On day three of Australia’s election campaign, former Queensland copper Peter Dutton, the tough guy opposition leader, had a question for the travelling press pack. “You’re all experts in this space … does anyone believe that Anthony Albanese can form a majority government after the election?”
Looking to his right, then slowly panning left, he waited for six seconds of silence to pass before offering an answer to his own question. “There’s not one political expert in the country that is predicting that Mr Albanese can form a majority government after the election,” Dutton declared.
The 54-year-old, embarking on his first campaign and hopeful of rendering Labor’s Albanese the first Australian prime minister in 94 years to be ousted after a single term in office, may well be right. Albanese, with a slender three-seat majority, doesn’t need to lose much to become a loser.
Most polling now suggests Australia will have a minority government after the May 3 election, more probably led by Albanese who will likely be reliant on a mix of crossbenchers – perhaps Greens and independent MPs – to govern. There’s a slimmer chance the election will leave Dutton with the better prospect of forming a minority government.
Dutton, of course, knows this. His aim was to sow among voters fears of instability and political chaos if they upend the traditional order of majority government, comfortably led by either a Labor or centre-right Liberal or Liberal-National coalition prime minister.
Big business has also joined the fearmongering, with the chief of the West Australian energy giant, Woodside, warning of the “nightmare” of a minority government beholden to the Greens and independent MPs.
New Zealand, accustomed to the horse trading that produces its own, colourfully functional, multi-party governments, might offer some reassurance to jittery Australians: the iron laws of arithmetic suggest they should themselves prepare for a new era of minority governments.
Voter support for minor political parties and independent MPs has continued to build ever since Labor’s Julia Gillard became the first Australian leader since 1940 to have to rely on independent MPs to survive after the unprecedentedly close 2010 election result.
Though that experience was short lived – Tony Abbott led the centre-right back into office three years later, trouncing Labor by 34 seats – the ground has since dramatically shifted. In 2022, voter support was roughly evenly split, three ways, between Labor, the Liberal-National conservative coalition and independents and minor parties.
The most obvious manifestation of the new wave of independent MPs usurping the old order are the Teal independents – the six professional women, so named for their mix of blue blood conservative heritage and Green sympathies, who have muscled to victory in seats in the wealthiest parts of Sydney, Melbourne and Perth.
The great question to be answered on May 3 is whether the trend toward independent MPs continues, and along with it, the burial of the once dominant two-party system.
Should that happen, the old guard – Labor and the coalition parties – must shoulder much of the blame. For it is they who have gone into this campaign with uniformly timid, tired policies that do so little to arrest an economic order that puts home ownership out of reach for many Australians, blunts the nation’s once egalitarian ideals and sanctions the shrinking of the natural world.
The rise of the independents has produced a Parliament that looks more like the people it serves. The answer to Peter Dutton’s question might well be a merciful no.
New Zealander Bernard Lagan is the Australian correspondent for the Times, London.
