Don’t believe Labor spin on who’s to blame for Pauline Hanson

Today, the 226 members of Australia’s 45^th Parliament will be sworn in.

Among the 76 new senators will be four new senators from One Nation, Nick Xenophon and two running mates from his namesake party, Derryn Hinch of Derryn Hinch’s Justice Party and familiar faces Jacqui Lambie, David Leyonjhelm of the Liberal Democrats and Bob Day of Family First.

Yes, the bar from Star Wars is back and it’s welcomed a few new members. Conventional wisdom is that the double dissolution election was intended to clean out the chequered cross bench that made Australia ungovernable for three years. Apparently, it has made the problem worse.

So next week, as we political tragics watch the unruly spectacle of all these new characters taking their place in the Senate, Labor will blame the impending chaos on the Turnbull Government. Specifically, on its reforms to Senate voting rules that, according to Labor, opened the door for One Nation’s dramatic revival.

Pauline Hanson’s second coming, they will tell us, is all Malcolm Turnbull’s fault.

How do we know? Because it’s the line Labor has been pushing for weeks.

In fact, Bill Shorten was blaming Pauline Hanson on the Liberals less than 48 hours after polling day. Taking time off from day one of his cross-country ‘victory’ lap, Shorten said that the Government’s Senate voting reforms ‘have made the situation worse.’

‘How on earth did Mr Turnbull think that an idea of reform could end up with two or three One Nation Senators in the Senate? This is farcical,’ Shorten said.

That line has had a good workout since then by Labor politicians galore. But unfortunately for Labor, the argument does not stack up.

Firstly, Pauline Hanson would have won under any system. One Nation’s vote of 9.14 per cent in Queensland means that Hanson comfortably achieved a quota in her own right (even with the higher quota under a ‘normal’ half-Senate election).

As for the other three One Nation senators, chances are that most of them would have won under the old system as well. The reason for this is that One Nation polled strongly enough in every state to have enjoyed a strong flow of preferences under the kind of complex preference-swap arrangements that we would have seen after the success that ‘preference-whisperer’ Glenn Druery enjoyed in 2013.

In fact, under the old system the new One Nation party room would probably be even bigger.

In Victoria, for example, the likely flow of votes from parties such as Family First, Shooters and Fishers and the Christian Democrats under a preference swap arrangement would have been enough for One Nation to achieve a full quota. This means that One Nation’s lead Senate candidate would have overtaken the Liberals’ Jane Hume for the twelfth Senate spot in Victoria.

One Nation would have had an even greater chance of cobbling together quotas in smaller states like Tasmania and South Australia.

If the government has any responsibility at all for the unusually large Senate crossbench, it admittedly lies in the Prime Minister’s decision to hold a double dissolution. By having each state elect the full contingent of 12 senators (as opposed to the usual six at a normal half-Senate election), the quota required for a senator to be elected was halved from the usual 14.3 per cent of the vote to a much lower 7.15 per cent.

Labor has also – correctly – pointed out that the new system has allowed for the exhaustion of votes for the first time (that is, for voters’ preferences to extinguish before reaching a successful candidate).

This means that in some cases, it has been possible for the ‘last candidate standing’ at the end of the count in some states to be elected with less than the double dissolution quota of 7.15 per cent of the vote.

For example, Bob Day in South Australia had a vote of just over 6.8 per cent after preferences at the final count, the highest remaining of any candidate. This was enough to see the Family First senator scrape back in and grab the final Senate place in that state. David Leyonjhelm won the last spot in New South Wales with a vote after preferences of 6.1 per cent.

But even though Labor is partly correct on the ‘exhaustion’ factor, it is not as big a factor as they would have had you believe. During the debate on the Senate voting reform bills in March, Labor claimed that the number of exhausted votes in the election would be over 3.4 million. In the end, the exhaustion rate was less than a third of that. Still high, but arguably not enough to make a significant difference to the final composition of the Senate.

Besides, all of this ignores the major flaw in the old Senate voting system that the Turnbull reforms have successfully fixed: The ability of political parties to ‘game’ the vote by manipulating the old group ticket voting system.

You know, the system that made it possible for the likes of Ricky Muir to get elected in 2013 with just 0.5 per cent of first preference votes in Victoria (after ending up with a staggering 14.9 per cent of the vote thanks to an elaborate preference swap arrangement).

The system that meant that Victorians who parked their votes with single-issue parties such as the Animal Justice Party, the WikiLeaks Party, Drug Law Reform and Stop CSG ended up electing a senator from the Australian Motoring Enthusiast Party.

But Muir’s is not the only example of bizarre Senate results. That same year in WA, a senator was provisionally elected from the virtually unknown Australian Sports Party despite receiving just 2,997 votes. (The result from that election was, of course, later scuttled by the High Court due to the disappearance of a stack of votes, resulting in the 2014 ‘re-run’ WA Senate election.)

The election before that, John Madigan, then of the Democratic Labour Party, was elected with just 2.34 per cent of the vote. And in 2004, the bungling of party apparatchiks in Victoria saw Labor’s preferences flow to Family First instead of the Greens, resulting in the unlikely election of Steve Fielding.

Yes, the lower double dissolution quota and some exhaustion of votes has made it possible for some senators at this election to be elected off low first preference votes as well. Examples include Derryn Hinch, elected off a first preference vote of six per cent, David Leyonhjelm with 3.1 per cent, and Bob Day with 2.9 per cent. As with the Ricky Muirs and Steve Fieldings of the world, all of these senators relied on a hefty flow of preferences to get them over the line.

But the key difference is that unlike Muir and Fielding, the senators elected in 2016 received preferences allocated directly by the voters, not by political parties.

In other words, every single cross bench senator is there because somebody, somewhere out there voted for them, either as their number one choice or as one of their subsequent preferences. That’s more that could be said for many of the crossbenchers in the old parliament.

The fact that it was possible, under the old system, for a senator to be elected not because of the wishes of voters but as a result of backroom deals by political parties was arguably undemocratic and inarguably unacceptable.

But don’t take my word for it. Or Malcolm Turnbull’s. Or Nick Xenophon’s or Richard Di Natale’s, both of whom supported the reforms.

Ask the Labor Party. Well, the old Labor Party, the one that was purportedly concerned about improving the democratic process.

As the dust settled after the 2013 federal election, ALP National Secretary George Wright wrote to then-electoral matters committee chair Tony Smith, with concerns about the rise of preference-whispering arrangements, claiming that ‘it is clear that candidates have been elected with little public support… through the manipulation of micro-party preferences.’ Specifically, Wright cited ‘the current operation of group voting tickets in harvesting preferences and by doing so delivering outcomes that are not an expression of genuine voter intent.’

The electoral matters committee subsequently released a report into the Senate voting system which mirrored Wright’s concerns. It contained a series of recommendations for reforms, including the introduction of optional preferential voting and the abolition of group voting tickets.

The committee’s report was bipartisan, and its recommendations were fully supported by the Labor Party. Labor deputy chair Alan Griffin encouraged the adoptions of the report’s recommendations in parliament, arguing that group ticket voting ‘conflicts with the democratic will of the voters’. On the unlikely election of Ricky Muir, Griffin said that there was ‘absolutely no doubt that the overwhelming majority of people who effectively ended up voting for him had absolutely no idea that that is where they would end up delivering their democratic support.’

Gary Gray, Labor’s then-shadow minister responsible for electoral matters, went further, saying that the recommendations would ‘significantly strengthen our democratic process by reducing the capacity for manipulation and increasing transparency in our electoral system’ and that ‘it would be a travesty for Australian democracy if these careful and thought-through reforms were not in place in time for the next federal election’

But somewhere along the way, Labor’s tune changed. By the end of 2015, there were reports of a split in Labor on the reforms. Apparently, Gray and Griffin were losing the argument to the likes of Senate hardheads Stephen Conroy and Sam Dastyari, who perhaps were seeking to ingratiate Labor with the unruly Senate crossbench and create further headaches for the government.

Whatever the reason, by the time the Turnbull Government got around to legislating reforms based on the recommendations of the electoral matters committee, bipartisanship on the issue had disintegrated. The Coalition had to rely on Nick Xenophon and the Greens to get the legislation through. Labor fought it until the bitter end.

Were Labor on the wrong side of history, fighting to retain a system that they had until recently slammed as a blight on democracy?

Arguably yes. While some may not like the 2016 Senate result, there is no question that it better reflects the democratic will of the people.

Yes, the double dissolution quota has seen the surprising election of a handful of senators on relatively low first preference votes, as in 2013.

But unlike 2013, this time around there has been no preference whispering, no backroom deals.

Whichever way you look at it, the new system is a clear improvement. We have the Government and, to their credit, Nick Xenophon and the Greens to thank.

Labor, faced with the opportunity to help fix Senate voting, chose instead to engage in opportunistic spin. In its reaction to the Senate result since, it looks like it still is.