Defection seldom ends well for Senate turncoats
Dorinda Cox’s shock decision to leave the Greens to join Labor is the latest in a string of upper house defections and departures, many of which didn’t work out too well.
Dorinda Cox’s shock decision to leave the Greens to join Labor is the latest in a string of upper house defections and departures over the past 12 years by the disenchanted, the disenfranchised and in some cases the downright disreputable members of our Senate.
In one rare case, a long political career followed. But most of the defectors – who include a few “accidental” members of parliament – flamed out in clashes of personalities and policy that rendered them unfit for the parties under whose banners they were originally elected.
The misfits’ own short-lived parties resemble an alphabet soup of failure – who longs for FACNP, GRPF or the GLT, let alone remembers them? But a few prevail and will have a place on the ballot papers for the 2028 election.
Of all the Senate defections since the fracturing of the two-party political dynamic took off in 2013, Cox’s shift from the Greens to Labor is remarkable in that it is the only one where a senator has left a minor party for one of the two majors.
Cox – the subject of bullying allegations from staffers who complained of a toxic workplace environment and high turnover – is the second of the Greens senators elected at the 2022 election, and the second Indigenous woman, to quit the party in just over two years.
Lidia Thorpe ended her association with the Greens barely seven months into her current six-year term over disagreement with the party’s support for an Indigenous voice and announced her desire to pursue black sovereignty – a goal the Victorian firebrand senator said she couldn’t achieve from within the Greens.
For Anthony Albanese, the issue of senators switching allegiances has been a curse and a blessing – and his comments have switched accordingly.
When Fatima Payman quit Labor last year after crossing the floor to join the Greens and other crossbenchers supporting a motion in favour of Palestinian statehood, the Prime Minister made it very clear that the young devout Muslim’s seat in parliament belonged to Labor.
“Fatima Payman received around about 1600 votes in the WA election; the ALP box above the line received 511,000 votes,” Albanese said at the time.
“It’s very clear that Fatima Payman is in the Senate because people in WA wanted to elect a Labor government and that’s why they put it number one in the box above the line.”
He didn’t view Cox’s defection through the same prism, despite the former Greens senator being elected from the same state and at the same election as Payman.
“She wants to be part of a team that is delivering progress for this country by being part of a government that can make decisions to make a difference,” Albanese trumpeted on Monday.
No mention was made this time of the West Australians who voted on May 19, 2022, for a Greens senator to be elected. Cox was elected fifth out of six and Payman last.
Quizzed on Tuesday about the contradictory positions, Albanese argued the two cases were different because they occurred either side of an election.
“Fatima Payman, of course, could have put herself before the people of Western Australia on May 3rd, but she chose not to,” he said. “Dorinda Cox’s term is up at the end of this term, and she will have to, if she is preselected through ALP processes, put herself forward for election.”
Payman said Albanese was “hypocritical” in calling for her resignation following her defection, but warmly welcoming Cox.
“Some people may call the Prime Minister hypocritical. And, let’s call a spade a spade,” she said on ABC.
“I’m just glad that Senator Cox hasn’t had to deal with all the name-calling and the smear campaign that I had to deal with.”
One Nation ructions
Without doubt, the most extraordinarily volatile and short-lived political career of any recent senator was that of Fraser Anning.
Third place on One Nation’s Queensland Senate ticket behind Pauline Hanson and Malcolm Roberts was never likely to come close to winning a seat in parliament at the 2016 double-dissolution election. Hanson romped it in, the third senator elected, and Roberts beat Labor’s Chris Ketter to the 12th and final seat from the Sunshine State.
However, his stay in parliament was short-lived. In 2017, he was caught up in the dual citizenship debacle that rocked all sides of politics and when the High Court ruled he was a dual British and Australian citizen at the top of his nomination, disqualifying him from parliament, his seat in parliament was handed to the next name on the 2016 election ticket: Anning.
The far-right, anti-abortion, anti-Muslim senator didn’t even last a week as a One Nation senator. Six days after the High Court ruling and three days after he was sworn in as a senator, Anning had an irreconcilable break-up with Hanson. She declared he had “abandoned” the party; he said she had made his position “untenable” because of conditions she imposed on him.
Anning officially remained a One Nation senator because neither he nor Hanson made any official representation to the Senate president about their break-up until January when Anning made it official that he would sit as an independent.
But the Anning saga didn’t end there. Less than five months later, he joined north Queensland MP Bob Katter’s party to become KAP’s first member of the upper house – but again it was a short-lived stay. An attempt to make a legislative distinction between European and non-European migration was the final straw for Katter, who alleged it was bigoted and discriminatory against Sikhs and Pacific islanders.
Clearly unable to fit in with others, Anning set up his own party – Fraser Anning’s Conservative National Party – and recontested his seat at the 2019 election. But his fledgling party fell well short of success, claiming just 1 per cent of the Senate vote in Queensland.
Strife of Brian
Another of Hanson’s 2016 success stories, Brian Burston, also didn’t last long in One Nation. Elected as a senator for NSW, Burston was two years into his term when he announced his support for the Turnbull government’s proposed company tax cuts – in contravention of One Nation policy. A month later he was out the door, announcing he would sit as an independent – but before the day was out, Clive Palmer had signed Burston up as a United Australia Party senator.
Unfortunately for Burston, UAP didn’t get anywhere close to a quota – not that One Nation did either, although Burston’s former party won three times as many Senate votes as his new party did.
PUP in doghouse
Palmer has had his own problems with newly elected MPs quitting his parties, most notably soon after his own dramatic arrival in federal parliament in 2013. Not only did Palmer win the lower-house seat of Fairfax but three of his Palmer United Party team – Jacqui Lambie, Glenn Lazarus and Dio Wang – were also elected to the Senate. Two of them didn’t last a year in Palmer yellow.
Lambie was gone five months after her term started after a bitter row with Palmer. She claimed she couldn’t toe the PUP line and do what was best for state of Tasmania; he called her a “drama queen” and a “liar” and even suggested she had infiltrated his party to sabotage it.
Lambie’s departure was a bitter political blow for Palmer, stripping him of the crucial “balance of power” position in the Senate he had won earlier that year.
Lazarus, like Palmer a Queenslander, lasted only four months longer than Lambie. In his announcement that he was quitting PUP, the former rugby league prop forward pointedly said “I have a different view of teamwork”. His departure also came a day after PUP sacked Lazarus’s wife Tess for “failing to comply with the terms of her employment”.
Liberals’ three strikes
Defections have proved a recent scourge for the major parties, particularly the Liberals, whose biggest loss was South Australian conservative senator Cory Bernardi after years of controversy.
Tony Abbott elevated Bernardi to his frontbench soon after replacing Malcolm Turnbull as Liberal leader and later as deputy manager of opposition business in the upper house. But the senator’s card was marked after he made inflammatory comments linking same-sex marriage to legalised polygamy and bestiality. After the Abbott Coalition won power in 2013, Bernardi sparked further unrest with public remarks about abortion.
On February 7, 2017, Bernardi revealed he was quitting the Liberals to set up the Australian Conservatives party. However, a lack of wider success at the 2019 election prompted Bernardi to dissolve the party a month after the poll and sit as an independent. The following January he resigned from parliament.
Like Bernardi, Gerard Rennick was another Liberal senator who fell out with the party.
A vocal critic of Coalition policies, particularly Covid-19 measures around restrictions and vaccines, Rennick lost preselection for the LNP ticket in Queensland for the 2025 election and left to set up his own party, Gerard Rennick People First.
Despite forming a joint upper-house ticket with KAP, GRPF finished well short of a Senate quota and Rennick will leave parliament on June 30.
A third Liberal to move to the crossbench who will also leave parliament this month is David Van. The Victorian senator was expelled from the partyroom amid allegations of sexual abuse levelled at him by former Liberal senator Amanda Stoker and Lidia Thorpe. Although Van denied the allegations, then Liberal leader Peter Dutton expelled him.
Labor’s lone loss
Labor’s only senator to jump ship in recent times was Payman, who had been preselected for the third spot on Labor’s WA Senate ticket in 2022, which wasn’t expected to win a seat. But the ALP’s strong showing in the West, which delivered Albanese enough lower-house seats to win majority power, also elevated the young devout Muslim to parliament.
In the nine months after the Hamas October 7 terror attacks on Israel, Payman’s strong position on Palestine – she declared Israel guilty of genocide in Gaza and used the inflammatory anti-Israel phrase “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” – reached a tipping point when she crossed the floor to vote with crossbenchers on a motion supporting Palestinian statehood. Payman was duly suspended from the partyroom and within a week had quit Labor.
Payman has since set up her own party, Australia’s Voice. She will not face re-election until 2028.
Lambie fights on
The same applies to Tammy Tyrrell, who broke away from Lambie’s JLN in March last year to sit as an independent after concerns were raised over how she represented the party, and Thorpe.
Lambie, who set up JLN six months after leaving PUP, is the one defector who remains a crossbench force. She was ruled ineligible to sit in parliament in 2017 because of dual UK-Australian citizenship but returned at the 2019 election and was narrowly re-elected last month.
Add your comment to this story
Watchdog crackdown on ‘unscrupulous’ childcare centres
Mandatory reporting of physical or sexual abuse allegations within 24 hours, a ban on vaping and new policies around filming children will form part of the new rules.
RBA to reveal board members’ rates voting
The Reserve Bank will now publish the unattributed votes of its board members, but the move has divided economists and former central bankers.
To join the conversation, please log in. Don't have an account? Register
Join the conversation, you are commenting as Logout