Election 2016: Voters won’t tolerate minority government again

PARTY GAMES: Bill Shorten says the Greens are “dreaming” if they think they can form a coalition with Labor. Here’s why there can be only one true king of the castle.

MAKING predictions about election outcomes is fraught at any time, so doing it just a week into a campaign that runs for 55 days has to be particularly crazy brave.

So please don’t laugh too hard if this turns out to be wide of the mark. One thing we aren’t going to see after July 2 is another hung parliament.

When the Greens’ sole Lower House member Adam Bandt threw this canard on to the election agenda a week ago during Australia’s most disconnected TV show, Q&A, he should have been ignored.

This didn’t happen, mainly because we have an eight-week campaign and the media space needs to be filled again and again.

The Greens want this idea out there because it gives them oxygen in a campaign when they find relevance hard to find — and they like stirring things up for Labor.

Labor’s Bill Shorten was near the target when he said the Greens were “dreaming” if they thought there was a chance of his party going into an alliance with anyone after the poll.

Here’s why. The Australian public aren’t going to allow an election outcome that doesn’t go clearly one way or another.

The memory of the 2010-13 Parliament — which saw plenty of unpredictability and some policy gyrations that ran counter to popular sentiment — is too fresh.

Voters can sense where the mood is going, and if they sensed there was a chance of anything but a clear result they would move one way or another in that final week.

No one can offer any science to back this thesis, but we’ll see whether it holds in early July.

No state minority government in recent times — in New South Wales, South Australia or Queensland — was followed by another close result where there was no clear winner.

The closest was in Queensland, where the 1998 result was almost repeated last year, but that had the complicating factor of the massive swing against the LNP.

See, anything can be explained away.

Originally published as Election 2016: Voters won’t tolerate minority government again