Australia’s inconclusive election

S P SETH

Australia has gone through, what one might call, an inconclusive election. The ruling conservative coalition has scraped through but it will have a difficult time of governing during, what looks, like an interim period before new elections might have to be called. Uncharacteristically for Australia, it has been going through a period of political instability, having changed multiple prime ministers through internal party coups followed by elections. The government in Australia has generally alternated between a conservative coalition and the Labour Party. Most people in Australia tended to vote for one or the other, with only a very small bloc of undecided voters. But, as with everywhere else in the western world, the old political certainties are no longer relevant with many voters, remaining undecided till the end. And in Australia’s case, about a quarter of the voters seem to have opted out of the comfortable feeling of political allegiance to either of the two main parties, and have ended up voting for a minor party/group and independents.

In Australia’s preferential voting system, a voter’s second and even subsequent preferences count in determining the final outcome. In other words, even if a party were to win a majority-vote it might still lose the election on the basis of results in marginal seats. Another important feature of Australian elections is that the voting in the country is compulsory. Therefore, a voter has to, in most cases, make a choice, which makes the election result quite representative. And the large vote in favour of minor parties and independents is a sure sign that a growing number of voters are not happy with what is on offer periodically at the time of successive elections.

Another disturbing feature of the recent election is the return of the racist and xenophobic Pauline Hanson and her One Nation party, with three likely seats in the Senate (upper house). Last time when she was elected to the parliament in 1996, she was mouthing anti-Asian rhetoric blaming almost all Australia’s problems on Asian immigrants, as well as targeting Australia’s aborigines as if they haven’t suffered enough already. This time, she has got even more ammunition by largely, but not exclusively, targeting Muslims. And as part of her anti-Muslim tirade she has asked for a Royal Commission into Islam and surveillance cameras in mosques. At the same time, she is also seeking a Royal Commission into climate change, as she questions its validity. In other words, she is bit of a nutter but, as with all such characters ---as with Donald Trump in the US--- they tap into a fertile constituency deeply unhappy and anxious with changes around them. They feel that their erstwhile ‘idyllic’ world has changed forever. Here in Australia, Pauline Hanson is no Donald Trump but she is still a lightening rod of sorts.

One might wonder what has gone wrong with Australia? The answer is that fundamentally there is not much wrong with the country. It is still one of the richest countries in the world and with one of the highest living standards. But the main worry, as featuring in the recent election, is that Australia’s luck might be running out, while the two main parties are simply engaged in point scoring for political gain and not seriously confronting the issues facing the country. Basically, with the slump in commodity prices, like iron ore and coal as Australia’s major exports, it is feared that it will adversely affect people’s living standards.

With the recent commodities’ export boom, Australia virtually had an uninterrupted couple of decades of economic prosperity---it even managed to get through the global financial crisis relatively unscathed--- which is now coming to an end. As a result, its debt level has gone up and it is running budgetary deficits. But the budgetary situation is being blown out of all proportion, considering that Australia’s national debt is less than 20 per cent of the GDP. But the question of debt is regarded as a sacred cow lest Australia, at some future time, go the way of Greece or Argentina. And both sides of the political spectrum are agreed on the need to rein in the debt and turn the budget into a surplus within the decade.

But the question is how to do it? The conservative coalition, which has just scraped through, is business friendly and believes that an investment-friendly regime, with cuts in company tax rates worth $50 billion over the next decade, would bring in more foreign investors propelling economic growth. Which would increase employment, spur consumer spending and create a virtuous cycle of all round growth. It is further argued, as the conservative government did during the election, that without healthy economic growth the country would not be able to sustain its living standards as well as its social, health and education benefits. Further on, because of fiscal constraints from a slowing and transitional economy, they felt that there would be need for spending cuts on a whole range of social and health benefits, though they sought to underplay it during the election. The Labour Party, on the other hand, sought to capitalize on the government’s handouts to their business mates while trying to cut on necessary social, health and educational services.

At the same time, the opposition the Labour Party didn’t want to come out as an irresponsible profligate political alternative and agreed on the need to rein in the budget deficit around the same time frame of under a decade, but not at the cost of Australia’s much popular universal health care, and spending on education. And they campaigned vigorously against the $50 billion tax bonanza for big business over ten years. No wonder that from a very low base of parliamentary seats held by them, the opposition Labour Party increased their tally impressively, with the opposition leader sounding like he was the real winner. In the midst of it, as pointed out earlier, nearly a quarter of the voters have voted against the existing two-party system by voting for minority parties/groups or independents. Which will make the task of Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull that much harder.

In other words, the task of governance will increasingly become difficult, thus further increasing voters’ disillusionment with the two-party political system of ruling alternatively without any real change. This process of growing voters’ disillusionment with existing political system is now seen all over the old western democracies, with some local variations.

Note: This article first appeared in the Daily Times.