The Australian election

I haven’t had a chance yet to comment on the recent Australian election. It certainly was an abnormal election. The former Prime Minister Kevin Rudd was dumped by his own party and new Prime Minister Julia Gillard called a new election. Rudd was dumped because his party had fallen behind the opposition in the polls. But in my view that decline in the polls could have been avoided had different courses of action been taken by the Rudd government. Firstly, the Rudd government should not have abandoned its climate change legislation. I realize it could not be passed in the Senate because of opposition obstructionism, but the legislation was very popular with the Australian public and abandoning it made the government’s popularity decline sharply. Instead the government, in my view, should have continued to push for the legislation. They could even have considered a double dissolution on the issue. In Australia, a double dissolution can occur when government legislation is rejected multiple times by the Senate. In the case of double dissolution, the entire Senate is up for election rather than the normal Senate half-election in which only half the members are up for election. After a double dissolution election, the Australian constitution allows for a joint sitting of both the House of Representatives and the Senate wherein a combined majority vote of both chambers can pass legislation that previously triggered the double dissolution. Labor certainly could have won such an election, in my opinion, if they had campaigned on the climate change bill and forgone their deeply unpopular mining tax (which also almost cost Labor government). Following an election victory for Labor in this scenario, there almost certainly would have been a combined majority for Labor in the two houses that could have passed the climate change legislation.
What is very strange about the climate change legislation is that the Green Party of Australia actually opposed the Rudd government’s climate change legislation on the basis that it did not go far enough and as a result the Greens voted against it in the Senate. This made the margin of defeat for the climate change bill quite wide. I believe this approach of opposing legislation because it does not go far enough is counterproductive. The nature of politics is compromise. In my view if you support something, you should always support legislation that meets that goal even if the legislation does not go as far as you want. Otherwise change will never be effected because people will be stuck voting against everything on the basis of it not going far enough and so nothing would pass and no progress would be made. To me it seems like a no-brainer that the Green Party of Australia ought to have supported the climate change legislation even though they didn’t think it had enough in it because something is always better than nothing.
Following the election, the Australian Senate composition does not change until July, but when it does change, ironically the Labor government will be in a better position in the Senate then they are in the House, in stark contrast to the government’s previous term when they were in a much better position in the House than in the Senate. Come July, Labor and the Greens will have a combined majority in the Senate. Given that the Green Party has given its support to the Labor minority government in both the House (through newly elected Green MP Adam Bandt) and in the Senate, the government will have a de facto majority in the Senate next July. Meanwhile in the House, Labor just barely holds on, being supported by the Green Party and 3 Independents for a very slim majority. Reinforcing the strangeness of the election is the fact that the two key independents giving Labor the majority are former members of the right-wing Australian National Party (one of the members of Australia’s centre-right coalition parliamentary group). Looking at the two members in question, however, makes their support for Labor less surprising. Both appear to have drifted away from the Nationals quite a bit in terms of policy. For example, both based their decision to back Labor in large part on the Labor government’s comprehensive program to build broadband internet to rural areas of Australia, a program that the National Party strongly opposes. Given that the opposition Coalition opposes the Labor government’s broadband program it appears that Labor’s support of the program and the Coalition’s opposition to it helped save the Labor government from defeat. Labor did manage to win the “two party vote” wherein under the Australian election system, vote preferences are distributed to the two main parties. They fell one seat below the Coalition, however. But to complicate matters, one of the newly elected National MPs from Western Australia declared that although he is a National MP, he was not part of the Coalition, effectively making the two main parliamentary groups tied for seats and giving Labor an opportunity to deny that the Coalition had won more seats than them. In the end, Labor won the election and I congratulate them for a well-earned victory and wish them luck as they govern as best they possibly can.