McBain IV – Balance of Power

Can you feel it in the air? It’s 5 days until the election, and I’d be lying here if said I'm not as giddy as a six year old counting the sleeps until Christmas. What kind of a leadership are we going to wake up to next Sunday morning?

To say things are not looking good for Johnny is quite an understatement. Consistent polls have the Coalition at a ten point deficit in the two party preferred stats.

The ABC’s site has a cool House of Reps calculator that lets you see what the results would be based on various swings. It also lets you enter in the results of polls taken lately. Using the latest AC Neilsen poll from last Wednesday we see a solid win for Labor, 87 to 61.

What is interesting is that the polling results have been essentially stable for the last five weeks of the election campaign. Pretty much everyone is predicting a Labor win, but that is only half the story, because, as I found out this afternoon, we actually have two houses of parliament, and apparently the other one is where all the action is going to happen.

Quick refresher on the Senate:

• The Upper House of parliament, as opposed to the House of Representatives which controls who forms government.
  
• Senators have a 6 year term, and the election coming up is only for half the Senate positions (6 each state and 2 for ACT, NT).
• State based representation not proportional to population. Which means Tassie’s 400,000 get the same number of senators as NSW’s 6.8 million.
  
• The new senators elected Saturday don’t enter parliament until July next year, except for the NT and ACT ones for some reason.
  
• It’s the big white form with more boxes than a Sudoku puzzle on it.

What was interesting/heartbreaking about the last election was that the Coalition gained control of not only the lower house, but the senate as well. Our lovely and ludicrously complicated democratic system is essentially designed to have a ruling party in the lower house and an oppositional force in the upper house to provide the checks and balances needed for the smooth running of our little southern utopia.

Howard, to his credit, managed to get control of both houses and as such was able to slam through any legislation he pleased. What the Greens and Demos are trying to do this election is to pry back that control and restore the ‘balance of power’. They are doing this by joining forces by way of a mutual preference deal to try and ensure they all don’t have to go and get jobs next July.

It sounds good, but looking at the polls and the current state of the Senate it doesn’t look very likely that the Democrats are going to have much of a showing, especially because all of their team are out at the Senate changeover in July next year (meaning of course that if they win nothing they are finished as a party). There does seem to be significant support for the Greens what with the world about to end due to environmental destruction, but they still only stand to get three or four seats. Depending on how things turn out though, that could be the magic number that will increase the calls from the Lodge significantly over the next few years.

As opposed to the relatively simple House of Reps, the Senate is bloody difficult to predict. The polls don’t seem to delve into the differences in voter's votes between the House and the Senate. If we take it as a given that K-Rudd is going to get in, then we have a few possibilities:

• ALP control: Rudd-slide, workchoices is out quicker than you can say unfair dismissal.
• Lib-Nat control: The ALP won’t get their IR changes through and, according to Julia Gillard Labor will force a Double-Dissolution rather than modify them.
• Green with BoP: Interesting stuff. IR will go though. Australia will get tough on Climate Change and 20,000 lumberjacks in Tassie are out on their arse.
• Family First with BoP: God help us. I’m moving to New Zealand.

Of course those are not the only options. As can be seen by the bed sheet sized ballot paper, it seems like everyone with three mates and a website is running for a senate spot. I’ll have a look at some of the democratic nut-balls in the next post.