The seduction of Saint Cheryl by the Labor Party, despite its immediate surprise, fits a mode of behaviour in Australian politics that has run for a quarter of a century.
That behaviour is the way the major parties virtually stop at nothing to undermine their opponents and the minor parties in the Senate.
They have used many Machiavellian tricks in a vicious Senate numbers game to block or control legislation or to get government itself. They have replaced dead or departing senators with their own. They have appointed opponent Senators to diplomatic posts to weaken the other side. They have thrown epithets like “”unrepresentative swill” at it.
They even increased the number of senators from 10 to 12 per state in theory to squeeze out minor parties who have a better chance to win a seat if there are an uneven number of seats up for grabs in a half-Senate election. Though that has back-fired as the major parties can no longer get the 43 per cent of the primary vote each to ensure the minors are squeezed out.
The fury and bad behaviour of both major parties arises out of their failure to get their own way all of the time despite having a majority of seats in the Lower House. It is a hallmark of the immaturity of Australian politics.
Children like everything all of the time; watch siblings fight.
Each time one of the major parties engages in a Senate-undermining trick, the other side works itself into a lather of accusations, most of it disingenuous. Surely, the Liberals would have welcomed Kernot. And if so, the Labor Party would have been as equally indignant as the Liberals are now.
There have been a few signs of a less Machiavellian approach, but the underlying conduct remains. The granting of pairs and the replacement of leaving senators by a senator of the same party are welcome signs. But both major parties would dearly love to see the minor parties and independents (whether left or right) in the Senate disappear.
It is fortunate that they are usually at each other’s throats so intensely that they would never co-operate in the venture. For if they were to, they could do so easily.
Let us turn to Section 9 of the Australian Constitution. It says, “”The Parliament of the Commonwealth may make laws prescribing the method of choosing senators.”
It means that the proportional system of voting for the Senate is not fixed in stone, or even in the Constitution. It does not need a referendum to change it. It can be changed by a simple law passed by a majority of both Houses. If the Liberal and Labor Parties wanted to replace the present system with a single-member system or a system of two senators for each seat, as in the territories. The National Party would cop it because they would be guaranteed a few rural senate seats.
Perhaps we can rely on the major parties’ innate suspicion of each other to prevent this horrible possibility.
Of course, the real reform would be to change the voting system in the Lower House, both federally and in all states and territories bar Tasmania and the ACT.
One of the reasons Kernot left the Democrats was because she could not participate in active policy development. To do that she needed to leave the Democrats, because as she admitted the Democrats can at best be an alternative opposition. That is the nature of the electoral system; it excludes significant minor voices.
Last weekend’s South Australian election proves the point. With 16 per cent of the vote the Democrats did not get a Lower House seat.
There are drawbacks in precise proportionality. We would lose local representation because members would be drawn from national party lists. And some parties and independents with only a few percent of the vote could get seats making it difficult to form stable governments or ones not beholden to small single-issue MPs. However, when a party with a full range of policies gets 16 per cent of the vote, it should get some seats.
Perhaps we need a mixed system with some proportionally-elected MPs who get significant support.
We might have had the Democrats represented in the Lower House, maybe in a coalition government with Kernot as a minister. Under such a system the major parties would have to engage in more compromise and consensus and less adversity.
The significant minors would provide enough check and balance to warrant the abolition of expensive upper houses in the states that still have them.
More importantly, when the voters turn away from the major parties, they would get proportionately punished by getting fewer seats, not as now still dividing virtually all the spoils in the Lower House with only about 70 per cent of the vote and relying on the preference system to trickle down ill-gotten gains.
The major parties would get an advantage in that some of their members could appeal to a national audience rather than relying on the vagaries of a small marginal electorate. Indeed, the very seat Kernot is to stand in (Dickson) shows how the single-member system can lower the quality of members of parliament. Labor’s fairly talented Michael Lavarch lost the seat while some of his far less talented colleagues got home in safe seats.
But electoral reform is unlikely. The real lesson of the Kernot defection is that under our system, you can’t tame them, you must join them.