Major parties hammered in WA election

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From William Bowe at Crikey:

Saturday’s unprecedented Western Australian Senate election has finally settled the make-up of the chamber’s crossbench after July 1. But Prime Minister Tony Abbott might have a few more weeks to wait until he can be sure of the strength of his government’s hand.

Despite a collective slump in the major party vote, there is a strong possibility that the general thrust of the September election result will be confirmed, with three Liberals likely to be returned along with an uncertain assortment of Labor and minor party members.

However, it is still far from clear that the third Liberal candidate, Linda Reynolds, will indeed emerge victorious when the final votes are tallied; the alternative possibility being that Labor Senator Louise Pratt will scrape home on the back of an improved trend in postal, pre-poll and absent votes.

On the former scenario, the government would require six out of eight crossbench votes to pass legislation when Labor and the Greens lined up against it, and would be well on its way if it could win over a four-person Palmer United bloc that will include the newly elected Zhenya (or Dio) Wang and Victorian Senator Ricky Muir of the Motoring Enthusiasts Party.

Otherwise, the government will only be able to wear one dissenter out of Nick Xenophon, John Madigan of the DLP, Bob Day of Family First, David Leyonhjelm of the Liberal Democrats, and the PUP bloc (assuming the latter holds together).

A strong hand for the crossbench would seem a fitting outcome for an election that gave neither major party anything to crow about, with the Liberals down 5.5% on the September election to 33.7%, and Labor down 4.8% to a dismal 21.8%.

Worse still for the Liberals was that 2% had been freed up by a drop in support for the Nationals, who were down from a high of 5.1% in September when their candidate was former West Coast Eagles star David Wirrpanda.

Nonetheless, it’s Labor that has suffered the bigger embarrassment, as the swing comes off what was already the party’s worst WA Senate result since federation, and the Liberals at least have the excuse that governments usually do badly at byelections. By any standard, a combined major party vote of 58.1% is a remarkable result, given that the equivalent figure of 70.9% from September was without any precedent since the two-party system first coalesced in 1910.

About the author
David Llewellyn-Smith is Chief Strategist at the MB Fund and MB Super. David is the founding publisher and editor of MacroBusiness and was the founding publisher and global economy editor of The Diplomat, the Asia Pacific’s leading geo-politics and economics portal. He is also a former gold trader and economic commentator at The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, the ABC and Business Spectator. He is the co-author of The Great Crash of 2008 with Ross Garnaut and was the editor of the second Garnaut Climate Change Review.