Hung parliament really does change the paradigm

Before the last election collective wisdom was that voters wanted one or the other party in power, and consequently that this hung parliament is an aberration. Our latest qualitative poll suggests that view may be wrong and that Labor in particular, and the electorate in general, may need to live with hung parliaments, or the prospect of them, for quite some time.

The last election was the culmination of pressures that have been in the system since around 1994.

When Joe Hockey made his comments about bank interest rates Labor leader Julia Gillard claimed Hockey was “Hansonite” and that Labor was the party of “reform”.

In truth, the major period of “reform” in the sense that Gillard used the word, occurred between 1983 and 2007. That is when the dollar was floated, banking and finance deregulated, tariffs slashed, social benefits means-tested, the GST introduced and personal tax rates flattened.

These reforms were never popular and invoked two reactions to them – one on the right, and one on the left. The one on the right exploded into Hansonism, attracting blue collar conservatives from both the Labor and Liberal Parties to the stage where in the 1998 Queensland State Election One Nation was the second most popular political party in the state.

The one on the left was contained by the ALP, who when Keating became Prime Minister largely adopted the cultural symbols of the left, while still more or less conforming to the economic reform agenda.

This led to a percentage of middle class moderates deserting the Liberal Party for the ALP, but it kept in check the growth of the Greens, and maintained the Lib/Lab duopoly.

It also gave John Howard his 11 years of ascendancy as he deftly used the “culture wars” to position the ALP as “elistist” at the same time eviscerating One Nation and claiming many of its voters in the guise of “Howard Battlers”.

I’ll call this group on the left the “left-liberals”.

2007 was their revenge; 2010 their breakout.

I know a lot about these voters because they frequently form the single largest bloc of respondents in our online surveys, and the increase in their level of discontent with both parties has been obvious for quite some time.

I’m calling them “left-liberals” not to indicate that they have come from the Liberal Party – in fact they are mostly from Labor – but to indicate that they more or less sit in the European liberal tradition and so are more social democrats than socialists.

Up until 2010 they stuck with Labor but only for fear that if they didn’t John Howard would benefit. (Dislike of John Howard was the strongest voting motivator for all of his reign). They also needed to be persuaded that the Greens could actually perform.

In the 2010 election Labor looked so hopeless and moribund that these voters decided there was minimal risk in going Green – who could do worse than Rudd/Gillard/Swan?

Our most recent polling suggests that they see this risk assessment as vindicated, and that a hung parliament is in fact a very congenial place for them to be. This really does fundamentally change the paradigm and presents opportunities and threats to the old duopolists.

Of our online qualitative respondents, adjusted for voting intention, 33 percent think it is good to have a hung parliament and 41 percent think it is bad. That is an equivocal result, until you look at it by party breakdown.

In this case you find 71 percent of Liberals opposed to the idea, which analysis of the qual suggests is at the deepest level because they don’t form the government, justified through the idea that the government is being held to ransom by the Greens and Independents.

However Greens are 73 percent happy, at the deepest level probably because they are in government, although this too is tempered by the fact that the leverage is shared with the independents. They generally see the benefits of a hung parliament as breaking the two-party duopoly and bringing more democracy.

Labor voters are a lot more agnostic. 36 percent like a hung parliament, 23 percent don’t and another 36 percent are neutral. Again, at the deepest level, their side is in power, but their comments centre on keeping all parties honest, reflecting a deep level of cynicism and frustration with the existing political entities.

What this suggests is that there is a lot more potential for Labor to bleed to the Greens, but at the same time that Labor voters are tolerant of parliaments where the Greens have the balance of power.

This gives Labor the opportunity to have a real or de facto coalition with the Greens, leaving the Greens to guard the left flank while they attract blue-collar conservatives away from the Liberals.

Is this a viable option with Julia Gillard as leader? Probably not, it’s a longer term strategy.

While she is still our group’s preferred PM, analysis of the qual using Leximancer shows that Abbott dominates discussion. Gillard’s strength as a leader has diminished, and he is the one who appeals to the working class conservatives. He maintains his positive rating for honesty, seemingly enhanced every time he makes another verbal stumble. She is still rated as intelligent, but her character apart from that is ill-defined.

Leadership is a problem in another dimension for Labor. To respondents “democracy” entails parliament taking an increased leadership role.

They were supportive of the debate on the Afghanistan war (most wanted troops home), although much less so of that on gay marriage.

They also overwhelmingly supported Joe Hockey’s call for a banking inquiry as, in a move which started from a stumble, he showed how an activist opposition can make a ponderous government look slow, dim-witted and unelectable.

We’ve had not quite 2 months of a hung parliament, and it is already changing how both major parties do business. With those changes will come broader changes in the perception of how politics can and should be conducted, and maybe even a lasting change in the paradigm.

We may even become like the rest of the world where compromise and gridlock is generally accepted as just part of the parliamentary system, and we may like it that way.