Few sights are more desperate than old political parties on the run. In this Australian federal election, the challenge from independents and smaller parties has sparked a nervous reaction, much of it negative and most of it misplaced.
An example of such nervousness came from startling remarks from former Treasurer Joe Hockey that he would sooner see Liberal seats fall to Labor than independents. Sounding distinctly illiberal, he suggested that independents were all too representative, populists of the electorate. Broad, party-based machines made the ‘tough decisions’ such as going to war, irrespective of whether popular will sought it; independents, being a mere ‘voice of one’, would only believe in principle rather than ‘consensus’.
This astonishing, if frank admission, belies the deeper problem with parties which continuously fail to understand that Parliament comprises a body of individuals supposedly representative of the electorate who put them there.
This same lack of understanding colours the reasoning of Australia’s second longest serving Prime Minister, John Howard, who can only reason along traditional party lines. For him, independent candidates on the conservative side of politics who were ‘disillusioned with the government’ were engaging in some ‘very strange logic’ in running. ‘The only possible consequence of these candidates being successful is medium to long term damage to the Liberal Party. They won’t inflict any damage to the Labor Party.’
Such an argument tends to ignore the fact that Labor faces, and has faced, its own threats from independents and Greens candidates disgruntled by the party’s erratic approach to fossil fuels and the opening of new mines. Along with the Liberals, they continue to insist on the status quo, refusing to make deals or arrangements with independent candidates to form government, even in the event of a hung parliament.
'A case can be made that Australia’s 43rd parliament, which saw the remarkable labours of such centrist independents as Rob Oakeshott and Tony Windsor, was truer to basic parliamentary principles than others.'
Australia’s longest serving Foreign Minister, Alexander Downer, is similarly hostile to independents though gives little reason to appreciate an electoral system that sees, time and time again, a blood-letting battle between ‘the two major parties’ who fight ‘each other to a standstill.’
Understandably, his position is shaped by what yielded success: a long spell in government; the war chest filled with personnel and funds that comes with traditional politics. Independents – ‘so-called’, he sneers – were ‘little more than the most loathsome example