Gillard said at the NPC last week that Australians want continuity in government. Well they didn’t vote that way. The 2010 election marked a clear break with the past. The refusal to give either party a clear mandate was not the result of a deadlock between competing interests in the electorate, but a fairly clear recognition of the unprecedented inability of either major party to represent any significant interests in society at all. It is on that basis that the independents have felt confident enough to humiliate them over the last two weeks.

However, the independents aren’t terribly representative of anything either, other than an anti-major party vote, and indeed they have gone out of their way to stress that they don’t necessarily even need to reflect their electorates. Windsor has been especially adamant on this, dismissing calls he has received to back either major parties as politically organised campaigns (which most of them probably are). Instead, the only advice he seems to be taking seriously is from those who come up to him and say they are happy to leave it all up to him.

It is this background that explains why the negotiations are all being carried out behind close doors, in seemingly sharp contradiction to their high aims. It was something brought close to parody by Gillard last week when she submitted a proposal for greater transparency in government in secret to the independents for their consideration, but not ours. At an interview yesterday, Oakeshott claimed that he would release the details of the proposals when the negotiations are over. Well why not now? Normally, a democratic election to decide a government is conducted in public. That it didn’t produce a clear result has left it up to a handful of independents and on the rare occasions this has happened before there have been back room deals. So it could be argued that this is not that new, nor especially anti-democratic compared to what we have seen in the past. But this time it is being so much trumpeted as all about making Parliament more accountable, that it raises questions about what ‘accountable’ actually means here. Accountable to whom?

One consequence of the hollowing out of the major parties over the last couple of decades is that some basic concepts of democracy have become confused. For example, one complaint often made of Howard, most amusingly by Fraser and Whitlam back in 2007, was the erosion of accountability of the head of the executive to Parliament and even Cabinet.

The tenets of the Westminster system didn’t come about as an idea of democracy in someone’s head. If they did, we would hardly have an unelected overseer of executive power. It came about through the evolution of competing interests. The Constitutional Monarchy represented the lack of resolution of those competing interests, in the case of Britain first between capital and land, then between capital and labour and, in Australia’s case, an unresolved nation state to top it off.

The erosion of ‘accountability’ in Cabinet and in the party is really about those interests no longer being pursued through those institutions. For example, a Coalition Cabinet would often be important as a means of the Nationals asserting rural interests, something that becomes less important as the Nationals effectively ceased to play that role. Ironically, Fraser and Whitlam attacked Howard just before this whole process was to go even further under Rudd, who not only bypassed the traditional party power bases and Cabinet, but formalised it with the Gang of Four.

However, the real irony is that the power faction brokers attempt to wrest back control has only accelerated this process even faster. It’s not only the party and Cabinet that is losing power. Now Labor is ready to bargain away powers that even the executive had, such as the timing of an election, a prerogative the power brokers used so skilfully two months ago. Anyone who lives in NSW would know that taking away the governing party’s right to decide the timing of election hardly guarantees better government. Indeed polls even suggest that this whole process might be turning off the electorate so much that they are even prepared to go through another election right now to sort it out. But such considerations don’t really figure. This is not about the electorate, but keeping the independents as long as possible in their current position to take advantage of the decaying two party system.

I’ve wielded power before. I come from a family that’s had a lot of power for about five generations in Australia. I’m used to power. Feel comfortable with it.

Bob Katter 24 August 2010

The Australian reports that the ongoing count has given the 2PP lead to the Coalition, denying Gillard a key reason for forming a government. As Mumble notes, this is a bit technical until the AEC returns to the count eight seats it took out, which is likely to favour Labor.

The Australian may be making a technical point, but then Gillard’s use of it to claim government was fairly technical anyway. In as much as neither side sought any sort of effective mandate during the campaign, neither side can claim a mandate for government no matter how the numbers stack up.

This why current calls for Parliamentary reform are so hollow. It might mean something if Parliament was restricting the representative will of the people in some way. Reforms like universal franchise of the late 19th century were meant to allow the democratic wishes of social groups such as organised labour and women to be expressed.

In fact, current reforms are almost about the opposite. They are about giving more power to independents who are unclear as to how they even represent their electorates let alone anyone else. The press has been trying to analyse the votes of the independents electorates to work out who they should support. But such analysis is pretty meaningless since the whole reason the independents won was presumably because enough voters didn’t want either party. Preferential voting might force a choice, but it doesn’t mean it is a positive one. Furthermore, the very fact that all three independents could just as feasibly support either side would suggest it’s not only the major parties that don’t stand for very much.

What the independents do stand for is undermining the major parties. The seven demands they put forward are essentially about being treated on a more equal footing with the major parties. Quite why independents voted by a few thousand Australians should be placed on a more equal footing with political parties voted for by millions of Australians is unclear. It used to be fashionable to decry the disproportionate influence rural parties would have on government policy, in some cases such as SA, WA and Queensland, backed up by outrageous gerrymanders. On the surface this seems if anything to be even worse.

In reality, however, such democratic points are fairly moot. In those days such rural gerrymanders would have been partly to protect against organised labour representation in metropolitan seats. There’s hardly much issue of that these days. Now it is more about rubbing the major parties’ faces in it, something only possible because neither party represents either organised labour, or those who have an interest in opposing it.

Any Parliamentary reform is likely to merely reflect the weakness of the major parties rather than the unleashing of wishes from a disenfranchised section of society. Indeed, if anything, it will try to legitimise the weakness of parliament and the parties that make it up. This is most clearly seen in the advancement of one of the independents’ demands that seems to get so much support these days in the name of democracy – funding reform.

One of the ways that the inability of parties to represent any real interests in society comes out is through their constant funding problems. This works two ways. On one hand, without a social base, political parties are increasingly reliant on costly media and advertising to mobilise support. On the other hand, traditional backers like business and unions are increasingly reluctant to back parties that no longer are necessary for their interests.

Given this political reality, it is hard for this blogger to understand why the state should step in with funds to fill the gap. It is traditional for those on the left to support this idea against interests who have greater access to financial resources. But this used to be less of a problem for those parties that could make up for the lack of finances by being able to directly appeal to the interests of a much greater majority of the electorate. In this blogger’s view, finance reform usually aims to conceal such democratic niceties. Ironically, while both parties are reluctant to make a full break with their traditional backers, there may come a time when they fully embrace such ‘reforms’ for their survival.

While the independents are unlikely to do much for us, they probably won’t do much for the major parties either. The independents cannot solve the problem of legitimacy that affects both the major parties and underpins the election result. It will likely try and make ‘workable’ a Parliament that has become unworkable because it has never before so poorly reflected what Australian society thinks or wants – the very antithesis of democracy.

Their power, of course, comes from the discrediting of the major parties from Saturday’s result and the problem of legitimacy it has left for the major parties and the traditional party system. While the weakness of both parties necessitate having to deal with the independents, it also makes it harder. For the Coalition, the independents’ very existence comes from the decomposition of the weakest part of the Coalition, the Nationals, and the junior Coalition partner is not only facing the humiliation of being shut out of the negotiations but having to watch its former members achieve more than they can as a party.

For the government, the sinking of the government’s agenda to the mess of the states has only aggravated the instability of Labor nationally as both the Queensland and NSW governments are forced to get involved to offset the blame from the national campaign, and so raise the question whether Federal Labor is any more likely to deliver stable government than they did before the election.

But not everyone it seems is aware of the context in which this ‘horse-trading’ (or more accurately ‘mugging’) is happening. It was fun watching Abbott decry ‘adversarial politics’, claiming that it has been especially bad in the last three years (surely he means since he took the leadership?) But commentators generally found Abbott’s intransigence over submitting costing to Treasury incomprehensible.

However, that would be to make the mistake that getting the independents on-side is the only game in town. As Australia’s last political party, the Liberals are acutely sensitive to the need to protect its credibility and ‘brand’ from the damage it received on Saturday and could yet receive from rolling over too eagerly to the independents’ attempt to undermine the two party system. Protecting the brand is, after all, the reason why Abbott is their leader.

Labor, however, doesn’t seem to have those concerns. Bruce Hawker, the strategic genius who helped mastermind Labor’s brilliant 2010 campaign, saw this as an ideal opportunity to recreate what happened at the state level in South Australia and Victoria when Rann and Bracks formed minority governments. These technocratic governments turned out be quite popular and led to Labor winning huge majorities in their own right.

Ironically at the federal level, the best practitioner of such cross party tactics was Rudd, who at his height not only appointed former Coalition leaders like Nelson and Fischer to plum international jobs but paid careful attention to these now powerful independents, as Crabb noted on Insiders last Sunday. Hawker himself made a speech to the Brisbane Institute in 2008, when Rudd was doing all of this, claiming a broader rethink of where government leadership should come from was necessary given the vanishing membership of the major parties, as he bluntly describes:

It has been calculated that the Labor Party had about 370,000 members in 1939. Estimates of its active national membership in 2005 were as low as 7,500. I understand that the story in the Liberal and National Parties is much the same. The only time that any Party’s numbers grow these days is when they are being fertilised by a branch stacker seeking pre-selection.

But this is not 2008. The technocratic moment that led to wall-to-wall Labor governments has passed. Rudd’s now gone and the state governments are in various stages of decay. Those minority state governments in SA and Victoria were created by a party that, while it did have to manage its legacy from earlier State Bank debacles, at least were facing Liberals that had just been discredited by an electoral loss.

There is an awfully big difference in creating such cross party governments from opposition than from a government that has itself just been discredited by losing an election. The abdication of power from such an alliance with independents determined to beat the major parties down, has the potential to damage Labor’s credibility even further.

The problem is, however, that Labor is in no place right now to make an objective assessment of these dangers. The consequences of Labor losing government for Gillard, and the power brokers who put there, are unthinkable and Labor will be desperate to cling to power and is likely to be blind to the problems it could bring.

Finally, it has to be said that there is also an unpleasant smell for the rest of us in how far Labor will go to hang on. This blogger’s ears pricked up last night when Hawker said that he wants to “look for ways of making that 76 feel more like 86”. Huh? If they can only muster 76, then 76 is what an elected Parliament will give them. How can they make a majority look bigger than it is? By drawing from outside the Parliament apparently. Just quite how by-passing parliament will make the government more accountable to it, as Hawker claims, is a subtlety that escapes this blogger. Let’s not get into a left-wing “I’m really concerned about the slippery slope etc. etc.”, but let’s also be frank, this ain’t no Festival of Democracy we’re watching.

When the government lost its majority it also lost its legitimacy.

Tony Abbott 22 August 2010

The people have spoken and it’s going to take a little while to determine exactly what they said.

Julia Gillard 21 August 2010

Or at least to put an interpretation on it that will suit.

So as it turned out, we didn’t have to wait very long at all for the electorate to deliver the real verdict on the political class. With neither side having sought a mandate, it seems fair enough that neither side was given it.

But first let’s deal with this nonsense about Australians’ sense of ‘fair go’ means that they don’t get rid of first term governments. Of course first term governments can lose in Australia, especially at the state level. It’s simply that governments usually come to power with an agenda that suits current conditions and that takes time to unwind. Alternatively, you could, like Howard in 1996, come to power with barely any agenda at all and lose the popular vote at the first election. The idea that while the electorate as a whole was ready to turf out Howard in one term but that it was the marginals who got all mushy and decided to give Howard another chance makes no sense. At least as opposed to, say, the inability of an exhausted, demoralised Labor to make a convincing case for government. This idea of Australians’ innate sense of a ‘fair go’ is just one of those bogus national characteristics that may make us feel good about ourselves but only serve to mystify things.

In this case Labor’s agenda didn’t last the three years. There never was a real one domestically and the international one didn’t last long, so Rudd would have had trouble no matter ever happened. Nevertheless he probably would have been able win in a one-to-one against Abbott for similar reasons as he did in the health debate – Rudd does negative better. All the faction power brokers did was to speed the decline and accentuate the problems, by thinking that they had a new agenda, that didn’t even last three months let alone three years, and did little than to legitimise Abbott.

But whether Rudd could have done better is just speculation. The basic electoral fact remains that in the last seventeen years, Labor has only once beaten the Coalition at an election – and that was by hiding behind Kevin07. The exhaustion of Labor’s program and the bankruptcy and discrediting of the traditional power brokers was why the party turned to Rudd in desperation in the first place – both externally in how they presented Labor to the voters and internally with the temporary over-riding of the power of the factions.

What we have seen over the last few months is that while Rudd’s solution was temporary, a return of the traditional power brokers was certainly no solution. The closeness of the election should not conceal that this was a disaster for Labor. Everything that wasn’t tied down was thrown overboard and the good ship ALP still sank. The latest excuse is that it was all going swimmingly until the leaks – as though sacking a Prime Minster didn’t already indicate something was wrong. The leaks against Gillard by those in the ALP were certainly damaging – just as were the leaks against Rudd by others in the ALP in the preceding months. But Labor couldn’t control what were pretty unexciting leaks because the campaign had nothing else going for it.

In effect what Labor did over the last few months was to confirm that it had no real case for holding power at the federal level. That is why the federal campaign began to more and more resemble a state campaign. As Shanahan rightly noted on the eve of the election, Labor’s federal polling was becoming intertwined with the state governments, which in NSW and Queensland were having a disastrous impact. Gillard’s identification with State Labor over the Parramatta rail link was widely seen as a major mistake, but it reflected that Labor federally had no distinctive agenda from NSW Labor anyway.

With Labor’s agenda exhausted, and admitted as much by the party itself, there was no reason for it to retain government – other than the other party who would have taken its place. That Labor managed to limit the 2PP swing to what looks to be 2% was more a sign of its superior negative campaigning that highlighted that the Coalition had nothing to offer either. But if Labor is prepared to be open about its bankruptcy, the Liberals are in a state of delusion that they don’t have the same problem.

The return of Howard and the cheering of the fall of Bennelong are sure signs that we are not in the reality of 2010, but in a parallel universe trying to relive and rewrite what happened in 2007. The Liberals are doing double-think at the moment. On one hand they have thrown overboard all the values that Abbott was supposed to be about restoring, in order to be electorally viable. On the other hand you just know they think they haven’t really overthrown all those values and that somehow Abbott being ‘genuine’ and a conviction politician was one reason why he did so well. Leaving aside that even at the end Abbott’s personal polling was mediocre at best, and leaving aside all the help that Labor has given to make him look credible, what we have is a conviction politician with little that he is allowed to be conviction about. Hence all the mad, probably counter-productive, action man running around in the last few hours of the campaign as Abbott desperately tried to look busy to fill a vacuum.

Abbott’s comment that when a party loses its majority it loses its legitimacy is truer than he realises. Since presumably if a party that loses its majority doesn’t have any legitimacy, neither does the party that fails to gain it. For all the talk of momentum behind Abbott, there is nothing in what he has campaigned on that would give him a mandate even if he does manage to scramble together a majority with the independents.

While neither party has escaped the democratic consequences of not offering a mandate, what we have at the Parliamentary level is a vacuum. It is likely that whichever party forms government with the independents, they will use those independents as a cover for not being able to implement a program that they never had in the first place.

There has been a lot of nonsense that having government rely on independents will be good for democracy and a reform of Question Time etc. etc. Actually, in the proper sense of democracy as representing the will of the people, it is a step backwards. The whole programme of the two major parties which had reflected something in Australian society for much of the last century has now imploded and will hide behind the personal agendas of three independents who represent little more from their electorate than the dissatisfaction with the traditional political system that they are now being called on to replace.

Labor has run the better negative campaign and at a wild guess will probably win on Saturday. The Coalition’s main failing was its inability to take full advantage of Labor’s calamitous second week, probably one of the worst campaign moments of any Australian government seeking re-election. They especially struggled to deal properly with the ‘Rudd factor’. The best Abbott could do was a faux sympathy for Labor’s ‘brutal’ dumping of a PM, which was unconvincing and contradictory (wouldn’t voting out Australia’s likeable first female PM after only a few weeks also be ‘brutal’?)

The feeble recycling of the ‘Lemon’ ads in response to the leaks summed up the problem of the Coalition’s tactics. Coalition ads just talked about ‘more of the same’ from Gillard, so missing what was exposed by the unprecedented dumping of a first term Prime Minister. If the Coalition had made the link clear between what they saw as the chaos of government projects like the BER and the pink batts program and the chaos at the top that led to Rudd’s dumping, then the result might have been even worse, and more enduring, than the slump in polls Labor recorded at the time.

The Coalition’s slowness to respond was repeated later with the cack handed response to the government painting of Abbott as an economic risk. Abbott was caught out on the call for a debate and not taking an upfront role in the release of Coalition costings. After allowing Labor to escape its dreadful week, lousy Coalition tactics allowed Labor to successfully turn it back to the economy and stabilise their own side.

Coalition slowness in this campaign was a result of two related factors. First they were unprepared for a winnable election. The collapse of Australia’s most popular political leadership for decades surprised a Coalition that had been more demoralised and prepared for a defeat than at any time since the Liberal party was formed. This election was supposed to have been more about saving the brand than winning government. Economic credibility, usually a code for a government credibility, was put to one side for the sake of a deluded attempt to try and pretend that conservative ‘values’ had some real popular basis in society. This was neatly summed up by Abbott’s appointment of ‘cut-through’ Barnaby to the usually sensitive Finance role. His replacement by Robb was a belated recognition that with a floundering government, such indulgence was exactly that.

The one who put his finger on it was Fraser. When Mal does his bleeding heart routine, his comments are usually worth a miss. But Fraser here was speaking more as the old fashioned conservative he always was and, noting that the Coalition was ‘not ready’ for government, highlighted that they had not much reason to return to power that was based on social reality.

In fact, it suggested a second reason why the Coalition struggled to respond to what was happening in the government. With no real social basis to Abbott’s ‘values’ project outside of core Coalition voters, he instead had to base it on opposing the government’s agenda. To do this, he had to pretend the government had one. So a government, for which everything was up for review, that even on climate change was prepared to be no more radical than Howard, was meant to stand for a whole series of things they did not; taxing industry to save the environment, big spending, soft on asylum seekers, etc.

This argument seemed to be credible, especially when the basis for the government’s support, mostly the international agenda, faded away. Suddenly a Prime Minster that had no trouble signing Kyoto accords, talking about great moral challenges, apologising to indigenous people, downplaying and even burying incidents like asylum seekers setting fire to boats, and remaining hugely popular, now was supposed to be in trouble because he was too tough on climate change, too soft on boats etc. etc.

If this didn’t make much sense, at least the Labor faction leaders believed it. This was despite Rudd’s caving in to pressure on the ETS, the ‘Big Australia’, getting tough on asylum seekers, and so on, making it worse. Then it really got worse after dumping Rudd, and attacking his legacy and coming up with pathetic cop-outs like the Citizen’s Assembly, and finally succumbing to paranoia over what were fairly anodyne leaks. It was only after reconciling with Rudd and talking about precisely what he would have campaigned on anyway, the economy and the risk of Abbott, that the campaign stabilised. But in the meantime, Labor’s tactics had at least legitimised Abbott and kept this a contest.

So we had Abbott grudgingly dumping his ‘values’ agenda with his backdown on Workchoices in the first week and Labor abandoning its ‘Howard battlers’ agenda in the second week, leaving both parties another whole month to campaign on pretty well nothing. This suited Labor better because after their Howard battlers’ backdowns, they were always prepared for a trivial campaign.

What we have then, are two parties heading for election, but neither seeking a mandate to do anything. Essentially they are ignoring the whole point of an election. One of them will seem to get away with it on Saturday, but ultimately, neither will. Mandates are still important, even to the most self absorbed political party. Rudd wouldn’t have been able to last against his own party for as long as he did without it. Yet even if Labor ends up with a comfortable majority on Saturday, Gillard will struggle to claim anything from it other than she was not Tony Abbott. This will be very little to draw on if she really intends to take on the party’s bankrupt power bases, which she would need to in order to survive. If Labor doesn’t win comfortably, then all bets are off.