Primer on Australian Politics

I was working on Part 2 of my Australian trip recap, when I decided that this was worth a post all on its own…
When I was staying at his house, my friend Rob gave me a lesson in Australian politics. It’s interesting but also kind of bizarre and complicated. For instance, did you know that the prime minister, who is a member of parliament, can be deposed and replaced by his/her own party in parliament at any time? Did you know that this does not trigger an election, either? Did you know that the prime minister can dissolve parliament and call for a new election if either house of parliament fails to pass a given piece of legislation twice? Or that in what is called a double dissolution, after dissolving parliament and winning the resulting election, the prime minister could then require parliament to meet as a single house to vote on the failed legislation that triggered the election in the first place?
This all came up because Kevin Rudd of the Labor Party (left-wing), who was elected PM in 2007, was extremely popular (70+%) even earlier this year. His main issue was climate change/cap and trade, which he called “the great moral issue of our time.” The legislation was set to pass shortly before the Copenhagen summit, with the opposition Liberal Party/National Party (right-wing) coalition being led by a moderate named Malcolm Turnbull (Turnbull once held negotiations with both Labor and Liberal to determine which party he’d join). The legislation had already failed once in the Senate (which the coalition controlled), and Turnbull thought if they defeated it again, then Rudd would call an election and the Liberals would get trounced at the ballot box. Two days before the cap and trade vote, however, Turnbull’s leadership of the party was challenged and he was replaced by Tony Abbott as opposition leader. Abbott galvanized the opposition and defeated the cap and trade legislation in the Senate. Everyone expected Prime Minister Rudd to respond by calling for a double dissolution, but instead, noting that public support for cap and trade was slipping a bit, Rudd trotted out a junior aide to announce to the press that Labor was shelving climate legislation for four years. The press and the public immediately turned on Rudd, wondering how something he had been calling “the great moral issue of our time” for three years could simply be given up on so suddenly and quietly, and put on the shelf for several more years. Nobody knew what he believed anymore, and his popularity started sinking quickly.
A few months later Rudd instituted a super-profits tax on the mining companies. Rudd’s Treasury Department estimated the tax would cost the mining companies $12 billion, but the mining companies knew Treasury had made an accounting error, and that the real price tag of the tax was $30 billion. So the mining companies were hammering Rudd and Labor with TV commercials, and the public realized that mining is the reason for Australia’s economy doing so well, so they soured on Rudd even more, sinking his approval rating to under 30%. Labor realized they couldn’t sustain the withering attack ads by mining from then until the likely October election, so the Labor MPs voted to oust Kevin Rudd as their party leader and replace him with a member of his inner “kitchen” cabinet named Julia Gillard. Gillard, even though she was in on all Rudd’s decisions, because she was a new prime minister she was able to negotiate with the mining companies to knock the super-profits tax down to $10 billion (and then she claimed it was a win for the government, based on the faulty $12 billion original tax claim, but it was really a win for mining).
Anyway, the Australian election was held on 21 August and resulted in a hung parliament (neither Labor nor the Liberal/National coalition held an outright majority in the lower house). Last week Labor reached an agreement with the few independent MPs to form a minority government. Who knows how long it’ll hold together though.
Back to the Australian electoral system. The method for electing MPs and Senators is rather byzantine, to say the least. Australia uses preference voting, meaning you either rank all the parties from 1-8 or whatever, or you rank all the candidates from 1-however many there are (in Senate races, that can be more than 60!). By voting for parties, you are in essence voting for whatever candidate preference rankings that the party placed with the election commission. In preference voting, all the 1st-preference votes are tallied. If no candidate has reached the vote threshold for election, then the last-place candidate is eliminated from the race, and the 2nd-preference votes from those ballots are added to everyone else’s totals. If a candidate still doesn’t reach the vote threshold, then the second-to-last candidate is eliminated (I believe), and the preference votes on those ballots are re-allotted accordingly. At this point I honestly have no idea what happens if candidates still haven’t reached the vote threshold. And why do I keep saying “vote threshold”? Well, because in the lower house of parliament, the vote threshold is simply majority of total ballots cast (50% + 1). In the Senate, however, the threshold is generally 14.3%. What?!? Here’s why. Senate elections are state-wide, with six of the twelve Senate seats from each state up for election every three years. So with six seats available, the vote threshold is one-seventh of the total votes plus one (if only two seats were open, for example, then the threshold would be one-third of the votes plus one). Each party gives all its votes to its 1st-preference candidate. Once that candidate reaches the vote threshold, then all the party’s votes go to their 2nd-preference candidate. And on it goes. According to Rob, this lower vote threshold means that minor parties have a far better chance of getting elected to the Senate, rather than the House. In Rob’s opinion, preference voting makes it even harder for minor parties to win seats in the House than would a straight-up winner-takes-all election like is done here in the States. The complicated vote-counting system is also why it can take days or weeks to count all the votes correctly!
Now that I have you all thoroughly confused after my description of the Australian electoral system, I figure you all will have a little more appreciation for the overall simplicity of the American electoral system!