Declining Labor may have to tie knot with the Greens

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This was published 12 years ago

Declining Labor may have to tie knot with the Greens

By Shaun Carney

HAVE Australians already seen the last majority national Labor government? The question acquires great potency now that the Greens have assumed the balance of power in the Senate. The comfortable, conventional view of the 2010 election result, which denied Labor and the Coalition an outright lower house majority, is that it was a one-off, born of the peculiar circumstances in which both Julia Gillard and Tony Abbott became leaders of their parties - and the limited ways they exercised leadership.

Supposedly, following the difficulties and inbuilt uncertainties that go with a minority government, things will return to normal at the next election, with either Labor or the Coalition securing a majority. At best, this looks like being only half-right.

Greens Leader Senator Bob Brown.

Greens Leader Senator Bob Brown.Credit: Andrew Meares

The Coalition would be able to manage it, but the ALP will struggle - even if it stages a stunning recovery between now and the second half of 2013. The harsh truth is that Labor can no longer rely on its natural level of support to keep it competitive. In the four general elections held so far in this century, the ALP's primary vote has been: 2001 - 37.8 per cent; 2004 - 37.6; 2007 - 43.4; 2010 - 38.

Labor does itself and its dwindling band of supporters a disservice if it chooses to ignore the pattern. It lost in 2001 and 2004, won in 2007, as voters got tired of John Howard after four terms, and managed to hold on to office as a minority government last year. What's happened since the 2010 election merely serves to underscore and compound the argument that Labor's critical mass of electoral support has vanished. Failing a political collapse on the other side, 38 per cent looks to be the ALP's natural level of support - not enough to give it power. The published opinion polls now suggest this figure has fallen to 27-30 per cent.

The Greens' 2010 election return, which saw them taking a lower house seat from Labor and boosting their tally of Senate places to nine, was, in all likelihood, a ground-breaking result. In 2001, the Greens' lower house vote was 5 per cent. Last year it was 12 per cent and 13 per cent in the Senate. While Labor last year could not manage to win a majority in the lower house, the two-party preferred vote still favoured the ALP - only just, at 50.1 per cent. And the combined Labor and Greens primary vote was 50 per cent. In other words, what can generically be called the left-wing vote was still healthy, it's just the Labor Party that's in real strife.

Labor is in long-term decline. With every day that passes, the period of Bob Hawke's leadership in 1983-91, when Labor consistently prevailed over the Coalition not just at elections but in the marketplace of ideas, looks more and more an aberration - a fluke of history driven at least in part by Hawke's energy and unparalleled charisma.

The party's former national president, Barry Jones, contributed an erudite examination of one of modern Labor's key weaknesses, the incapacity to explain and promote the argument for a carbon price, in these pages yesterday. Although Jones focused on a single issue, what he was highlighting was a broader, considerably more profound problem: the timorous and confused political approach of the ALP under the leadership of both Kevin Rudd and Gillard, and how strongly that undermines the Left's ability to carry an argument.

This is a weakness that grows directly from Labor's organisational emptiness. Its low membership numbers, and the relative decline of its union base have drained it of two qualities: an automatic sense of conviction and intellectual energy.

Voters know it, they can see and hear it, and they have responded accordingly. If Labor is to get back to merely the same inadequate level of support that it commanded at the election 11 months ago, it will, if the current opinion polls are to be believed, have to pick up 8-11 per cent of the vote. To get back to its 2007 support level - the last time it secured a lower house majority - it will have to win back 13-16 per cent of voters, based on the latest polling.

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A recovery of that magnitude would have to be described as, at best, an intellectual possibility but not much more. Every conceivable thing would have to go right for Labor from here to election day and it would have to develop a capacity to influence the debate. That's why a formal, lasting tie-up with the Greens is likely to be something Labor will be forced to consider in the longer term.

The political equation really did change yesterday when the new Senate came into effect. Essentially, for any legislation to come into being, the ALP and the Greens have to vote together. Jointly, they face a test: can they work with each other and will this presage a closer, formal relationship down the track?

There will be plenty of party members and voters for both parties that will be appalled at the prospect of Labor and the Greens forming a coalition at the national level. Although lower house Green MP Adam Bandt votes with Labor and the parties notionally share the leftward side of the political pendulum, the animosity between their supporters on the ground is substantial, especially where Green-Labor electoral contests are tight.

A decent share of the Greens' support base is made up of former Labor voters who have turned on their old party, and left-wingers and environmentalists who are, depending on your point of view, either admirably idealistic or completely unrealistic.

The Greens' great attraction for these voters is that they don't need to compromise; compromises are for the old, hated mainstream parties. So how will these voters respond to the inevitable concessions that Bob Brown and Christine Milne will have to make to produce a carbon price agreement with the government and the Labor-supporting independents?

This will be but the first in a succession of moments of truth for the Greens as they exercise the balance of power in the Senate. Every compromise, every negotiation they make with Labor will face scrutiny and there will be nowhere to hide. In the previous Parliament, the balance was shared with Nick Xenophon and Family First's Steve Fielding. Now the numbers are more straightforward: in the 76-seat Senate, Labor has 31 seats and the Greens have nine. This extra scrutiny is what comes with success.

Then there is the potential reaction on the Labor side to the new political circumstances. Bedrock elements of Labor's constituency - manufacturing and coal workers, outer-suburban blue-collar workers, some ethnic groups, party activists who see the minor party as unreasonable and unfair to the ALP - do not track well with the Greens, many of whom talk the language of de-industrialisation. And uncommitted suburban and regional voters will remain uneasy with the Greens' reputation as a party on the political margins, and its unquestionable reliance on inner-city voters to provide its support base.

Those who argue for closer, potentially more enduring relations between the Greens and Labor can, of course, point to the formal arrangement between the parties in Tasmania. Labor maintains office as a minority government but Greens leader Nick McKim is a minister and another Greens member is cabinet secretary. But Tasmania is not Australia. Closer ties would be a big leap; the numbers suggest that eventually Labor will have no choice but to jump.

Shaun Carney is an Age associate editor.

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