different from just tolerating such a government on a day-to-day basis. But understanding those decisions requires a more detailed look at just how governments are formed in a situation where no-one has a majority, so we’ll defer that to part two, to follow later this week.
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* I was a late replacement on the panel when Kos Samaras was unavailable. My thanks to the organisers for including me in a very enjoyable event!
The World is Not Enough 