The Western Australian and Queensland elections have made some Coalition MPs ponder supping with the Devil. They are thinking of doing a preference deal with One Nation.
National De-Anne Kelly summed up the position: “”If you’re part of the same sort of conservative, right-wing family, if you don’t share preferences, you are dead in the dust.”
And the Liberal Member for Eden-Monaro, Gary Nairn, is making similar noises.
Hitherto, the importance of preferences has been grossly exaggerated, but next election it might be different, based more on the result in Western Australia than Queensland.
In 1996, preferences decided 50 of the 148 seats. In 1998 they decided 91 seats – an historically high proportion. In fact they made little difference. Of the 91 seats in 1998 the leader after the first-preference count stayed leader in all but three cases after the distribution of preferences. (This is counting the Coalition as a single party.) Still, despite the high number of seats determined by preferences, the preference count did not affect the outcome of either election.
Hitherto it has taken freak circumstances for preferences to affect the overall outcome. It happened in 1961 when DLP preferences gave the Coalition a victory that would otherwise have been Labor’s. And in 1990 preferences gave a Coalition candidate’s lead on the first-preference count to Labor, changing the election outcome.
These were freaks because the primary and two-party preferred vote was extremely close.
In the past decade and a half preferences have not mattered. They have not mattered much because we have been talking about Democrat and Green preferences, or in the case of 1998, the ill-disciplined preferences of One Nation. In the case of the former they made up their own mind about who would get second preference (60-40 or 70-30 respectively). In the case of One Nation in 1998 the direction was also weak. It meant that the fun mental bi-polarity of the electorate was not affected much by people wandering off to a minor party and then returning to their natural inclination as a second or subsequent preference.
In 2001 this might be very different. One Nation is likely to be a maverick. In some seats it could hand victory to Labor, in others it could take the Alf-Garnett, working-class tory vote from Labor and hand it to the silver-tails of the Coalition.
Generally, I have been sceptical about the influence of preferences. Australian electoral history generally shows that the first-preference vote is very similar to the two-party preferred vote and that very few seats (net) change from one party to the other because of preferences.
One Nation might change this, if the bizarre Upper House result in Western Australia is any guide. This is because, unlike 1998, voters are following One Nation’s preference direction. The sort of disaffected person who votes One Nation is deliberately ignoring the major parties and its therefore not making a choice between them, but rather doing whatever One Nation tells them to do. In Upper Houses this means just ticking the One Nation box and in Lower Houses it means following their how-to-vote card religiously.
In Western Australia, One Nation did not direct preferences uniformly. In some seats they were directed to Labor and in others to the Coalition, often filtering through other minor parties first. One Nation tends to direct preferences away from sitting members.
The result in the Western Australian Upper House was very peculiar. The Upper House has six electorates (or regions) of five members each. There is above the line voting (which 90 per cent of voters use). You can just tick the party box and your preferences are deemed to running according to the ticket lodged with the electoral office.
In the Agricultural Region, the primary vote had the Liberals with 1.8 of a quota, One nation 1.3, Labor 1.2, Nationals 1.1, and the Greens just 0.3 of a quota. You would think the Liberals would be a shoe in for the second quota as the other candidates and excess quotas were distributed. But no. The Greens got preferences from One Nation over the Liberal Party, and the Green got elected.
In the Mining and Pastoral Region, the same thing happened, though in a slightly more complicated way. After preferences of some independents were distributed the One Nation over-quota was distributed to the Greens before the Liberals and the Greens got a seat with 0.3 of a quota on the primary count.
In the metropolitan regions One Nation gave preferences to the Coalition.
This is more complicated than the single-member House of Representatives system, but the point remains: a maverick One Nation, directing preferences to a slavish following can inadvertently hand seats in a most unexpected way. The result was that One Nation preferences resulted in two Greens getting up in addition to their other three, the Greens and Labor together make a majority in the Upper House and One Nation does not have the balance of power. One nation was so maverick it overplayed its hand and lost.
It has unnerved marginal-seat government MPs hoping for a superannuation- and perk-rich third term.
A amoral win-at-all-costs Prime Minister would do a preference deal with One Nation. The Liberal preferences to One Nation would never be counted because Reps seats (with few exceptions) come down to a two horse race. But it is there that One Nation preferences would help the Coalition. In any event Howard would lose nothing because he has already lost virtually all of the small-l liberal vote that he won in 1996 because of policies on universities, the republic, reconciliation, detention centres and the ABC. Not to do a preference deal with One Nation means the loss of the working-class tory vote that Menzies held via the DLP. Without a deal it would be dissipated through seat-by-seat One Nation ad-hockery as we saw in Western Australia.
More ironies in Australian politics: the Howard Government loses office because it stands up to bigotry and racism and refuses to do a survival deal (contrary to all its conduct to date) and Labor wins office on the back of preferences of the One Nation party when it detests everything its stands for.
Or will Peter Costello step in and regain the support of the small-l liberals to make One Nation preferences irrelevant?