This article is taken from Ian McAuley’s regular Saturday round-ups of links to writings, interviews and podcasts of Australian political and economic issues.

What happens if no party achieves a parliamentary majority?

The party with the highest share of the vote forms government. The party with most seats forms government. The governor-general decides who will form government. An election is won or lost when Antony Green calls it. There has to be another election. A hung parliament is an unprecedented constitutional crisis that makes the country ungovernable.

None of the above.

The government continues in office, maybe in caretaker mode, until and unless the prime minister resigns. This may be because he or she sees no chance of forming government, or it may be a result of losing the capacity to govern – a vote of no-confidence or defeat of the appropriation bills.

That’s a summary of what Anne Twomey writes on her Constitutional Clarion site, explaining  what happens if there’s a hung Parliament, in which she covers every imaginable contingency. There is only one highly unlikely situation in which the governor-general has to make a decision other than to follow the advice of the prime minister.

Crispin Hull has a broadly similar piece on his site, dispelling some common beliefs about our Constitution and conventions around forming government: "Forming" or electing governments. While Twomey’s piece is descriptive and historical, Hull has some suggestions for changing our governance arrangements.

He points out that a party can form and continue in minority government without a specific deal from independents, who can vote issue-by-issue, rather than pre-committing themselves to a set of reforms.

To wrap up, failure of a party to achieve a majority is nothing to get excited about. We’ve been there before, in 1940 (when it took five weeks for a government to be formed) and in 2010 (when it took 17 days). Both the Curtin and the Gillard Governments served Australia well.

Foreign election interference – are Putin and Musk pushing for a Coalition government?

In the lead-up to the German election, Elon Musk unambiguously  threw his support behind the Alternative für Deutschland. US Vice-President Vance  met the leader of Alternative für Deutschland, after criticising the German political parties for their “Brandmauer” (firewall) policy, designed to keep far-right extremists out of possible coalition arrangements.

At least Trump’s administration is clear about its electoral interference. It’s hard to imagine that, having explicitly weighed in against Germany’s social-democratic government, it wouldn’t be targeting other social-democratic governments facing upcoming elections.

Less is known about how well the Russians operate, but it is now clear that they played a part in Trump’s 2016 election and in the UK’s Brexit referendum.

Last week, in his  Annual Threat Assessment, ASIO’s director-general Mike Burgess warned of the risk of foreign regimes interfering in our coming election:

“I am acutely aware that this year’s federal election will be held in a security environment characterised by eroded trust in institutions, mis- and dis-information, incidents of politically motivated violence and attempts at foreign interference.

“Ensuring our elections remain free, fair and peaceful is business as usual for ASIO. We have already established specialist teams and operations to work with the Electoral Commission and other partners to protect the integrity of the poll.

“We will be watching. If a foreign regime tries to meddle in the election by pressuring diaspora groups, directing foreign language newspapers, spreading disinformation on social media or using any of the other tactics sometimes seen overseas, we will know.”

Nothing new in that. In the 1950s through to the 1960s — up to the time of the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 — the Communist Party of Australia had close relations with the USSR, and the Coalition parties would regularly accuse the Labor Party of coming under the influence of the Kremlin. (In reality, Labor was much more hostile to the communists than it was to the Liberals.) The most outstanding case of foreign interference was in 1975, when staff employed by a foreign monarch encouraged the governor-general to use his reserve powers to dismiss a Labor government.

Prominent members of the Liberal Party have turned up at gatherings of the Conservative Political Action Conference. The Sydney Morning Herald’s Michael Kozoil describes how 40 Australians, including Warren Mundine, Dutton’s close friend and political ally Gina Rinehart, and former Liberal Party vice-president Teena McQueen, turned up at the conference’s last gathering in Maryland:  Inside the Trump-loving gathering that wants to save ‘Austrailia’. Also at the gathering, wearing a “Make Australia Great Again” cap was Libertarian Party-endorsed Senate candidate, Lachlan Lade.

Just as Germany has endured a Trumpian interference in its election, we can expect something similar here, probably aimed at supporting the Coalition and other parties on the far right. Loose electoral funding laws make it easy for foreign money, laundered through nominee companies, to make its way into Australian election campaigns.

Although explicit interventions, such as those of Musk and Vance, are rare, ideological alignments across international borders are a longstanding part of the political landscape.

The other concern we should have, and which seems to have escaped Burgess’s assessment, is about Russia’s interest in energy markets. It’s not about ideology and it’s not about the similarities between Dutton and Putin. Rather it’s about the price of gas and oil, of crucial interest to Russia. The Russian Government inherited from the USSR a well-organised security service, which has already demonstrated its global reach. The Liberal Party has made it quite clear that it wants to stop renewable energy, and to re-vitalise the coal and gas industries in the decades before (if ever) its costly nuclear energy plans come to fruition, thus helping sustain world demand for fossil fuels.

That is not to suggest the Liberal Party would be soliciting support from Russia, but there are many ways Russia can exercise its influence, in gatherings such as CPAC, by sending money via difficult-to-trace funding channels, and through establishing and supporting anti-renewable energy movements.

Election of a Coalition Government is clearly in Russia’s interests. It would be naïve for anyone to believe Russia would hold off from working to help the Coalition’s election along the way.

Political drift – leftwards and towards a concern for public policy

The prevailing political meme in Australia, as in similar countries, is that the electorate in democracies is drifting to the right. This view has undoubtedly been reinforced by the outcomes of elections in the US and Germany, and by the circulating story that in Australia Labor is in deep trouble. (The actual figure is that Labor’s vote is down about 2% from the last election.)

There is a lot of noise in individual election outcomes, which can mask longer-term trends arising from slow developments such as demographic change, rather than specific events such as pandemics and wars.

The Conversation has a contribution from Intifar Chowdhury of Flinders University, who has  looked at 35 years of data to see how Australians vote, and has used it to develop some pointers to our coming election. Her data is sourced from Australian Election Studies, from 1987 to 2022.

She finds that over time, women and younger people have been moving to the left in their voting patterns. That is a reasonably well-established trend in Australia as in other countries.

In some countries, including the US and Germany in recent elections, young men are moving to the right. Chowdhury finds that Australia is bucking this trend: young Australian men are slowly moving to the left, but more slowly than women,

She mentions factors driving this leftward drift, particularly women’s attainment of higher education levels over time. This perhaps helps explain another of her findings, that over the 35 years of the AES surveys, voters have increasingly been driven by policy issues. In the most recent study, 48% of voters cited policy as the primary factor influencing their vote, followed by party affiliation (29%), party leaders (14%) and local candidates (9%).

On specific policies, the Coalition has traditionally been seen as having strength on economic management and on immigration, but it is losing its lead over Labor. (It takes a long time for reality to catch up with perception.)

In relation to the coming election, that all means if the Coalition is not to see its fragile lead slip away, it should start engaging in serious policy debates, rather than hoping that ad hominem attacks on Albanese and uncosted ideas about nuclear energy and Medicare will get the party over the line.

Labor has politicised the Climate Change Authority by appointing a Liberal to head it – go figure!

The Climate Change Authority has upset Coalition politicians by publishing an  assessment of the impact of a nuclear pathway on Australia’s emissions, comparing the trajectory of our current path to net zero with the nuclear option as laid out by Frontier Economics in its work for the Coalition.

Under the Coalition’s nuclear plan, planned coal-fired power station closures would have to be delayed until nuclear power started to enter the system, which would not be until 2036 at the earliest. Even with Frontier’s assumption of low economic growth, emissions would continue to rise for the next 10 years, and any serious reduction would not start to occur until 2040. That would involve an additional two billion tonnes of CO2 emissions between now and 2050 – one billion in electricity generation and one billion in other sectors.

Even though the opposition has dug itself into an absurdly expensive nuclear power plan, one would expect its spokespeople to mount some defence in response to such a report, questioning its assumptions, or perhaps proposing a different way of calculating emissions.

The ABC’s Jo Lauder  reports on the opposition’s response, but finds no criticism of the report. Rather it has attacked the people who wrote the report.

Liberal finance spokesperson Senator Jane Hume’s response has been to demand that the Authority’s head be sacked, and she has accused the government of politicising the Authority. Opposition spokesperson on energy Ted O’Brien has accused the authority of having become a puppet of Albanese and Chris Bowen, and of echoing “Labor’s untruthful anti-nuclear scare campaign”.

In fact, the Climate Change Agency’s head is Matt Kean, former Liberal Party minister for energy in the NSW Government. Is this the “politicisation” about which Hume is complaining? Who does she think would be a suitable head of the authority? Someone appointed by the coal lobby, perhaps, or someone nominated by the Russian Government?

There is no valid criticism the Coalition can make, and they know it. The headline on Jo Lauder’s article should have read “Coalition admits its nuclear power plan will result in an extra two billion tonnes of emissions”.

The Coalition’s candidate for the marginal seat of Gilmore is more direct. He has told a meeting of electors that under a Coalition majority government any Paris 2035 commitment  would be “off the table”.

The media has to challenge the Coalition on its nuclear policies. If commentators such as Hume and O’Brien cannot give considered responses, it’s a waste of precious airtime to give them a voice on national media. It would be far better if the ABC and other media were to go to energy experts, detached from Australian partisan politics, to evaluate the government’s and the opposition’s energy policies.

Juvenile crime shouldn’t require policymakers to make a choice between two bad policies

It shouldn’t be necessary to point out that locking up troublesome kids in the slammer does not bring about a reduction in youth crime; in fact, in the medium to long term it results in a higher crime rate, without making the community any safer.

David Hailpern, who was for 20 years a magistrate in the NSW children’s court and who is now Dean of Law at Southern Cross University, was interviewed on Radio National explaining the reasons why locking up young offenders doesn’t work. (seven minutes)

The issue has arisen because the state government has extended a trial of tougher bail laws out to 2028, even though the New South Wales Law Society and the Aboriginal Legal Service warned the government that this tough-on-crime approach wouldn’t work. Halpern reports that privately, many politicians who voted for the extension admitted it wouldn’t work, but they understood the political pressure to go tough on crime.

He draws attention to data published by the NSW Bureau of Crime Statistics showing a 32% increase in the number of young people in custody over the last year, almost entirely explained by the courts having become tougher on granting bail. The number of children in custody after having been sentenced is much lower, and it shows no rise: the stability of that number is inconsistent with any notion of a state-wide surge in youth crime. Aboriginal and country children feature disproportionately in these figures.

Yet at the same time there have been pockets of high youth crime. There is no shortage of reports: in Kempsey, 700 people have turned out at a demonstration calling for tougher bail laws. Among the demonstrators was a 76-year old lady who said she had experienced 17 home invasions, and had 20 cars stolen over the past 18 years. Her experience may be at one extreme, but in some regions youth crime is a serious problem. There is a similar message from Victoria,  reported in the round-up two weeks ago.

Hailpern stresses that the problem can be addressed properly only through policies to do with childhood development, housing, education and domestic violence. That’s beyond dispute. But even once those problems are seriously addressed for coming generations of children, there will still be regionally- concentrated groups of children stealing and smashing up cars (and themselves), breaking into houses and businesses, generally doing a lot of damage and creating fear – the sort of fear that makes a town or suburb intolerable to live in.

People’s political reaction is understandable. They expect that there will be policy interventions that curtail the possibility of children wrecking their communities. Political parties have to respond to those experiences.

Reformers do neither the children, nor these communities, any favour when they fail to put forward suggestions that restrict these children’s opportunity to go on offending. There have to be options other than those offered by the criminal justice system. Such solutions are bound to be labour-intensive and expensive, but that’s preferable to the binary choice between locking up children and letting them go on trashing communities.

Republished from ianmcauley.com/saturdays