Australia is now a one-party state.
What price democracy?
Governments need functioning oppositions to keep them in check. Australia no longer has one of those.
It was the most famous victory of our time. Anthony
Albanese, a man who has been “under-estimated my entire life”, led the Labor
Party into a landslide of a scale that it has seen only once before in its
133-year history. And, for the first time since federation in 1901, there is
now no functioning opposition and no alternative government anywhere in sight.
There have been even bigger landslides before, but this one
is different. Labor now has 62.7% of the seats in the House of Representatives,
but in 1943 the Curtin wartime government got 65.3%. Conservative parties have
done even better: 66.1% in 1966; 69.4% in 1977; and 71.7% – a record still
unsurpassed – in 1975.
Even after losing to the biggest landslides of the past, the
defeated parties were able to reconstitute themselves. They remained mass
movements and, once their leaders and policies became electable again, they
were ready to govern again.
After the 1943 wipeout of the United Australia Party under
the veteran Billy Hughes, its former leader, Robert Menzies, was able to
reassemble the shattered pieces – including various breakaway groups – into a
new “broad church” Liberal Party. Just six years after the great defeat, the
conservatives returned to government and stayed there for 23 years.
Labor’s was kept in the wilderness for a generation only because its Catholic Right in Victoria and Queensland split from the party and formed a new force, the Democratic Labor Party, whose preferences always went to the Liberals.
The 1966 election was fought on the Vietnam War, which Labor opposed and the conservatives embraced. But the war quickly lost popularity, Labor’s principled stand was vindicated, and the path was ready for Whitlam’s brief but historic victory.For all but three of the 34 years between 1949 and 1983, the ALP was out of federal office. But for all its travails, it remained a mass movement with wide national support and many thousands of members. It was down, never out.The Liberals now have a lower share of seats than Labor had in 1949 or 1966, and almost as low as the 1975 Labor wipeout. Even more seriously, the Liberal Party is no longer a mass movement with a large and active membership. The catastrophic loss in 2025 was not because of a bad campaign or the wrong leader, though both of these made their situation worse and hastened the end. It was because the party had been moving inexorably to the right while the country had been moving to the left.
The Liberals were once distinguishable from their
Country/National coalition partners but they no longer are. The party is now
overwhelmingly populated by hard-right ideologues with no desire or capacity to
change.
There is no way back from here.
The problem for Australia is not the removal of the Liberal
Party from the political contest: they are no longer capable of understanding
the country or its people. The problem is that there is now only one party
capable of forming government. The Greens, out on the left of the spectrum,
cannot. Nor, by their very nature, can independents form the core of a
government.
Until a new grouping is formed, Australia will remain a
one-party state, with the affairs of the nation horse-traded between the
unattractive factional warlords of the Labor Party.
The electoral consequences of Mr
Howard
John Howard’s greatest contribution to the welfare of
Australia is that he set in train the process of making his own party
unelectable.
Howard often described himself, accurately, as “the most
conservative leader the Liberal Party has ever had”. When he came to power in
1996, he set about remaking the party in his own image.
Moderates were sidelined. Some left politics altogether and
were replaced by conservatives. Those who remained were required to abandon
their professed ideals in order to secure position and power. A favourite
tactic was to place potential factional opponents into portfolios which forced
them to become ever more right-wing: Philip Ruddock and Amanda Vanstone
surrendered any moderate credentials by pursuing, as immigration ministers, the
most racist and punitive approach to migration since the collapse of the White
Australia Policy.
When the cabinet papers were released in 2018, The
Guardian Australia reported:
“Australians witnessed unprecedented tactics: guards with
dogs removed the unionised workers from the docks; non-unionised labour wearing
balaclavas were bussed in and the MUA resorted to an untried tactic of taking
action in the federal court as it fought for its very survival.
“The union won in the courts, but the waterfront dispute
would prove to be a major shift in the balance of industrial relations, away
from union power and towards employers.”
Political strategies that demonise the outsider and target
an external threat can be extraordinarily successful in diverting attention
from a government’s real performance. Groups which appear different from the
majority, but who have no power to argue back, are ideal: Asians, Muslims, boat
people, dole ‘bludgers’, African gangs.
Two incidents in the lead-up to the 2001 election epitomise
the Howard government’s technique: the Tampa affair, and Children Overboard.
Howard, aware that he was breaching international law,
refused the Tampa permission to dock. Heavily armed SAS troops stormed he
vessel, lined the refugees up on the deck before being forcibly transferring
them to an Australian navy ship and taken to Nauru.
The incident, coming just a month before the 9/11 attacks in
New York, gave the government an immediate and substantial lift in the polls,
setting them on a path to win an election they had been likely to lose.
And they kept up the pressure, seizing the community’s fear
of terrorism and magnifying it into a potent weapon of fear and hatred of all
undocumented migrants, even the most innocent. It made Australia a nastier,
crueller place; but it won the election.
Then came Children Overboard. The Immigration Minister,
Philip Ruddock, claimed asylum seekers being rescued from a sinking boat had
thrown their children overboard to save themselves. The lie was repeated by
Reith and Howard even after they knew it was untrue. By the time the public
learned the truth, the election was over.
The themes established by Howard were continued under his
acolyte, Tony Abbott, who led the next Liberal government into power in 2013.
By now, the magic had ceased to work and Abbott’s hard-line economic and social
approach saw him dumped from the job by colleagues after only two years. The
Liberals limped on in office until 2022 but the party was already over.
Australia had changed. They hadn’t.
All through the time that John Howard, Tony Abbott, Malcolm Turnbull
and Scott Morrison sat in the Prime Minister’s chair, changes were happening in
Australian society that nobody in the Liberal Party seemed to notice. As they
moved further to the right, the country was going the other way.
It’s largely about demographics. Young people tend to be
more progressive than their elders, and that’s still the case. But each
generation is a bit more left-wing than the last, and younger generations are
now much more likely to retain their progressive ideas as they get older.
Benjamin Disraeli, among many others, said that “a man who
is not a Liberal at sixteen has no heart; a man who is not a Conservative at
sixty has no head.” If it was ever true, it is no longer.
The Australian Election Study provides the most
comprehensive evidence of the changing attitudes of voters. Simultaneously with
each federal election, researchers from the Australian National University
conduct extensive and revealing polls of voters. Like all polls, they are
subject to sampling error, particularly when the sample is broken down into
smaller groups. Nevertheless, the trends after more than three decades are
unmistakeable.
People over 65, who began voting long before Howard’s
ascendancy, have mostly maintained their allegiances, even as younger people
join their ranks. But all other age-groups have moved decisively to the left.
It’s particularly noticeable among 18-to-24 year olds (red solid line) and
55-to-65 year olds (black dotted line). The middle point of Australians’
political outlook is now left of centre.
In 1996, women tended still to be more conservative than
men, but that long-standing trend has now decisively reversed. (The apparent
return to the political centre by women in 2022, shown in this graph, looks
like a statistical blip.) But there is also evidence
that after a long plateau, the attitudes of Australian men, particularly young
men, have since 2022 become more closely aligned with those of women. Labor’s
landslide indicates that this is now being strongly reflected in votes.
In the new political climate, union-bashing is much less
effective. When the Howard government came to power in 1996, the community was
evenly split on whether unions, or big business, had too much power. Wave after
wave of union-busting legislation changed that perception: by the time Howard
lost the 2007 election, only 37% of voters thought the unions were too powerful
– but 70% thought big business was.
At the 2004 election, the Liberal-National coalition gained,
for the first time, majorities in the House of Representatives and the Senate.
Changes which once seemed impossible were now achievable, or so they thought.
Howard’s long-term passion was to swing industrial power away from employees
and towards business: a new system, WorkChoices, would achieve that by further
deregulating employment, mandating individual contracts over collective
bargaining, crippling or abandoning unfair dismissal laws, winding back the
award system and lowering minimum pay standards.
Australians are much less afraid than they were during
Howard’s ascendancy. Scare campaigns about terrorism helped keep the
conservative parties in power and wedged Labor powerfully. But despite a
temporary increase in fear levels after the Lindt Café siege in Sydney in 2014,
the trend has been sharply downwards, with women consistently less afraid than
men.
There are still enough votes in racism to keep Pauline
Hanson in the Senate, but nowhere near enough for any party to win government. For
every vote now gained by migrant-bashing, many more are likely to be lost.
But racism has a long and deeply-ingrained history in
Australia. It didn’t take long after European settlement for China to be cast
in the permanent role of threatening monster. Chinese miners on the goldfields
in the mid-19th century were vilified, subject to race riots and
expelled from the diggings and from the country. One of the first laws passed
by the newly federated parliament was the Immigration Restriction Act of 1901,
better known as the White Australia Policy.
No foreign country, including China, is capable of landing
and maintaining a hostile force on the Australian mainland. And what would they
gain from trying? Without access to Australian raw materials, growth as
spectacular as that of the past four decades would not have been possible. They
need us and we need them.
The old fear of China remains and is easily awakened, as
Malcolm Turnbull did in 2017 (having nearly lost the previous year’s election) when
he proclaimed that Australia was “standing up” to China. In this, he was
assisted by Xi Jinping’s asinine wolf warrior diplomacy and bullying in its
offshore waters. But bad behaviour is typical of big powers and China’s is
still nowhere near as egregious as that of the United States.
There was no good reason, then, why the proportion of people
thinking China was a military threat should rise suddenly from 46% in 2017 to
75% by 2022. There was just one bad reason, and that was Malcolm Turnbull’s
beating his war-drum
in December 2017 and the subsequent bellicosity of Peter Dutton and his (now
disgraced) department head, Mike Pezzullo.
Scott Morrison won the 2019 election against an unelectable
Labor offering, but that had nothing obvious to do with China. Unless there’s
an actual war on, there are few votes in foreign policy.
Only since the change of government, and the restoration of
more prudent relations, has the fear begun to ebb. A great deal of damage was
done, not only to agricultural exporters, by this episode.
But it did not accomplish the goal of winning elections or
of making Turnbull look like a strong and capable leader. Eight months after
his foray into dingo-warriorism, he was tipped out of office in a palace revolt.
Climate change is the greatest challenge facing humanity,
but the conservative parties prefer to ignore it. The Lowy Institute poll
reveals that serious climate action is now being demanded by a majority in all
age groups, most dramatically among people under 30, who will have to live with
a new and much less amenable world.
Moderates won’t save the Libs
The notion that returning moderates to the Liberal Party
will revive its fortunes is a hallucination. They cannot.
Even if the dominant right-wingers were suddenly to relent,
and enough moderates could be found, and enough seats could be found for them,
it would make little difference. The problems go much deeper.
The difference between the party’s moderate and conservative
wings is exclusively about social policy. On economic and fiscal policy, they
are as one. They all subscribe passionately to an ideology that most
Australians now reject: small government, fiscal austerity, free markets,
deregulation, privatisation, tax cuts and trickle-down economics. That liberal
(or neoliberal) ideology has led them first to oppose and then to degrade Medicare
and the PBS, slash university funding, increase student debt, preferentially
fund private over public schools, oppose competition laws, sideline trade
unions and give tax breaks to business.
Over at least the past two decades, the National Party’s
influence in the coalition has grown and is now at a historical high-point.
Although the proportion of all parliamentary seats (for both houses) held by
the Nationals has fallen since its heyday in the 1970s, the decline has been
much less than its has been for the Liberals. Calculations based on the new election results indicate that in the joint party room, where
the most significant decisions are made, the two parties are more equal than ever before: probably about 17% versus 11% of all parliamentary seats. The accusation of the tail wagging
the dog is now inapposite: the dog is now little bigger than the tail. Liberal
numbers were artificially boosted by half the Senate not being up for
re-election. If not for that, the two parties would now be even more equal.
The Country Party (now the Nationals) began in 1920 to
represent small farmers: people occupying small blocks or “selections” which
were often insufficient to maintain an income above the bare subsistence level.
Wealthier graziers – “squatters” – supported the established conservative
parties.
From the beginning, the Country Party pursued policies of
agrarian socialism: price support schemes, subsidies and marketing pools. A
coalition with the Nationalist Party, a forerunner of the Liberals, quickly
followed and has persisted, with occasional hiccups, ever since. But as rural
areas lost population to the cities, and small farmers merged or were taken
over, the original constituency diminished.
“They’re not going to disappear,” ABC election analyst
Antony Green told The
Monthly in 2018. “The coalition agreement protects them in their
weakened state. But they’re not about to grow. They’re struggling to maintain a
separate identity to the Liberal Party. That’s their biggest problem.”
Today, the Nationals’ connection with farming is far weaker
than their connection with big mining companies. That, after all, is where the
money is. This explains the Nationals’ adherence to coal mining and their
hostility to climate action. In this, they have succeeded in coercing the
Liberals into a climate policy which is clearly unacceptable to a growing
majority of voters.
Both parties now struggle to maintain relevance in a
changing society. They now share the same conservative attitudes to social
issues and their economic position is terminally confused.
What now for democracy?
Between 1949 and 1983, the conservative coalition was in
government for all but three years. Labor is now unassailable in the way the
coalition never has been, and is likely to be in power for at least a
generation.
But the party’s support is less solid than it looks. All
parties need members at branch level to fight the ground game in each campaign
– door-knocking, putting up corflutes, raising money. Party bosses are cagey
about how many members they have, but acknowledge a severe
decline. The Liberals had 197,000 in the 1950s; in 2022 the party’s former
federal treasurer, Michael Yabsley, put
the figure at around 40,000 across all state and federal divisions.
“The inescapable truth is the Liberal Party is not a
mass-membership organisation,” he wrote. “It should be and likes to pretend it
is. Nowhere was that more apparent than during the recent [2022] six-week
campaign in many of the now-teal seats, where Liberal Party workers were
hopelessly outnumbered.”
The party is not saying how many have left since then but
numbers are said to be in
“freefall”.
In 2020, the ALP’s federal secretary, Paul Erickson, said
Labor had 60,085 members around the nation. Inevitably, many of those are
inactive. Those numbers are probably now increasing, but are still at
near-historical lows. In both parties, an unknown number are the result of
branch-stacking exercise. Some may not even know they have been signed up.
Membership of trade unions, the Labor Party’s bedrock, stood
at 51% of all employees in 1976. By 2024, that had plummeted to 12.5%.
The extent to which the parties have lost their connection
with the people of Australia is also seen in voter allegiances. In the past,
people knew well in advance of an election who they were going to vote for. Now
they don’t. It’s a major challenge for established parties and an opportunity
for newcomers.
Only about a third of all voters can now be said to be loyal
to a single party.
There is no comfort here for Labor. Over the past 30 years solid,
predictable voter support sank to even lower levels than for the conservatives.
Left-of-centre voters now have more choices.
Voters are less trusting of those with political power. Split-ticket
voting – supporting a different party in each house – is now twice as common as
it was in the 1980s and early 1990s.
And here’s why. The people who run the country, do not have
the confidence of the people. Across all
age groups, Australians no longer believe that government is of the people or
by the people – and certainly not for the people.
Supporters of all major parties have remarkably similar
views. They don’t trust anyone. Again, this is not good news for Labor, however
unassailable its grip on power now is.
All governments tire with time. This one will be no
different.
Governments run out of ideas and out of talent. These
dangers are magnified when they face no real risk of being tipped out of
office. When they have been in power for too long – typically, for longer than
10 or 12 years – governments become arrogant and hubristic, seeming to regard
themselves as the nation’s owners rather than the people. The arrogance of
which Labor is eminently capable was on display only six days after the
election when Richard Marles, Deputy Prime Minister, Defence Minister and
Factional Assassin-In-Chief, purged two of the most effective ministers from
the front bench to make room for less-talented factional buddies.
They were secured in power by a gerrymandered electoral
system which gave a rural vote five times as much value as a city vote. Their
Liberal coalition partners got more votes but always fewer seats. In 1972,
Bjelke-Petersen’s party gained only 20% of the popular vote but 32% of the
seats. Together, the coalition got 42% of the popular vote and 57% of seats.
There are no longer any gerrymanders in the Australian
electoral system, but the monopoly on power now enjoyed by the Labor Party produces
the same result. There are, though, more checks and balances than in Joh’s
Queensland: an independent High Court and, most significantly, an upper house
in which governments seldom have a majority, and which can defeat legislation
and disallow regulations. But the Senate cannot effectively initiate policies
or, usually, prevent government from doing (or not doing) whatever it wants;
and in a parliamentary system, the separation of powers between the executive
and the legislature is blurred, reducing accountability.
Without the emergence of a new political force, Australia
will not have a viable alternative government to Labor. It is unlikely to be
the Greens, whose brief sojourn in the chamber of government demonstrated their
fundamental unsuitability. The electorate has returned them to the role of
night-watchman in the Senate that was once entrusted to the Democrats.
It’s not the Teals either. Unless they can organise
themselves into a party with coherent policy and leadership, they will at best
be restricted to the fringes of actual power. They will have to explain in
detail, for the first time, what they stand for. As renegade Liberals, do they
still share an attraction for hardline neoliberal policies: small government,
low taxes, the sanctity of the market? What values, beyond climate change and
administrative integrity, do they share?
Any close collaboration between the Teals and the Greens is
unlikely to the point of absurdity. They are too different.
The prospects of a revival in competitive parliamentary
democracy are dim. An ideal result would be a new and vital centre-left party
with a clear vision for change and the capacity to inspire enthusiasm in the
electorate and passion among its followers. The reality is that no new party
capable of governing has emerged in at least eighty years.
Within a decade or so, this government will lose impetus and
purpose, as they all do. In the past, the remedy has been a period in
opposition, allowing renewal of personnel, revision of policies and the
rediscovery of a sense of purpose. No such period of opposition beckons now. So
the country faces a future characterised by diminishing trust in a government
that cannot be removed, a further alienation of the people from those in
charge, and a growing conviction that the democracy is not working.
Our last, best hope is that this, in turn, may eventually inspire a new political movement to restore the link between power and the people.