When the Electoral Commission’s computer crunched the preferences of the 11,909 Brindabella votes it had in its system yesterday, it ended Gary Humphries (very slender) chance of government, and cut severely the influence that the Democrats would have in the next Assembly.
It is a sample of 21 per cent of the electorate and is not likely to change.
It gave Labor the third seat in Brindabella and its eighth seat in the Assembly. Together with the Greens Kerrie Tucker (who has vowed not to vote for a Liberal Chief Minister) it is a majority for Jon Stanhope’s Labor Party without needing to deal with the Democrats.
(Humphries, of course, should have conceded on Saturday night given the (un)popular vote he got.)
The eighth seat may be a blessing that Stanhope will regret.
The dynamic of the new Assembly will be very different with eight Labor seats. It means that the Liberals and Democrats cannot gang up to defeat Government legislation or to get their own legislation through. In previous Assemblies, Government legislation was often defeated and Opposition and cross-bench legislation often got up. Governance was often better for it.
In this Assembly it will be a rare day, indeed, to see Government legislation defeated or significantly amended by the Liberals, Democrats and Green joining forces.
If legislation is too far to the right for Tucker’s liking, the Liberals or Democrats will support it. And Labor won’t put up any legislation that is too left for Tucker to support.
The danger for the ACT is that for the first time we will have a Government with an effective majority on the floor of a single-chamber parliament. That means very little checking and balancing, unless Stanhope is true to his word and puts in the reforms of governance that he promised in the campaign.
Without the Democrats, it may be that Labor will not get saved from itself on vital occasions. Legislation, appointments and executive actions can get steam-rolled through which come back to bite Labor later in the term.
The other complication is that Stanhope will have two women among his eight. Under gender equity rules they might both have to get ministries which might cause some resentment. That they are both untried is of little moment, given that all but Wayne Berry and Bill Wood are also untried as Ministers. (Presumably Wood will get the speakership.)
Another difficulty is that Labor is good at making complicated deals within its own factions stick, even over a long period, but when an outside force (the Greens) enters the fray, the factional arrangements often come unstuck, causing grief.
Stanhope must be wary of the Tasmanian experience of Green-Labor Government between 1989-92. An arrangement between Labor factions would often fall through when the Greens supported one faction’s agenda, but not the other. The result was stalemate and nothing getting done because the Labor faction not getting Green support would demand its part of the deal go forward first. On its defeat the deal would fail.
There are some important differences, though. The ACT does not have any old-growth forests in contention and Tasmania had five Greens to contend with. Moreover, Kerrie Tucker has shown a capacity to be more flexible, less dogmatic and of broader outlook than the Tasmanian Greens of the 1980s and 1990s.