Let horse trade begin
THE Coalition must find a way to work with a disparate Senate.
YESTERDAY, the new senators for the 44th parliament were sworn in — the most party-diverse collection of personnel since proportional representation was introduced into Senate elections in 1949.
The number of Coalition and Labor Party senators fell from the previous parliament, with Labor’s numbers dipping to a historical low.
For the Coalition, the arithmetic is simple: if the Labor opposition and the Greens oppose legislation, Tony Abbott and his team need the support of six of the eight crossbenchers to achieve their policy goals. The complexity comes in the negotiation process.
Under those circumstances the three Palmer United Party senators can block Coalition legislation, assuming these senators vote together. They have an insurance policy in Motoring Enthusiast Party senator Ricky Muir, who has signed a (non-binding) memorandum of understanding with Clive Palmer, bringing the PUP collective in the Senate to four.
But Muir already signalled his willingness to consider defying PUP’s stated voting intentions when this newspaper reported his preparedness to consider blocking the carbon tax repeal if government benefits for components manufacturers doing it tough weren’t also introduced.
In the end the prospect of a coalition of the willing on this issue between Muir, Nick Xenophon and Democratic Labor Party senator John Madigan never materialised, but the suggestion is a sign Muir may not be the soft touch for Palmer or anyone else (he has now had his first meeting with the Prime Minister) first thought.
PUP Tasmanian senator Jacqui Lambie has made it clear she will vote in Tasmania’s interests, not according to party lines. And her opinion of Abbott has been anything but polite, describing the PM as a “political psychopath” on more than one occasion. In short, it may be difficult for Palmer to hold his team together, especially given he resides in the lower house, not the Senate, where the action will be.
Palmer has rented office space outside the parliamentary building, presumably in a bid to give his team a central meeting point.
A loose alliance has formed on economic issues between Liberal Democrats senator David Leyonhjelm and South Australian Family First senator Bob Day. The pair differ on numerous social issues, but their support for lower taxes and smaller government is likely to see them oppose most revenue measures the Abbott government seeks to legislate.
This is a difficult starting point for a government that identifies fixing the budget as a core goal.
Xenophon and Madigan hold a number of similar views on issues of government intervention, arguably offsetting the views of Leyonhjelm and Day, but the government, via recent decisions concerning SPC and car manufacturing, appears to be moving in a different ideological direction.
One development in recent weeks, as we have started to hear more publicly from the incoming crossbench senators, has been the willingness of some new senators to “horse trade”. Even a rigid ideological player such as Leyonhjelm last week suggested he might vote for the Coalition’s paid parental leave scheme if tax and regulatory adjustments to childcare were also on the agenda. On Sunday, Coalition Senate leader Eric Abetz expressed interest in the policy idea, albeit cautiously noting it isn’t his portfolio to comment on.
Despite the complexity of dealing with the new diverse Senate, the Coalition must surely regard doing so as a lesser of evils.
The alternative before July 1 saw the Greens and Labor able to dictate terms, blocking all but appropriation bills if and when they chose to.
“At least now we can work with the new Senate”, one Coalition senator told The Australian. This echoes the words of both the Prime Minister and Abetz, the latter referring to the new Senate as “all God’s children”. That said, late last week Abbott sought to assert authority in the wake of conciliatory rhetoric by suggesting the crossbenchers needed to recognise the government’s mandate.
The first items on the new Senate’s agenda this week are the bills to repeal the carbon tax. In between Palmer’s bizarre spectacle of announcing his support for an emissions trading scheme (standing beside former US vice-president Al Gore) with a starting price of zero, he declared his senators would support the repeal, with conditions. Environment Minister Greg Hunt told Australian Agenda on Sky he was confident those conditions could be met and the tax would be scrapped this week.
Further legislation in other policy areas may not pass the Senate so easily, and one suspects that as time passes and the new senators settle into their roles, they will grow more alive to the concept of horse trading. Another factor Abbott needs to be mindful of is bleeding support from his own ranks on some policy issues. For example the PPL. The irony of this policy goal could be that it only successfully transitions into law because of the Greens’ backing.
For all the condemnation of the construct of the new Senate, the representative credentials of many minor party senators is electorally quite strong. Most Greens secured more than 10 per cent of the primary vote in their states, with a number winning more than the Senate quota of 14.29 per cent before preferences. Equally, PUP senators all won north of 6 per cent of the vote, a figure that historically saw Australian Democrats elected to the balance of power. In the case of Xenophon, he won a higher share of the vote in South Australia than the Labor Party.
Only Muir stands out as genuinely “unrepresentative swill”, to borrow Paul Keating’s turn of phrase when expressing his frustration at dealing with the West Australian Greens senators in the early 1990s. Muir won just 0.5 per cent of the vote in Victoria, catapulting to victory on the back of complex preference flows orchestrated by “preference whisperer” Glenn Durey, who is now on his electorate staff.
Debates about government mandates versus the check-and-balance rights of the Senate are as old as Federation. While the Senate was initially conceived as a states’ house by the founding fathers, the partisan nature of parliamentary politics soon eroded that principle.
The check-and-balance role of reviewing legislation was strengthened through the 1970s with the enhancement of the powerful Senate committee system, after which it was further impacted by the rise and rise of minor parties.
Fast forward to today, and we enter a period of important Senate considerations in the wake of the Gillard government’s term in minority power. During the 43rd parliament, the role of the Senate was diminished because the horse-trading of government went on in the lower house. For legislation to pass the House of Representatives, it needed the support of a crossbench that included Greens deputy Adam Bandt. As a consequence, the deals had already been done by the time bills reached the Senate, and the Greens’ balance of power in the Senate invariably complied with the decisions already made in the lower house.
The return to the difficult role of government seeking crossbench support in the Senate is therefore nothing new; it was just on hold during the last parliament.
The Labor opposition — and the Greens — have signalled their intent to largely obstruct in the Senate, dealing themselves out of the process the remaining crossbenchers now find themselves in.
It remains to be seen what the impact of such positioning will be on the political players. Abbott has no choice but to deal with Palmer, but in doing so does he legitimise a dangerous force on his right flank? That might risk the Coalition’s long-term dominant position in the Senate in the name of short-term policy imperatives. Does it risk diminishing the government?
Where once Abbott mocked Palmer and his team, he is now being forced into regular meetings, not unlike those Gillard engaged in with former Greens leader Bob Brown. The Coalition in opposition effectively tied Labor to the hip of the Greens, reducing Labor’s capacity to appeal to mainstream voters. Of course such tied approaches continue in many Senate voting patterns now.
Will Palmer’s profile see voters turned off his game-playing with Australia’s political system? Or will it add to his cachet as an anti-politician politician, elevating his standing as a portent of voter dealignment from the major parties?
These are long-term questions, but in the short term the only question the government wants answered is whether it will secure the passage of enough of its budget to avoid appearing impotent. If it can’t, then the long-mooted threat of a double-dissolution election may need to be enforced, not simply to pass bills into law but to stave off the risk of the Coalition seeming weak.
The difficulty with the threat of a double-dissolution election is contained in recent polling for the government. Abbott’s personal ratings are poor, the Coalition’s primary vote is too low and its two-party-preferred vote, according to last week’s Newspoll, slipped to 45 per cent. It took John Howard’s government eight years to register its first TPP vote of 45 per cent. Team Abbott did it in eight months — the first poll after the May budget — doing so again last week.
Further, a double-dissolution election reduces the quota for winning Senate positions in each state to 7.69 per cent, ensuring an even more rag-tag representation in the aftermath of such an election than before it.
The threat of a double-dissolution election works only when a government can be confident it will win, an ever-diminishing view within Coalition ranks in the short term. Time is now Abbott’s friend and his enemy. The next election isn’t due for more than two years; a good thing for Abbott, given the current polls. But without the passage of meaningful legislation during that time, Team Abbott may slowly ebb towards a re-election, by which time it won’t be able to reflect on an agenda implemented to its satisfaction.
The new Senate will be crucial to what happens next.
Peter van Onselen is a professor at the University of Western Australia. His PhD was on the Australian Senate.
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