Labor looks like becoming the “natural party of government”, but in doing so, it is abandoning its traditional role as the party of initiative. In this post, I’ll discuss the first of these points
Labor as the natural party of government
Prediction in politics is always tricky, but it seems fair to say that Anthony Albanese is well on the way to realising his stated goal of making Labor the “natural party of government” in Australia. Assuming a continuation of the current party system, that leaves the LNP as a party of protest, the B-team which is elected only when Labor has been in too long, or stumbles really badly.
Indeed, this has arguably been the case for some time at the state level. The LNP has been out of office almost continuously since 2000 in Queensland, South Australia,Victoria, and the ACT. It took the truly spectacular corruption and incompetence of NSW Labor to give the LNP three terms there. In WA, they managed two terms on the back of Alan Carpenter’s bizarre decision to readmit allies of the notorious Brian Burke to the ministry.
Federally, however, the Liberals have been competitive until recently. Although it never seemed likely that they could win a majority at the 2025 election, a minority LNP government seemed possible until quite near election day. The disastrous outcome reflected two main factors. First, having campaigned against Albanese’s Voice referendum on the content-free but almost invariably successful slogan “If you don’t know, vote NO’, the LNP convinced themselves they had tapped the support of a silent majority of anti-woke Australians. Then, the horrific advent of the Trump regime made support for Trumpist policies untenable, a fact that was only realised too late.
But the result has only reinforced the shift that was already underway from rightwing neoliberalism to Trumpism. Neoliberalism in the Liberal Party was represented almost entirely by representatives of and candidates for metropolitan seats, nearly all of which have been lost to Labor and independent candidates. The result is a party whose members typical voters increasingly resemble those of One Nation – aggrieved low education voters from peri-urban and regional Australia. Having gained control of the party, it seems unlikely that they will hand it back to the urban upper-middle class that previously dominated it. That leaves the Liberals and Nationals fighting with One Nation and other rightwing parties for perhaps 40 per cent of the electorate.
Labor hasn’t gained the support of the remaining 60 per cent, but it doesn’t need to. The distance between the Greens (and, to a lesser extent, progressive independents) on one side and LNP/ONP on the other is such that Labor will usually get second preferences from both. So Labor will win unless its candidate finishes third in the first preference count or else so far behind that that the inevitable leakage of preferences is enough to produce a majority for the initial leader (or of course, where a non-Labor candidate wins a first-round majority, but that’s rare these days.
In the context of a single-member electorate, the usual outcome is the best reflection of the preferences of voters. If a Labor candidate beats, the LNP on preferences, that’s because a majority of voters preferred Labor to the LNP. And since the LNP candidate’s preferences would also have flowed to Labor, a different majority would have preferred Labor to Greens in a two-candidate race. In the jargon of voting theory, Labor is the Condorcet winner.
The difficulties arise when this outcome is repeated over many electorates. The effect of a single-member system is to magnify majorities, producing parliaments that are quite unrepresentative of the voters.
As we have seen, Labor can win a comfortable House of Representatives majority with 35 per cent first preference support, and could probably form a government even with a vote as low as 30 per cent, and the support of a few independents.
Fortunately for Australian democracy, the Senate is elected on a proportional representation basis, meaning that Labor can’t just push legislation through regardless of the merits. A shift to PR in the House of Representatives would be highly desirable, but it won’t happened until Labor loses its majority and (given that independents depend on localised support) probably not even then.
John Quiggin 
I am somewhat confused. Why is it better to have proportional representation in each district? It sounds quite confusing.
Some people are talking about doing proportional RCV here. Can you do that if the elections are non-partisan, such as at a city level (as is often the case here in Cali)?
Is the idea that these elections lead to less extreme outcomes? (That might be worth something.) Do you basically then end up with 3 parties instead of just 2? (Where I am, we only have 1 party … which isn’t great.)
And then, how do the governing decisions get made? Just by majority vote?
I think I would need to experience this type of voting firsthand. I don’t play any games – hardly ever even poker. I am just now realizing, maybe I should work on this. I’ve never even bet on a horse.
By definition, you can’t have proportional representation (PR) in a single-member district. Sometimes people who have no familiarity with either PR or RCV (ranked-choice voting)–also known as preferential voting, or AV (the Alternative Vote), or IRV (Instant Run-Off Voting)–confuse them with each other, and inaccurately and imprecisely refer to a proposal for RCV as being a proposal for PR.
If you have a situation where a city is going to elect a council of twenty-five members, you could have the city divided into twenty-five single-member districts each electing one council member, or into five five-member districts each, or you could have the whole city voting as a single district with all twenty-five members elected by the whole of the city (in the US often referred to as ‘at-large’ election). If you have single-member districts you can’t have PR; if you have five-member districts or at-large election you can have PR (although non-PR alternatives are also theoretically available)–but PR with five five-member districts will produce less proportional results than at-large PR.
The reason John Quiggin is giving for saying that PR is better is basically that with PR a party needs half the vote, or at any rate close to half the vote, before it can win a majority of the seats, whereas in non-proportional systems it can be much easier for a party to win a majority of the seats with much less than half the vote. John Quiggin evidently thinks that it’s a bad thing for a party to obtain political control while having much less than half of the vote: if you don’t agree with that you probably won’t agree with his argument in favour of PR.
RCV is just as easy to use in non-partisan elections as in partisan elections. PR is both conceptually harder to define and harder to implement in practice in non-partisan elections, but there are at least some PR systems which can be implemented in a non-partisan way (although it reamins harder to explain why you’d want to).
If governing decisions are made by a city council, then they’d be made by majority vote (regardless of how the council was elected). If governing decisions are made by a single mayor, then that one mayor would by definition be a majority (one out of one is a majority), but for the election of a single mayor, as with any other single-winner election, PR is not an option.
Thank you!! This was very helpful.
I didn’t get this bit though: “PR with five five-member districts will produce less proportional results than at-large PR.”
The people here pushing the PRCV are indeed also wanting multi-member districts. (There is a charter revision process happening.)
They do not seem to say much about the non/partisan thing. They seem to appeal to people’s alleged race-based voting – which I don’t think actually even happens much in LA. (We had an exceedingly stoopid faux scandal a couple years ago – involving a secret taping of a redistricting-related meeting. I could go on and on about how bad it was. The local rag imo completely defamed people and blew the whole thing out of proportion. And now, we get manipulators trying to take advantage. I will say, they seem sincere. I do not know who’s paying for it though.)
There is another suggestion I think I like more – called star voting. Here is a link if you’re bored:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1O8eGoLjtWmD-toOMD0DE9ZbxpQiU3fAd/view
As a moderate temperamented person though, I don’t know that I’d go for either of these regimes without a whole lot more demonstration of it. And, maybe it would have to sunset, too. LA is politically dysfunctional in the extreme. Voters are sitting ducks. I think RCV might be okay but I’m not ready for anything more.
Thanks again!
The exact numbers depend on precisely which form of PR is being used, and also on how each party’s vote is geographically distributed, but to a rough approximation it’s like this.
If you have twenty-five members elected at large, then any party which has 4% of the city-wide vote is sure to get at least one member elected, unless the PR system has an explicit threshold higher than that. Otherwise, the votes which elect no members will all be for parties with less than 4% of the vote.
If you have five five-member districts, then any party which has 20% of the city-wide vote is sure to get at least one member elected, one way or another, but parties with a city-wide vote share of anything less than 20% are not in that position. They may still win seats, depending on precisely which form of PR is being used and (more importantly) on how their vote is spread across the districts, but there is a much higher chance of more votes going to parties which elect no members at all. More or all of the seats will go to larger parties than under the at-large system.
What’s more, the more fine-grained system allows for greater proportionality even between the parties which do get members elected. To illustrate, think of this example. If there are exactly two parties, both with voting support mostly evenly distributed across the city, and if one of those two gets just a few more votes than the other, then under the at-large system the larger party will win thirteen seats to the other’s twelve, whereas under a system of five five-member districts the larger party will probably win 3-2 in each district, producing a final result of 15-10, which is less proportional (in this scenario) than 13-12.
I didn’t look at your link, I just glanced at the Wikipedia article on STAR voting. Score voting was something I’ve seen described before (only under the alternative name of ‘range voting’). I wasn’t previously aware of the idea of combining it with the kind of automatic runoff described, but I had wondered about whether it would be possible to combine range voting with some kind of runoff: interesting to see that the idea has been developed more than I realised.
John Quiggin is advocating for PR (in some form), for the reason I mentioned (or so I think), but I’m not advocating for anything in particular.
Wow, thank you again – this was also very helpful!! Fwiw, in many places here, we’ve moved away from at-large voting because it is thought that it disadvantages minority group voters. I am really going to have to chew on all this for a while. It’s tricky because I do think that race is a factor in some places – however, not all of them, I think. But I could be wrong.
Years ago, I read a famous law professor’s book on the subject, Lani Guinier’s book – The Tyranny of the Majority – but unfortunately I have forgotten almost all of it, under the use it or lose it principle, or possibly due to hardware suboptimality – big phooey – although I do recall a part about music at high school dances. Maybe I should read it again.
Thank you so much! It’s kind of fun. Also scary, a bit.
Some groups of voters are geographically concentrated; some groups of voters are more evenly distributed geographically. Small groups which are geographically concentrated do better under district systems than under at-large systems; for small groups which are evenly distributed, it can be the other way around. Thus in Australia, the Nationals, a party whose support comes almost entirely from rural areas, does better in the elections which use single-member districts, while the Greens, whose support is more evenly spread (although with a significant tendency to be higher in inner-urban areas), do better in Statewide PR elections (although they have started winning a few inner-urban single-member districts).
If US at-large elections do not use PR, then they would offer little chance to minority groups whether geographically concentrated or not; but if US systems for drawing districts do not have the kind of rules we have in Australia which mostly have the effect of producing geographically compact districts, then there’s more scope for drawing districts where a particular minority group is concentrated, improving their chances of gaining representation.
There are multiple factors which complicate the question of what the effects of an electoral system will be. It’s easy to find examples of countries which have extremely similar electoral systems but dramatically different party systems.
Yes – it seems very complicated.
I have an online friend who thinks we should all become independents, because he thinks the 2 party system we have here tends towards extremism. I am not convinced – yet, I’ve never really been in a proportional system so maybe it’s hard for me to imagine. Here, our third parties seem to create disasters a good bit of the time. But I can’t say that I have a handle on it.
I wonder what game would make me better at this sort of thing. I need to exercise my brain more.