When I first started writing for Whale Oil, the Good Oil’s storied predecessor, I learned two important lessons. Firstly, how not to write like an academic. Fresh from an adult degree, I had to learn to cut back the padded prose and academic waffle and not pepper the posts with a hundred hyperlinks.
Second lesson was a rude introduction to just how little I knew about New Zealand politics – and even that was more than the average Australian. It was quite a surprise to learn, for instance, that New Zealand doesn’t have states. Who knew?
The dearth of insight is reciprocated, of course. Which is only to be expected, really. Why would Kiwis bother learning the intricacies of Australian politics? Especially when most Australians don’t.
Especially, too, when Australian politics often appears so weird to outsiders. Why, for instance, is the traditionally conservative party called ‘the Liberals’? That one left Tony Abbott with a lot of explaining to make to Republican politicians, when he visited the US.
The weirdness of Australia is nothing new to visitors. To the first European arrivals, everything about Australia seemed upside down: the seasons, the weird animals, even the very landscape, dotted with trees with pale trunks and dark foliage in a literal reversal of European norms. The platypus, for instance, was so bizarre that early biologists named it Paradoxus. Even our one dollar coins are bigger than our two dollar ones, a fact which caused me some initial confusion on my first visit to your fair shores.
So, with an Australian election looming within the next few months, here’s a brief explainer for the confused Good Oil reader.
Firstly, this is a federal election. Like the US, Australia has a federal system, with six states and two territories electing members to the lower house: the House of Representatives. Lower house seats are based on population. Each of the six states is guaranteed equal representation in the upper house, the Senate. Each state elects 12 senators. The Northern Territory and the ACT elect only two senators each.
House of Representatives’ terms are roughly three years. The actual term length varies, depending on when a prime minister exercises his prerogative to call an election: the maximum term is fixed at three years, counted from the date the parliament first meets after a general election. In practice, most PMs go to an election earlier. The average term length since Federation (in 1901) has been two years, 130 days.
Senate terms are double those of the House of Reps. At a normal election, only half of senators face re-election. The only time there’s a whole Senate election is if a PM calls a ‘double dissolution’ election. That is, both houses are dissolved and all MPs face re-election. A double dissolution can only be called if the Senate twice rejects a piece of legislation which has passed a vote in the House of Representatives.
Even if this condition is met, only a brave or reckless PM actually calls a double dissolution election. There have been just seven in the 124 years of Federation, with, in most cases, the government either losing office or returned but unable to break the Senate deadlock. In only one case has a government been returned and subsequently been able to pass the contentious legislation.
Now to the meaty stuff: what are the parties, and why are they apparently named in direction contradiction of what they stand for?
Because this is Australia. Ben Elton once noted how Australians often go for strictly plain-speaking place names: Big Hill, Sandy Bay, Shark Bay and so on. When it comes to our political parties, though, the nomenclature is never so obvious or straightforward.
It puzzles even many Australians that the conservative wing of Australian politics is lead by the Liberal Party. Former Prime Minister Tony Abbott, as mentioned above, had to convince Republicans in the US that, as the leader of a “liberal” party which supported universal healthcare, he wasn’t some kind of raging socialist. Why couldn’t we just be sensible, like the Canadians, and have a Conservative Party and a Liberal Party?
In fact, opposition to socialism is the key to understanding the Liberal name. In 1944, the founding Liberals were a broad coalition whose common interest was opposing the socialist policies of the Australian Labor Party. Founding leader Robert Menzies said the name was chosen deliberately for its association with the principles of 19th century liberalism: free enterprise, free speech, social equality, and the primacy of individual rights and duties.
That commitment to free speech meant that the Liberals, unlike Labor with their enforced party lines, have long prided themselves as a ‘broad church’ party which includes genuine liberals (nicknamed ‘Wets’) and conservatives (‘Dries’). Thus the Liberals have not only been associated with Thatcherite economics, but also some of the most socially progressive legislation in Australian history.
In recent years, in a trend New Zealand National voters will sadly recognise, the ‘wet’ wing of the Liberals have been in the ascendant. Calling themselves ‘moderates’, these wet, woke loons are in truth little more than Greens (we’ll get to them later) in expensive suits. The ‘moderates’ were long disparagingly called the ‘doctor’s wives’ wing of the party: the sort of ‘socially conscious’ upper classes with too much time on their hands and too much conviction that noblesse oblige required them to be woke meddlers.
The Liberals are in a long-standing coalition with the rural-based Nationals (not to be confused with New Zealand’s National). Sharp-eyed Good Oil readers may have spotted me referring interchangeably to ‘the Liberals’, ‘the coalition’ or even ‘the LNP’, meaning ‘Liberal-National Party’. For all intents and purposes, they’re the same beast. Only in Queensland, so far, have the coalition formally united as the Liberal-National Party. As part of the coalition agreement, in government the National’s leader is automatically appointed deputy prime minister.
The rural-based Nationals were once the most straightforwardly-named party in Australian politics: the Country Party. But, besides changing their name, the Nationals also promulgate a kind of agrarian socialism that seems at odds with the deep conservatism of their farmer constituents. Until one realises that it really means socialising the losses and privatising the profits.
Opposing the coalition are Australia’s oldest existing party, Labor. Why its name is misspelled is as lost in the mists of time as any Labor MP who ever worked a day in their lives. Practically no sitting Labor MP has ever worked a day outside politics, let alone laboured alongside the horny-handed sons of toil. Long gone are the days when Labor leaders were former train drivers or coppers. Nowadays, the closest a Labor MP ever gets to a genuine worker is when they need someone to fix the office coffee-maker.
The standard career path for a Labor MP today is: educated at a private school or, at worst, a selective government school, then an arts/law, communications or political science degree at a Sandstone university (Australia’s equivalent of the Ivy League). From there, it’s straight into a brief stint at a union head office or as a political staffer, then parachuted right into politics. Even Anthony Albanese, for all his prattling nonsense about being raised in a cardboard box in a lake, worked for just two years outside politics, in a back office at the Commonwealth Bank.
Even the party’s trade union power and money base scarcely represents working Australians any more, with only about 15 per cent of Australian workers unionised. Some have tried to reclaim the party for the workers, with little success. The Labor party has not only abandoned actual working Australians, it actively despises them. When a centre-right union made a YouTube video depicting a working-class party taken over by progressive weirdos, the party furiously ordered it taken down. Luckily for posterity, some far-sighted YouTubers uploaded their own copies.
To the left of Labor are the Greens. As is invariably the way with factions of the left, Labor and the Greens are at each other’s necks almost as often as they’re fighting the conservative(-ish) coalition. The two parties are often two dogs fighting over the same left-wing vote. So Labor is often wedged between pressure to put the extremist Greens last and needing Greens preferences to win seats. The Greens know this perfectly well and, as most starkly seen in the Gillard Government, use their numbers as the tail to wag the Labor Government dog.
True to Australian tradition, the Greens claim to represent the environment, but their voters couldn’t be more removed from the natural world if they tried. To the average Greens voter, the natural environment is something David Attenborough talks about on TV.
For a party run by old Stalinists and Marxists, with a policy platform that attacks ‘the production and consumption of material output’ and emphasises ‘reducing inequalities in income and wealth’, they are also the party of the very rich. In fact, the richest voting bloc in Australia. The Greens’ vote is almost entirely concentrated in the wealthiest inner suburbs of Australia’s biggest cities, Melbourne and Sydney. Inside their ‘Quinoa Belt’, Greens voters keep themselves almost as splendidly isolated from the ‘refugees’ and ‘asylum seekers’ they profess to care so much about as they do the actual environment.
The Greens have never captured above 13 per cent of the national vote, often much lower, around 10 per cent. If recent state election and by-election results are any indication, though, the Greens are set for a pummelling due, in large part, to their visible alliance with the violent anti-Semitism post-October 7.
New Zealanders, by the way, would have no trouble recognising the type of person the Greens attract as candidates: bullies, sex pests, accused rapists and paedophiles, self-confessed thieves and drug abusers. Not to mention open supporters of every fetish from bestiality to necrophilia. What is it about the Greens?
For some of the ultra-rich ‘doctor’s wives’, as it happens, being seen to vote for a bunch of nasty socialists like the Greens is the sort of thing to spoil one’s next soiree. Hence, the rise of the Teals: literally, the blue-greens. That is, rich ninnies who fret about boutique issues like climate change, but don’t want to be made to spout Marx.
Where the Greens sucked away Labor’s left fringe, the Teals drain off ‘Wet’ votes from the coalition. The Teals, funded by a Svengali-like idly useless inherited-wealth billionaire, snatched a handful of former blue-ribbon Liberal seats at the last election. But the defeat of the Morrison Government robbed the Teals of most of their raison d’etre, while their well-exposed thirst for SUVs and luxury air travel robbed them of their phony sanctimony. So, whether even Little Rich Boys’ money can keep them alive at the next election remains to be seen.
Then there’s a host of minor parties. The most famous of which is Pauline Hanson’s One Nation. This is an unusually honestly named party: not only is it as much Pauline Hanson’s show as ever, its political philosophy is diametrically opposed to the multicultural identity politics of the left. Hanson is nothing if not tenacious: despite decades of organised attempts to take her down, from media hit jobs to a stint of false imprisonment, Pauline has hung on.
The concerted opposition to One Nation, though, especially from the government-funded and resolutely left-wing ABC, has meant that One Nation has long struggled to turn a persistent undercurrent of popularity into electoral success. Despite polling votes near to the same level as the Greens, One Nation has rarely achieved the same representation in parliament. Still, nearly three decades on, she’s still hanging in there.
If you want to really deep-dive into Australian politics, by the way, Hanson’s Please Explain YouTube videos are not just hilarious, they’re essential viewing.
So, there’s Australian politics for you. It’s much like Australian wildlife: it may not make much sense to an outsider, but it’s at least entertaining. And the creatures will happily kill you as soon as look at you.
