Next election shaping up to be close contest

With a federal election only months away, a hung parliament may well be in the offing.

Anthony Albanese’s challenge until polling day is to turn soft support into a hardened desire to change governments. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Martin Ollman

With a federal election only months away, a hung parliament may well be in the offing. There are 151 seats in the House of Representatives, and 76 is the bare minimum needed to form majority government. If the government of the day wants a Speaker from within its own ranks it needs 77 seats to guarantee winning votes on the floor of the parliament.

The Coalition won 77 seats at the 2019 federal election compared with Labor’s 68, but the defection of Craig Kelly (member for Hughes in NSW) from the Liberal Party to the United Australia Party and redistributions in Victoria and Western Australia have reduced the number of seats the Morrison government effectively holds to 75 going into this election.

Although the Coalition is expected to win back Hughes, the abolished seat of Stirling in WA has been replaced with a new seat in Victoria (Hawke) that is notion­ally Labor-held, on an anticipated margin of more than 10 per cent.

So we can say Scott Morrison will go into the election next year with 76 seats and Anthony Albanese with 69 seats. Labor must win seven (or ideally eight) seats to govern in its own right. Morrison can’t lose seats without winning others off Labor, otherwise he’ll be reliant on the crossbench.

The six crossbench seats comprise what traditionally would be regarded as four conservative seats and two Labor. But it would be a brave conservative leader to assume they’d get the support of the four crossbenchers holding traditional right-of-centre seats.

Remember, Tony Windsor and Rob Oakeshott were rural independents who held traditionally safe Nationals seats yet sided with Julia Gillard, allowing her to form a minority Labor government from 2010 to 2013.

With climate change action front and centre, Zali Steggall certainly is no guaranteed supporter of a minority Coalition government. Neither is Helen Haines, who holds the regional seat of Indi. She has been campaigning for an federal corruption watchdog for years and no doubt is unimpressed by the Prime Minister’s comments this week downplaying the value of a watchdog that has teeth.

The likeliest outcome from a hung parliament is that the major party with more seats gets the tentative support of enough crossbenchers to form minority government, but perhaps only if they are prepared to bend to policy positions close to the hearts of those with the deciding votes.

Remembering how important climate change may be in negotiations with crossbenchers, Mor­ris­on will be playing a different game at the election to appeal to mining communities in WA and Queensland. Can he pivot thereafter? Probably not. Can he embrace climate change action more warmly without losing support in mining communities? Probably not.

Equally, however, the Opposition Leader needs to think long and hard about how he positions federal Labor when seeking to secure votes in these mining states.

Bill Shorten found out the hard way in 2019 that telling north Queensland voters one thing and Victorian electors something quite different can leave you winning over neither community.

Morrison’s biggest difficulty at the election will be holding on to the large swath of seats he has in WA and Queensland. It is a lopsided pendulum from 2019, revealing a divided country, and that was before the numerous divisions that have opened up courtesy of the pandemic.

To maintain the status quo, the Coalition must win 33 of the 48 seats on offer in WA and Queensland, which doesn’t leave much room for failure.

When you consider the state election victories Labor has enjoyed in Queensland and WA since the 2019 federal election, as well as the closed borders and retirements on the conservative side, Morrison has his work cut out maintaining the dominance conservatives have enjoyed in Queensland since 2013 and since the days of John Howard in WA.

WA particularly interests me at the forthcoming election. On the night, results in WA will start to come in three hours after booths close in NSW, Victoria and Tasmania. That is a potentially long wait in a close electoral environment. The most marginal Liberal-held seat in WA is Swan and the sitting MP, Steve Irons, is retiring. The next most marginal seat is Pearce, and whether Christian Porter runs or is replaced, either way Labor must have high hopes of winning it. Given that the Liberals managed to win only two seats in the 59-seat WA Legislative Assembly last March, we know voters are prepared to turn their collective backs on the Liberals if the circumstances present themselves.

The hope among conservative strategists until recently had been that NSW would be a terrain where they would pick up seats to offset loses elsewhere, given that the Coalition holds less than half the seats in NSW (22 of 47) and 10 Labor seats in the Prime Minister’s home state are classified as marginal.

But Gladys Berejiklian’s departure as premier, the extended lockdowns in the state and the discriminatory treatment of those living across western Sydney may have blown that strategy apart. It will be a seat-by-seat dogfight, which is why a switch into federal politics by someone such as Andrew Constance (contesting Gilmore) is the sort of boost Liberals will be looking for in other key seats they hope to pick up.

The lost halo over Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews gives Liberals hope of doing better than expected in the south, but that’s more about retaining the four marginal Liberal-held seats in Victoria rather than seriously targeting either of the two Labor-held marginals.

The old adage is that governments win close elections, and right now that must be one of the only comforting thoughts for Coalition strategists. As difficult as it is to find the seats Morrison needs to secure a fourth Coalition term in power and again govern in his own right, a Labor landslide of the sorts we saw the last two times Labor won its way back into power, in 1983 and 2007, doesn’t appear to be on the cards. That said, if the polling stays where it currently is (Labor 53 per cent, the Coalition 47) that would result in a landslide.

But polling, even if it is accurate, is a snapshot in time a long way out from election day, and it is a carefree chance to kick the incumbent. Which explains why there is no sign of panic within the government, despite the plethora of problems it has trying to make the numbers add up to another majority government. Albanese’s challenge until polling day is to turn soft support into a hardened desire to change governments.

Peter van Onselen is political editor at the Ten Network and a professor of politics and public policy at the University of Western Australia and Griffith University.