If you want to call yourself a ‘political party’ you have to register and show some kind of general support. The Australia Electoral Commission (AEC) maintains a register of political parties. If you want to register you need at a minimum a written constitution that sets out your aims, a sitting MP or, failing that, 500 or so supporters who don’t belong to any other party. The AEC will do some scrutiny of your application, and let the world know about it as well, and about your logo, if you want one. Does this deter you? Well, there were 57 political parties registered for the 2016 elections.
Most of them did poorly and won’t be heard of again. But the Nick Xenophon team in South Australia won a quarter of a million votes. Bob Katter’s Party won 78,000 and returned him to Parliament, while Independents of various hues won 380,000 votes, and two seats as well. One Nation, derided by the mainstream media, won nearly 600,000 votes at the Senate elections in 2016, and Newspoll had One nation at 11 per cent this week. These are not trivial numbers. The electorate contains about 15 million people, and about 1,400,000 didn’t even vote last time.
Mr Turnbull was exercised this week about where the Liberal party sat in the party system, and opted for ‘the sensible centre’. I don’t think that matters much to anyone other than a few dissident Liberals. What seems plain to me is that the dissatisfaction with Australian politics as it presently is can be seen in various small signs of disengagement. A major external crisis of some kind, and the emergence of a leader who made sense to people on both sides of the party divide, could change all that.
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But I see no real sign of either, and in default I predict a continual slow movement away to attractive Independents, protest voices like the Greens and One Nation, and regional champions like Nick Xenophon and Bob Katter. Put together, they make the business of Australian politics much more diverse, and the task of governing our country even harder
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