A new party for the centre? (1 Viewer)

[Generator]

An old article, but, given that I saved the link so that I could one day use it as a launching pad for a new discussion, I guess that I'd be best to throw it up now before I walk away. Thread one of three -

Mike Steketee: There's room for a party at the political centre

The Democrats may be in terminal decline, but a large group of disenchanted Liberals would vote for a party like the one Don Chipp led
August 31, 2006


THE Democrats are dead: long live the minor parties. At least, that is what Australian voters seem to think.

Don Chipp's death this week highlighted that the party he founded and led to a position of significant influence during more than a quarter of a century seems now to be in inexorable decline. If the Democrats' four remaining senators and one upper house member in each of NSW and South Australia lose their seats in the next round of elections, that leaves room for a third party at or near the middle of the political spectrum, a socially progressive, environmentally conscious grouping with the potential to appeal to disaffected moderates in the Liberal Party, as well as to social democrats unhappy with Labor.

How it is filled - by a new party, by the Greens or even by independents - depends on a whole series of factors. But the long-term trends suggest it is not ground that will be easily recovered by the main parties.

For more than 30 years the loyalty of voters towards the Coalition and Labor has been declining.

In 1975, minor parties and independents attracted 4.1 per cent of the vote in the House of Representatives. By 2004, that had increased to 15.7 per cent. Offered a wider choice, voters are increasingly prepared to shop around. And those sticking with the main parties are more loosely attached than previously.

Minor parties still have to break into the lower house, where the need to reach 50 per cent of the vote after preferences in individual seats has proved too high a hurdle. But the Greens are a threat to Labor in inner-city electorates in Sydney and Melbourne. In what have been traditionally safe Labor seats, they can win if they can lift their vote above that of the Liberals and gain from their preferences.

Independents with local appeal already have broken into the House of Representatives. In 1990 Ted Mack became the first genuine independent in a half century to win a federal lower house seat, North Sydney, where he had been mayor and state MP.

There are now three independents, all in country seats, in the house and they are encouraging more with high local profiles to run in next year's federal election.

In the Senate, the vote for candidates not representing the main parties was 19.3 per cent in 2004, despite the Coalition securing an unexpected majority of seats. Judging by the findings of the Australian Election Study conducted after the previous election, that is not a gift that voters intended giving to the Government. Fifty per cent of those surveyed said they thought it better when the Government did not control the Senate, compared with 33 per cent who favoured Government control.

Although the big parties always have encompassed varied views and priorities, the differences have been widening and the parties are finding it harder to keep them under one roof. It is a problem often hidden from public view through party discipline, which is stricter in Australia than in virtually any other Western democracy. But it broke into the open recently with the Liberal revolt over asylum-seeker legislation, forcing John Howard to withdraw the bill.

It was evident, too, in the previous election in the so-called doctors' wives' vote: well-off professionals, often women, who deserted the Liberals over issues such as Iraq and refugees. Despite a national two-party preferred swing to the Coalition of 1.8per cent, Howard suffered a swing against him of 3.2 per cent in his seat of Bennelong and there were similar movements in other traditionally Liberal strongholds in Sydney held by Philip Ruddock and Joe Hockey. Most of these votes flowed to Labor via Green preferences.

Labor frontbencher Lindsay Tanner wrote recently that, while Labor had been quite successful in winning support in the rapidly growing ranks of tertiary-educated professional and managerial workers, this had not compensated for the fall in numbers of blue-collar voters or the decline in their overall commitment to Labor.

The barriers against the formation of a new party are formidable. The Democrats had a flying start in 1977 because Chipp, as a former Liberal minister, was nationally known and charismatic. Such figures emerge only rarely. Leadership or lack of it is one of the reasons for the Democrats' decline.

The Australian Election Study found that 40 per cent of voters surveyed said they disliked the Democrats' then leader, Andrew Bartlett, and fewer than 9 per cent liked him. By far his biggest rating, 51 per cent, was from people who were neutral, including from those who didn't know much about him. Failing to make any impression on voters is almost as serious an indictment of political leadership as alienating them. But, then, with many voters already having given up on the Democrats following chronic infighting, it always was going to be hard sledding for Bartlett.

Another of the Democrats' problems is that they drifted to the Left of the political spectrum, not only reducing their appeal to disaffected Liberals but putting them in more direct competition with the Greens. Judging by what voters say, there seems still to be scope for the kind of party Chipp positioned in the middle of the political spectrum. In the Australian Election Study, 38 per cent of voters placed themselves in the dead centre, compared with just 27 per cent who identified with the Left and 36 per cent with the Right.

While Howard makes some sort of accommodation with the moderates in his party - as he did by pulling back on his asylum-seeker legislation - he may be able to stave off the mass defections that could give impetus to a new centre party, particularly in the absence of an obvious leader. Disaffected Labor supporters are mainly on the left of the party and more inclined to find a home with the Greens than a Democrats-style party. If the Greens adopted a more moderate tone and particularly if they shed their anti-economic development image, they may be able to harvest more disillusioned Liberal voters.

Mike Steketee is The Australian's National affairs editor.


Source: The Australian

I thought that an introduction of sorts would be in order, but the above article more than covers what I was going to say, and it does so in a way that far outstrips what I had planned to write.

With the Democrats no longer being a political party with a future and the Greens being a protest party that sits to the left of the ALP, do you think that there's room for a new party in the centre? If not, do you think that the Greens would be able to become a truly constructive force in Australian politics if they managed to gain the balance of power, or would they continue to be a protest party first and foremost?

 

[withoutaface]

The problem with the idea of having a third party in the centre is the concept of asking three people to pick a number between 1 and 10 with the closest winning pie. If one picks 4, another picks 6 and a third picks 5, then the third person will almost always lose out. Extend that example to 20 million random selections of a number between 1 and 10, with the person who gets the closest the most times winning, then the chance of the third person winning are virtually zero.

The only way the greens will have an influence will be if they hold balance with the ALP, but I have my doubts that ALP policy would be able to shift far left enough to appease the greens while keeping the dominant ALP right faction on board, and thus you'd have a term where nothing much is acheived due to lack of consensus.

 

[dieburndie]

If WAF means what I think he does, that 1 and 10 are the far right and the far left respectively and the Liberals are 4 and ALP are 6 with a centre party being 5, then I very much agree.
The Democrats could win votes as a centre party in the 70's, when the gap was wider and Labor were about a 9, but with the right wing dominant in Labor it seems the area a centre party could account for between the two current major parties is small.
However, I do think a lot of people cast their vote according to competence rather than policy. The reason ALP aren't winning elections isn't because they are on the left, it's because they are mostly terrible politicians.
As the two major parties swing right, I can't see the Greens having any impact apart from accounting for voters on the left/far left who abandon Labor (and that's 10-15% max).
Before a new party arises in the centre, It might be nice to have a decent party on the left.