Australia’s establishment parties are running scared. The Albanese Labor government is particularly scared. Tumbling in the polls, increasingly weakened and choked (inexplicably) by the bruising tactics of Coalition opposition leader Peter Dutton, the sinking vessel that is this government is scrambling for existential remedies. One is to try, as much as possible, to limit the reach of independents and minor parties, those frightfully irritating creatures who have served to change the Australian electoral landscape by encouraging cooperation in Canberra.
While electoral reform in terms of disclosing financial support is to be encouraged for reasons of accountability and transparency, something baked by the Parliamentary Joint Standing Committee on Electoral Matters in June 2023, the steel in these proposed changes is clearly on snuffing minor parties and independents. It stands to reason: the share of the vote for the major parties is precipitously falling. Minor parties, including independents, are doing better than ever.
Between 1980 and 2024, the primary vote for minor parties and independents, as the Australia Institute notes, markedly increased at the federal, state and territory level. Even the ACT, which tended to be a bit of a holdout to such trends, registered a 33% vote for minor parties and independents in the 2024 election, the highest in two decades.
The 2022 Australian Election Study, led by the Australian National University with Griffith University, also found that voters tending to always vote the same way was at a record low of 37%. “This growing detachment from the major political parties,” note the authors of the report, “provided the conditions that supported the Teals’ success.” The study also identified a throbbing note of mistrust in the voters, with 54% of Australians believing “that the government is run for ‘a few big interests’, while just 12 percent believe the government is run for ‘all the people’.”
It has therefore become an imperative of Labor and the Coalition to encourage changes that will consolidate their increasingly precarious hold on power. The Liberals, having lost their blue-ribbon seats to the Teal independents in the 2022 election, will be delighted by these suggested changes.
Much of this lies in what is returned to the party for each legal first preference vote received above the 4% minimum as dictated by the Commonwealth Electoral Act. The current rate sits at $3.35, one that will rise to $5 under the proposed changes. Registered parties will also receive additional sums in the form of “administrative” funding: $30,000 per MP and $15,000 per senator.
The proposals will effectively enable the two major political parties to more than double their public funding at the 2028 election, totalling $140 million. (At the 2022 election, the two parties received a combined total of $57.4 million.) There are also caps of $90 million per party on federal election campaign funding, a cap of $800,000 per individual candidate, and a $20,000 cap on individual donations.
While the implications are glaringly obvious, the special minister of state, Don Farrell, would have you believe otherwise. “This is designed to take big money out of Australian politics,” he said on November 16, denying that reforms were intended as a blow to such funders as Climate 200’s founder, Simon Holmes à Court, or former MP and mining tycoon Clive Palmer. “We’re not targeting individuals, we’re targeting the systems that allow an uncapped amount of money to be spent on elections. We don’t want to go down the track of the American election system. We want to cap the amount of money people can spend and that applies to anybody.”
For his part, Palmer, who intends challenging the legislation in the High Court should it pass, called these measures an attempt “to rig elections”. For all his blustering vulgarity, not to mention opportunism, such a view is hard to contest. As he goes on to insist, the changes would “hinder the independents, the regular Australians, from standing for parliament.” He may have some wriggle room on this, though the implied right of free speech on political subjects tends to be interpreted narrowly by the High Court.
Independent senator David Pocock is also of like mind. “This is a deal cooked up between the major parties, who are clearly terrified of minority government,” he opined in a statement. “He also noted that these reforms would not be the subject of a Senate inquiry, a point “damaging to our democracy.”
Disturbingly enough, the exact effect of these changes will be to redirect cash that would otherwise go to alternative candidates to a withering party establishment Australian voters increasingly mistrust. By supposedly restricting the cash pipeline from external sources, the public purse in support of the major parties will be consolidated.
Farrell’s somewhat irrelevant reference to US politics also ignores a fundamental fact. The US electoral system is already marred by what Gore Vidal called the two right wings of politics, making inroads by independents nigh impossible in a Congress that is overwhelmingly dominated by big industry and lobby groups.
The logic in the Albanese government proposals would be to effectively increase public funding by 2.4 times to favour the ALP-Coalition orthodoxy. May it be confined to judicial oblivion before the justices of the High Court.
Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He lectures at RMIT University, Melbourne.
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