In all the brouhaha surrounding the almost equal outcome in the House of Representatives after the 2010 election, very little has been said about the outcome in the Senate. There are many reasons for this, including the fact that it took a number of weeks to count the Senate election to determine just who had won a seat and what this will mean when the new Senate (complete with the senators elected in the election just past) convenes on July 1, 2011.
Were Liberal leader Tony Abbott to have become prime minister, it seems highly unlikely that he would have been able to get much through the Senate at all.
With the question of which major party would seek to form a minority government occupying everyone’s attention, very few noticed the significant political shift going on in the Senate. Once the chamber where the Australian Democrats used to hold the balance of power and famously sought to ‘keep the bastards honest’, in more recent times the Senate has been under the dominant influence of conservatives.
The rise of the conservative forces in the upper house coincided with the election of John Howard’s coalition government back in 1996. At around that time the Liberals were able to entice a former Labor senator to back them with promises of the deputy President’s position, and Tasmanian conservative independent Brian Harradine could be assured of supporting Mr Howard’s conservative social agenda. Howard did not have the numbers in the Senate after he won the 1998 election with a promise of a new tax on everything, but, with the assistance of the Democrats, a Goods and Services Tax was duly legislated for.
The zenith of conservative power in the Senate was reached after the 2004 election. The Liberals and Nationals won enough seats in the half-Senate contest that year to allow them to have a majority in the Senate – the first time since Malcolm Fraser led the coalition to an upper house majority back in 1977. The right-of-centre triumph didn’t stop there: thanks to Labor preferences, Steve Fielding of the conservative Family First party also won a seat in the Senate. The hegemony of the right was thus complete, and Workchoices followed soon after (although, to be fair to Fielding, he didn’t vote for it).
Howard was defeated at the 2007 federal election, but the election of independent Nick Xenophon and the presence of Fielding from the last election ensured that the right continued to hold control the Senate. The then prime minister, Kevin Rudd, was to be increasingly frustrated by an obstructionist Senate. One wonders why he didn’t use the double dissolution mechanism in the Australian constitution to do something about it.
All this has changed – or, at least, is about to change in July 2011. The 2010 half-Senate election has seen a dramatic shift in the political balance in the Senate from the right to the left mainly because of the strength of the performance of the Greens across the country and the weakness of the Liberal vote especially in Victoria and Tasmania. The Greens have won a Senate seat in each state, but, critically, the Liberals failed to win more than 2 seats in both Victoria and Tasmania. In Victoria, the Greens effectively took Steve Fielding’s seat while the Liberal-National ticket lost a seat to the DLP!
What this all means is that, when the new senators join with those elected in 2007, Labor and the Greens will hold 40 of the 76 seats – as big a ‘left of centre’ majority as is likely to ever occur. This fact underpinned Julia Gillard’s claim to being the only major party leader able to offer a minority government that would work, especially in the light of her signing an agreement with the Greens just before being able to form a minority government. Were Liberal leader Tony Abbott to have become prime minister, it seems highly unlikely that he would have been able to get much through the Senate at all. In that case, an early double dissolution election would have been very likely.
Labor and the Greens have thus triumphed in the 2010 election, but not necessarily in the lower house. The Senate’s shift to the left was as historic as any of the other historic outcomes in the lower house. Moreover, the result highlights the fragility of the Liberal achievement in the 2010 election, especially when the voting behaviour of Victoria and Tasmania is taken in to account.