Back on March 10 there was published in The Canberra Times an article by me headlined “Palmer party saved Greens”. It looked forward to the Western Australian Senate re-election on April 5 and, among other things, predicted that Scott Ludlam would win his seat again. The article noted the similarity between the Senate results in South Australia and Western Australia in September 2013 and listed those who were elected.
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In SA these people were elected, in order of election: Cory Bernardi, Nick Xenophon, Penny Wong, Sarah Hanson-Young, Bob Day and Simon Birmingham. In WA these were elected, again in order of election: David Johnston, Joe Bullock, Michaelia Cash, Linda Reynolds, Wayne Dropulich and Scott Ludlam. What is truly extraordinary about the above lists is that only one name was Labor in each state, Wong in SA and Bullock in WA.
Readers may be interested to know the statistics for the progressive parties in each of these states. In WA, on first preference votes, Labor had 1.861 quotas and the Greens 0.664, for a total of 2.525. In SA, again on first preference votes, Labor had 1.586 quotas and the Greens 0.496, for a total of 2.082.
The important point is that in neither state did these parties have three quotas, or even close thereto. They were, therefore, bound to win two seats combined, not three. In both states Labor was closer to two seats than the Greens were to one.
So, what saved Hanson-Young and Ludlam? Answer: in both cases it was the combination of the present electoral system and the ticket preferences of the Palmer United Party. The WA re-election count is now complete and, at first glance, it seems only two changes have occurred. First, the minor party senator elected is Dio Wang of Palmer United and not Dropulich of the Sports Party.
Second, Ludlam has achieved a quota on primary votes and so is the third senator elected, after Johnston and Bullock. With a quota of 182,544 votes Ludlam has received 198,845 votes.The combined Labor-Greens vote is now 2.599 quotas, being 1.507 for Labor and 1.092 for the Greens.
That there has been such a big swing from Labor to the Greens can, in my opinion, be blamed upon the candidacy of Bullock. At first glance this looks a disaster for the Labor-Greens combination. Having received 2.525 quotas in September 2013, they could get only 2.599 quotas in April 2014.
That first glance is not good enough for me. So I decided to do a two-party preferred count – which is easy enough to do, though I lack the space here to explain my methods. In September last year the preferred votes for parties of the right were 827,755 (63.2 per cent) while the Labor-Greens vote was 481,989 (36.8 per cent). Last month the preferred vote for the right was 735,801 (57.6 per cent) while for Labor-Greens it was 541,130 (42.4 per cent). So there was a swing to the left of 5.6 per cent.
Last year there were three candidates left in the count for the sixth place with the quota for election being 187,183 votes.The votes were 163,784 for Pratt, 131,022 for Ludlam and 79,023 for Wang. The final votes after the distribution of Wang’s preferences were 200,866 for Ludlam and 166,551 for Pratt. So Pratt received only 2767 preferences from Wang’s pile of 79,023 votes. From that fact readers will understand why the heading for my last article was “Palmer party saved Greens”. Without the Palmer ticket votes both Ludlam and Hanson-Young would have been defeated last year. At the re-election last month the final votes for the sixth place were 188,169 for Reynolds and 176,042 for Pratt.
To sum up: last year a different turn of the wheel might have seen Pratt re-elected at the expense of Ludlum but she did not come even remotely close to being re-elected at the expense of Reynolds. Last year’s WA vote was an absolute debacle for Labor-Greens. This year’s vote, by contrast, came very close to giving Labor-Greens the success of winning three seats out of six.
Let me give a final thought for those Labor supporters who are now feeling depressed. As I stated at the beginning of this article Western Australia was not the only Senate debacle for Labor in September 2013. South Australia was even worse. And yet six months after that SA Senate debacle Jay Weatherill was able to win a state election in SA and is now the only Labor premier in the country.
Malcolm Mackerras is a visiting fellow at the Public Policy Institute in the Australian Catholic University’s Canberra campus.
