Greens leader Bob Brown has been spruiking the possibility of the Greens winning an ACT Senate seat from Liberal Gary Humphries. He’s dreaming.
The community-based group GetUp is also running its Save Our Senate campaign strongly in the ACT in an attempt to overturn the Coalition majority in the Senate.
On that point, the ACT is critical. This is because ACT (and Northern Territory) senators take their seats immediately after the election. Senators from the states, on the other hand, take their seats on 1 July next year. State senators have a fixed six-year term. Half are elected every three years, usually at the same time as the House of Representatives election, but their terms run from the next July 1 to the June 30 six years later.
Territory senators terms are exactly the same as the terms of members of the House of Representatives.
It means that if Humphries lost the seat, the Coalition would lose its one-seat Senate majority that it would otherwise have retained until July 1 next year.
But the Greens and Labor should not get too excited. First, Humphries is not going to lose his seat. Secondly, even if he did, it would not make much practical difference. The Senate would be tied and a tied vote goes in the negative. It means the Coalition could still block any legislation of the in-coming Government, should Labor win.
Sure, the Coalition would not be able to launch Senate inquiries without a majority, but it usually takes at least six months for a new Government to make a blunder worth inquiring into.
So why is Humphries a certainty? Why are the arrangements for the territory senators different from those in the states? The questions are related. When the 1973 Senate (Representation of Territories) Act was being put together the major parties set up a system to make sure that each territory would always have one Labor and one Coalition senator.
If you have two senators elected at the same time in each territory, you get one from each major party. The system was to be neutral and was designed to exclude minor parties who have given the majors such grief over the years – the DLP against Labor and the Greens and Democrats against the Coalition.
So Humphries only needs a third of the vote plus one to be elected. And that is after preferences have been distributed.
Yes, it is a Labor town. Yes, the Greens have a higher vote in the ACT than anywhere else in Australia. Yes, the national polls reveal a major swing to Labor. But it does not add up to either Labor or the Greens winning the second ACT Senate seat.
In the 2004 election, the Greens got 16.4 per cent of the vote in the ACT Senate race. That vote would guarantee a seat in any of the six states, but not here.
In 2004 Humphries got 37.9 per cent of the first-preference vote – more than enough to be elected without preferences. My guess is that he will do the same again.
We don’t have any ACT-specific polling, but I think it unlikely that Labor will get very many more votes in the ACT than it got in 2004. I don’t think the national swing to Labor indicated in the polls, if repeated on November 24, will be reflected in the ACT.
The reason lies in the 2004 figures. In 2004, Labor in the ACT defied the national trend. The Coalition got a swing towards it of 1.8 per cent of the vote. In the ACT it lost 0.5 per cent of the vote to Labor. So Labor is coming off a significantly higher base in the ACT than anywhere else in the country.
There are not many more votes left to be had for Labor in the ACT. There is not even much joy in the public service vote. Like any aspiring Opposition, Labor has said it will cut Public Service waste. The Coalition is now presiding over a bigger Public Service than when it came to office.
But just say there is a swing away from the Liberals and Humphries does not get his 34 per cent quota on first preferences. What then?
The Electoral Commission would eliminate the shrapnel candidates and distribute their preferences and would also distribute the preferences from Labor Senator Kate Lundy’s over-quota votes – the votes over the 34 per cent needed to elect her, because Lundy is going to get a lot more votes than 34 per cent.
But this is where the Greens and second Labor candidates run into trouble, even if there is a very large over-quota.
You see, the ACT has the highest Senate below-the-line voting in Australia. About 20 per cent of ACT voters refuse to tick a party box. Rather they mark out their own preferences.
It means you do not get a tight flow of preferences as you do in state Senate races where typically 95 per cent of voters tick a party box.
In a tight flow you would expect all the over-quota to go to the second Labor candidate, Peter Conway. After that either the Greens’ Kerrie Tucker would be eliminated (if she got less than about 17 per cent of the primary vote) and all her vote would go to the second Labor candidate. Or if she had more than 17 per cent of primary vote, the second Labor candidate would be eliminated and his votes flow to Tucker who would be elected.
But that is not going to happen. Why do those pesky 20 per cent of ACT voters vote below the line? Precisely because they do not want their preferences to go tightly on party lines. Many of them, in this small community, know both Humphries and Lundy personally, and might well vote Lundy 1, Humphries 2. Scrutineers say they see many such votes.
My guess is that Humphries will get his quota fairly comfortably with first preferences. But even if he does not there will easily be enough preference leakage to get him across the line.
You might well wonder why the Greens bother standing for the Senate in the ACT when it is so hopeless. Or indeed why any candidate stands against a sitting member in a safe seat anywhere. Wonder no more. Bear in mind that under public-funding provisions, candidates get two cents for every vote, provided they get at least 4 per cent of the primary vote.
And by the way, ACT Labor supporters should not be concerned about the prospect of little or no ACT swing to Labor. It means the national swing predicted by the polls will be going elsewhere – in marginals where it might count rather than in safe ACT seats.