Malcolm Turnbull's interpretation of the Queensland state election outcome is both right and wrong. Right in that it was fought primarily on state issues, but wrong that there are no federal implications.
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The return of a state Labor government is always bad news for a Coalition federal government. If the federal government is travelling well, it can shrug off the result. But the Turnbull government needs some good news and the Queensland result was far from it.
The outcome also exacerbated tensions within the Coalition between conservatives and moderates, as well as about the consequences of a party model that includes Nationals and Liberals: the Liberal National Party. The tensions extend to what voter support for the One Nation Party means for the conservative side of politics.
The Queensland result also again shows how fractured Australian society now is and how difficult this makes governing for any government. Queensland has unique characteristics as the most rural and regional of the states, but the lessons are nevertheless clear.
The major parties continue to lose their grip on voters. The drift away from these parties continues. In this case, the combined vote of the two major parties (three really, given that the LNP is an amalgamation) was only 70 per cent. Of the remaining 30 per cent, One Nation polled 14 per cent and the Greens 10 per cent, while Katter's Australian Party showed it is still a force in Queensland's sugar belt.
One Nation set itself up to be seen as a dismal failure by building up excessively high expectations (that it would win 10 seats and hold the balance of power). In reality, it still did very well for a minor party.
Regardless of the parliament's eventual shape – it may include representatives of all three minor parties plus several independents – the vote demonstrates the sheer range of opinion within the state and, ultimately, Australia. The impact is lessened by the fact that Queensland is the only state without an upper house. If it had one, the new state government, like the Turnbull government, would lack an upper-house majority and be reduced to tortuous negotiation of its legislation.
Whatever stance any Queensland government takes on contentious issues, like coal mining or environmental protection, will strike bitter opposition from one section of the community. Such opposition is often far deeper than anything exhibited within the traditional two-party system. Compromise, much less consensus, is almost impossible for any government to achieve.
The Queensland election also again showed how central preferential voting is to the Australian political system, especially if preference allocation is compulsory. If the two evenly balanced major parties are each winning only about 35 per cent of votes, then many seats will be decided by second, third and fourth preferences. Preference distribution is crucial and relationships between parties are always important even though they are desperately fighting each other to win first-preference votes and seats.
This has several consequences. At the party level, how-to-vote-card haggling between the party machines is inevitable. It takes a bold major party to declare a minor party like One Nation unacceptable, as Labor did.
At the level of the voter, second preferences matter whatever the parties decide. Green preferences will largely favour Labor candidates, but some will flow to the LNP. A decisive number of One Nation preferences will also flow to Labor, even though the latter claims not to want them.
Ultimately, the greatest significance of any minor party to the final outcome is when it serves as a way for voters to find their way from one side of major party politics to the other. That is why One Nation badly hurts the Coalition. It disproportionately takes first preferences away from it but does not give them back in the same measure as second preferences. The Democratic Labour Party used to hurt Labor in a similar fashion.
The Greens don't hurt Labor in the same way, even when they win inner-city seats, because Greens voters predominantly give their second preferences to Labor. This is not to underestimate the anger Labor exhibits towards the Greens for trying to "steal" its inner-city base, but Labor should get used to it.
On One Nation, the Coalition continues to ruminate about how best to defend itself from defections in rural and regional areas. Some Coalition conservatives have a fixation that all would be rosy if their party/parties moved to the right, though that misreads the situation.
Nevertheless, some now suggest a de-amalgamation of the LNP back to Liberal and Nationals would counter One Nation more effectively, allowing the Nationals to reclaim their "rural" brand. Presumably, this would mean more conservative-looking Nationals campaigning in the bush while more progressive-looking Liberals tackled Labor and the Greens in the cities.
But doing that would be to forget why the amalgamation happened in the first place. It was an attempt to combine resources, simplify the message to voters and eliminate damaging rifts between two conservative parties. Voters were totally confused as to what sort of government they would get when the two separate parties came together to form a Coalition government.
Effectively, this would produce a Turnbull-type government, in which a post-election Coalition agreement is reached between the Liberal and National leaders. In this situation, a progressive Liberal leader is tied up in knots by a conservative junior partner.
In short, there is no obvious quick fix to the electoral consequences of the deep divisions among Coalition voters and MPs.
John Warhurst is an emeritus professor of political science at the Australian National University.
