In a recent edition of The Guardian, George Megalogenis discusses the impact of minor parties and independents on the two major parties in Australia.
Some key points from the article include:
"Today, Labor and the Coalition would kill for the support they received in 2010. That was the last campaign run on the old 40–40–20 rule, whereby the duopoly typically garnered at least 80% of first-preference votes between them."
"Back then, the major parties convinced themselves that the protest vote had peaked and regular programming would soon resume. The theory, explained to me by MPs and advisers on both sides, was that the ordeal of Julia Gillard’s minority government would act as an automatic stabiliser for the two-party system. Voters would not want to go there again."
"But support for minor parties and independents continued to ratchet up in each subsequent campaign and reached an inevitable tipping point at the 2022 election, when the primary vote divided into a third each for Labor, the Coalition and none of the above. Another collective swing away from the major parties at the next election would make the none-of-the-above vote the largest bloc of the three."
"The crossbench is three times larger (than during Julia Gillard’s minority government), seating 16 MPs at the last election. It skews towards urban Australia and is dominated by professional women who have had a life before politics."
"A parliament that looks more like the people it serves carries the promise of new ideas to test an economic model that has outlived its usefulness and a social model that still falls short of our egalitarian ideal. But it also risks forming into a new gridlock if the major parties and crossbench are in direct competition for seats – namely, Labor versus Green, and Liberal versus teal."
"I have been looking forward to the rise of the New Australian Voter. The concentration of migrants and their local-born children in the capitals, increasingly in election-deciding numbers, will reduce the threat of a Trump, Farage or Le Pen-style politics infecting our system"