Earlier this week in part one we looked at the demands on the Coalition to commit itself one way or another on a potential coalition with One Nation. I suggested that the sort of flexibility on such matters that would be appropriate in a genuine multi-party system might be less so in a simple three-party system – which seems to be the situation Australia is now in.
Parliamentary government is based on a binary choice: government or opposition, ins vs outs. It can accommodate third parties or multiple parties, but they are always under pressure to line up on one side or the other. If they’re not part of the government, then they’re generally going to be regarded as part of the opposition; conversely, if a party regularly votes with the government, that party will usually play a role in forming the government’s policies.
As I put it many years ago, in relation to the Tasmanian Greens, “If a government depends on a particular group of MPs for its survival and functioning, then the leaders of that group should sit in cabinet and share responsibility for the administration’s measures.”
So consider, for example, this year’s Victorian state election. If current polling holds up (a big if, no doubt), we’re heading for a situation in which the three political forces of Coalition, Labor and One Nation will all have comparable strength, none of them being able to command a majority. It’s easy to imagine a Legislative Assembly where the 88 seats split something like 34 Coalition, 28 Labor, 22 One Nation and four others.
In some countries that would mean that the Coalition, having the most seats, would get the first chance to form a government. But in the Westminster system the government remains in place until voted out. Labor, as the party currently in power, would be entitled to meet the new parliament and test its strength. Only if a vote of no confidence – presumably moved by the Coalition, with One Nation either supporting it or abstaining – was carried would the government be obliged to resign.
If the Coalition and One Nation had previously reached an agreement to form government together, Labor could choose to resign without waiting to be voted out. But it might well want to put that agreement to the test, just as Robin Gray did when Labor and the Greens combined in Tasmania in 1989, and as Rob Kerin did in South Australia in 2002.
Once Labor had resigned, the governor would send for Liberal leader Jess Wilson and ask if she could form a government. At that point she would need, not necessarily a coalition with One Nation but at least some sort of agreement that she could show the governor. Otherwise Wilson would have to admit that no, she could not guarantee supply. In that case, the governor would send for the One Nation leader (let’s say Moira Deeming, for the sake of argument) and ask the same question, presumably getting the same answer.
If none of the three leaders could demonstrate the ability to survive in parliament, the governor would probably give Wilson, as the leader of the largest group, the opportunity to try her luck with a minority government. It’s likely that she would survive for a while, because neither Labor nor One Nation would want to be blamed for forcing a fresh election. And in Victoria – although not in the classic Westminster system – she would not have the option of going to an election unless a vote of no-confidence was carried, because parliamentary terms are fixed.
So it’s possible that a Coalition government would be allowed to govern without a majority, with Labor and One Nation both claiming credit for allowing it to function but keeping it on a tight rein: no legislation could be passed without one or both of them agreeing to it. The Coalition would have avoided committing itself either way, but at the price of a day-to-day struggle for survival.
And this, for the Coalition, is a reasonably optimistic scenario. If its polling holds up it could instead be One Nation in the position of the largest group, with Deeming given the opportunity to form a minority government. In that case Labor would no doubt offer to co-operate with the Coalition in hamstringing or destroying it, and the Coalition would be even more obviously on the spot as to which side it was willing to work with.
That, it seems to me, makes it all the more reasonable to expect some indication beforehand of which way it would prefer to go. But it also makes it understandable that it would go to great lengths to avoid having to give such an indication, for fear of bringing its internal divisions to the surface. And while Victoria is the state currently in the spotlight, Liberals in the rest of the country will not be immune from the problem for long.
(I had hoped also to say something about the comparison with the Labor/Greens relationship, but this is already too long for a weekend post so there will have to be a part three, coming probably on Monday.)
The World is Not Enough 