Something about the ACT Senate seats attracts hopeful, high-profile independent and minor-party candidates like bogongs to the light on the hill.
This week the hitherto electorally successful ACT Greens MLA Kerrie Tucker announced she would not be standing for a fourth term in the ACT Legislative Assembly and would consider standing for the Senate.
She would be wasting her time.
The two Senate seats in each of the mainland territories have been stitched up by the major parties. The system is deliberately arranged so that each major party gets one Senate seat each in the ACT and the Northern Territory and no-one has ever comes remotely within range of changing that outcome.
Former Prime Minister John Gorton, Tasmanian Democrat Senator Norm Saunders and Democrat former Farmers Federation chief Rick Farley are among the victims of the lure of the ACT Senate seat. None got within cooee.
The creation of territory Senate seats was a near-run thing. The Bill creating them was rejected twice by the Senate and passed in 1974 by the only joint sitting to follow a double dissolution in Australia’s history. It then narrowly survived two challenges to the High Court. On one hand the Constitution provides for the Senate to be a states’ house on the other hand it gives Parliament the power to provide for representation for the territories. In the first case the court held by the barest majority that the latter prevailed. And a second challenge after the composition of the court changed with appointment of a new judge failed. Some minority judges who ruled against territory senators in the first case felt bound by the precedent set by the majority in that case when it came to the second challenge.
So the first election for territory senators was held in 1975.
By then Gorton was disgusted with the Liberal Party and resigned from it to stand as an independent for one of the two ACT Senate seats. Gorton lived in Canberra then and was quite popular, as well as being a national figure.
But he was trounced. He got just 12.2 per cent of the vote. That should have provided a lesson for all the other high-profile hopefuls later on, but it did not.
If Gorton had stood and got that percentage of the vote in any Australian state he would have easily been elected to the Senate. Standing for one of 10 seats in any state in the 1975 double dissolution, 9 per cent would have got him over the line.
Then in 1990, Norm Saunders resigned as Democrat senator for Tasmania and stood for one of the ACT Senate seats. He had three years of his Tasmanian term to run. The idea was that a Democrat would replace him in Tasmania and, relying on his high profile, he would win the ACT seat, thus increasing the Democrat representation in the Senate. The first part of the plan worked because the Constitution required it. But the second part turned to dust. Saunders got 17.6 percent of the vote – enough to win one of six Senate places in any one of the states if he had stood there, but not enough to win one of the two seats in the ACT.
You need 33.3 per cent of the vote to get an ACT seat.
In 1990 – the election when independents and minor-party candidates were at their zenith — Saunders, the Greens and the Nuclear Disarmament Party put together got 22.2 per cent of the vote. Not enough.
State senators have different terms from territory senators. In the states, half the senators come up for election every three years. So they have a six-year term. The term is fixed, running from July 1 after the election. Usually, the Senate election is run at the same time as the House of Representatives election, which might be up to 11 months and 29 days before July 1. So the newly elected senators have to kick their heels a bit before taking their seats.
The ACT and Northern Territory senators, on the other hand, are elected for a term exactly the same as that of the House of Representatives. Both senators from each territory come up for election at each House of Representatives election. It is a major-party stitch-up. With two seats up for grabs each election, you need 33.3 per cent of the vote after preferences to get elected – very easy for each major party. For a major party to get both seats, it needs 66.6 per cent of the vote – impossible. For a minor party or independent to get elected they need 33.3 per cent of the vote – verging on the impossible.
But this and the Gorton and Saunders lesson did not deter Rick Farley in 1998. He thought that with Prime Minister John Howard’s Government on the nose he could beat Liberal Senator Margaret Reid.
In the 1998 election, Labor’s Senator Kate Lundy got 42 per cent – more than a quota – and was elected straight away. Farley got 16.5 per cent – enough to win a Senate seat in one of the states if he had stood there. Reid got 30.9 per cent, just 1.4 percentage points shy of a quota. She picked that up very quickly from One Nation preferences and Farley was left way short.
Part of the attractions for Farley and Saunders was that the ACT senators take their seats immediately while those elected in the states had to wait some months till the following July. In 1990 and 1998 the immediate replacement of a Liberal by a Democrat would have been critical in those months in a finely hung Senate. But it was self-aggrandising folly.
In the ACT, the Liberals have only been pushed to preferences twice in the 11 elections since the Senate seats were created. Each time it took only a trivial amount of preferences to get Reid over the line. Neither major party has been pushed to preferences in the Northern Territory.
The history lesson for Kerrie Tucker is that standing for an ACT Senate seat is political suicide – or delusion.
In the three elections she has contested at ACT level she got 6.3, 6.1 and 10.1 per cent of the vote – nowhere near enough for an ACT Senate seat.
The territory-senators system has been created to be politically neutral for the two major parties – one seat for each party from each territory. Forever.