The fragmentation of votes in Australia’s 2022 federal election told a local version of a global story as parties, media and social identities grow more diverse.
Trouble is, our locally focused reporting tends to the parochial, looking back through a lens of 20th century institutional stability where shifts can be attributed to the to and fro of big-party combat and the charisma (or lack of) embodied in their respective leaders.
Now, we’re starting to get a deeper look at the full picture with last week’s twin release of Griffith University’s Australian Election Study along with Labor’s more self-interested election review.
With almost one-third of voters now ticking the “none of the above” box, we should stop asking “why are people leaving the major parties?” and instead ask “what attracts people to the new parties?”
Rather than a single storyline — “voter disenchantment with the major political parties” as Griffith study co-author Sarah Cameron called it — the seemingly sudden fragmentation reflects long-term trends which may still be playing out.
Call it that moment when Duverger’s Law crashes into the power of possibilities held out by social media networking. The French political scientist Maurice Duverger argued that the number of parties in any given country reflects the electoral rules they operate under. Single constituency first-past-the-post voting? That delivers a two-party system, like the United States. Proportional representation? That gives multiple parties, as in most of Europe.
It’s driven by how different groups reckon they can best advance their interests: by forming coalitions in big parties or by having a party of their own. The Griffith analysis looks at identity markers like class, income, gender and education.
Australia has been slowly evolving into an unusual hybrid: single constituencies in lower houses, but with preferential voting and, since the 1980s, upper houses at both federal and (most) state levels elected by proportional (and preferential) party-line voting.
No surprise then that we’re seeing an unusual hybrid party structure emerge. We have two big parties, and smaller groupings around them. It allows people to vote both for the party that they think best represents them and for the government they prefer — at the same time.
Right now, it’s coinciding with the parallel fragmentation of the media which, once monopolising the message, restrained the imagination of the possible. Now, advertising and political messaging once channelled through mass media are being replaced with grass roots and online social media campaigning (and, on the right, by an increasingly extreme News Corp). Campaigning has been democratised, making it practical for smaller parties and independents to break through.
One result is that people are opting for the ideological sorting the new media ecosystem makes possible, with parties on both the left (like the Greens) and the right (like One Nation and United Australia) garnering votes from each of the big two. These parties are turning those votes into direct representation in proportionally-elected houses and preferences to the big parties in the lower house.
Where they can geographically concentrate those votes (Greens in the inner-cities, Katter’s party in north Queensland) they can also capture a handful of lower-house seats.
A look at European parties suggests this ideological sorting — with between 10% and 15% of the vote available at each end of the spectrum — is close to done in Australia, unless there is some spectacular implosion of one or both of the big two (as happened on the centre-right in Italy in the 1990s and on the centre-left in France in 2017).
The Griffith survey (and Australian experience) suggests this sorting is age dependent. The Green vote skews young and seems to shift to Labor as they age. The One Nation/UAP vote skews old as they shift (mainly) from the Liberals (until they, er, drop out of the voting population).
Another global trend is that democracies are dividing between cities and regions. Leafy suburbs in large conurbations which once comfortably sat with small-l Liberals in Australia, wet Tories in the UK, or liberal Republicans in the US now increasingly vote for left-of-centre parties.
The last election brought that trend to Australia. The Liberals now hold just 15 out of the 95 seats in the (broadly defined) greater urban areas in and around seven of the eight state, territory and federal capitals (the always proudly different Queensland remains the exception).
It’s the reverse in the 34 regional seats (including Queensland): Labor holds just two. It holds just one of the 13 semi-urban and Gold Coast seats around Brisbane. It’s why encouraging Greater Brisbane to vote like the rest of Australia is a priority in the Labor review.
The pattern encourages us to ask: are the teal seats, then, a Morrison shock that will soon head home; a permanent centrist offering for these once conservative suburbs; or does the Griffith survey conclusion of tactical voting by usually Labor and Green votes make it look more a long-term bridge from right to left?
