Rundle: how the minors can hijack Parliament and bring on the revolution

For those who follow politics with the same intensity as most people follow TV mini-series thrillers, the real smoking gun in this election has been Parakeelia. That is a beauty — a company nestled within the heart of the Liberal Party, run by the Liberal Party, its clients the Liberal Party, using the taxpayers funds gained by the Liberal Party. The longer it went, the bigger it got, until the party has a multimillion-dollar company at its heart that has not had one dollar from the private market paid into it. The public’s reaction to it? Just about zip.

That may change as the full story is elaborated. But for the moment it’s yet another example of the Hollywood Effect — what people expect, demand in blockbuster movies (“well, of course the syndicate ran him off the road at night; he was a journalist with the files about the syndicate”) they will reject or not notice in real life. Untold monies being siphoned off by a party? In the movie, tired journalists stand around as an editor barks down the phone “Print!” A montage sequence follows, in which the bad guys are led out in handcuffs. In real life? [Name redacted here] goes to lunch again.

The reason Parakeelia hasn’t made the impact that the political/media bubble hoped/thought it would is because few people understand how the party funding system works. Many Australians genuinely do not know that political parties get government funding, matched to their primary vote — a form of funding, in other words, that favours existing market forces and excludes new entrants and smaller players. That’s on top of the regulation-free private donations system we do have — the least regulated in the world.

[Election deciders: the moneybags]

The funding system connects with what I noted yesterday and have before — our ridiculous multiple-lock system, developed in fits and starts, which maintains major parties in power, as quasi-state apparatuses, their vacancies overwhelmingly filled by student politicians from the sandstone universities.

The system has been perfected over the decades, and at this point it has reached its apogee. That’s why this election has such a strange, uncanny feel to it — we all know there are major policy differences between the parties, we know we are going into a future that is more uncertain than the recent past has been, yet the whole thing is failing to grip. The whole thing has an amnesiac quality. Something hoves into view — a big thing, like recognition, the treaty and indigenous Australia — sticks around for 24 hours, and then vanishes again, with nothing resolved or even much debated. After 24 hours on treaties and recognitions, we were onto Muslim clerics and dinners. At the end of the week, waiting like a painted grin on the door of the ghost train ride, is Joe Hildebrand, ready to do a Facebook Live debate.

Consequently, just as this system has been perfected, it is starting to come apart. One sure sign of this concerned the return of Rob Oakeshott to the fray in Cowper — a move that looked quixotic and not a little sad when he announced it. Now, with polling showing him in striking distance of the seat, people in the major parties must be starting to panic a little. Winning the seat from a standing start may still be beyond him, but the fact that it can even be considered is a measure of the volatility around. With eight or so viable independents and Greens running, and the unknown factor of NXT in South Australia, it is clear that the party system is under its most sustained assault in the lower house since Federation.

Could that bear fruit, now or in 2019 (or whenever the next election is — 2018? 2017? July 9, 2016?)? If a recession intervened and the major parties continued to be as unresponsive as they are, then the system could break apart entirely. There’s no reason why the NXT party could not become the major holder of South Australian seats, relegating Labor and Liberal to scraps — and it’s not impossible that it could extend its reach to Victoria, where its centrist policies connect well with “Hamer” liberalism.

[NXT stop: the balance of power]

A West Australia First party could emerge. Jacqui Lambie, if she stays in the Senate, could run a lower-house team and take one of Tasmania’s forestry-centred seats — conservative Labor who vote Liberal to occasionally punish the former. Through rural NSW and southern Queensland, a progressive rural movement/network could develop, linking half a dozen candidates from the Hunter Valley up through the Liverpool Plains and Byron/Lismore, to the Queensland gas/killing fields, and built on the social coalition created by the Lock the Gate movement. Bob Katter, if he could stop behaving like a fuckwit for nine minutes, could grab a second northern seat.

There are other, less imminent possibilities — an Aboriginal Peoples Party could bury left/right differences and take one of the NT seats, a Party of the Poor could leverage a Senate seat or two — but let’s leave it at that. The key point is that even the mighty power of the “multiple lock” is starting to yield to the various forces now arrayed against it — class/region shifts, the increasing education levels of society, the rise of social media, and much more – though it is has immense power to slow this process and continue to ensure that we are ruled by a bunch of people who knew each other in six student unions 25 years ago. Once secondary parties become viable, the exhaustive preferential system does start to shift a little.

If there are four viable parties and some smaller ones competing, you can take a seat with a 22% primary vote. If NXT and the Greens developed a working alliance — in respectful competition, preferencing each other — then they could cut a swathe through the inner and “inner-middle” capital city regions. People keep looking for “our” Syriza, “our” Podemos. If they try to find it on the left, they’re looking in the wrong place. We’ve been prosperous for so long that our “anti-political” movement comes in centrist form, balancing class demands within it.

So next time I would think, if at all. But if it is this time, if there is a hung Parliament in the lower house, then the crossbenches should make a compact and hang the Parliament until it is blue in the face. It should simply refuse to offer even the slightest endorsement to either party until they have agreed to what would effectively be a constitutional convention, a rolling two- to five-year process, dedicate to thoroughly considering, debating and renovating the system with regard to:

• federal voting system, single v multi-member electorates, proportionality, preferentiality, the whole damn thing;
• public funding of parties and a genuine system of monitoring and capping public donations;
• a federal ICAC and the constitutionality and operation of the AFP, and intelligence agencies;
• federal v state carve-ups on water, land, and mining regulation, and on health and education provision;
• media ownership and control, and government co-subsidy of media outlets;
• indigenous sovereignty possibilities, such as a Nunavut-style autonomous province, or a new de facto indigenous-majority state carved out of Northern Australia, and other moves connected to a treaty with real content;
• a federal bill of rights; and
• national libel law reform, so that the use of libel as threat to choke free speech is removed.

That’d to be going on with. I’m not coming down on either side of all of these questions (I’m pretty wary about a bill of rights for example) — and the crucial points remain the first two. But it’s really time to stop simply putting patches on patches of a system whose design was commenced close to 150 years ago. The process could be started by the independents simply refusing to grant any party the stability to carry on with business as usual — now, or next time. I suspect no one will pay a blind bit of attention to this. Unless I am driven off the road on the weekend (“Yr truth is too dangerous, Mr Rundle — zee sheeple must never know!”) at which point everyone will say, “oh, what a terrible accident”.