Double-D election? Tell 'em they're dreaming

There was a deal of incredulous guffawing among Liberals yesterday at the talk of a double dissolution election from within the Abbott Government’s highest echelon.

The thought of charging at voters’ bayonets bare-chested with little more than a shredded 2014 Budget covering their privates made some Liberals wonder whether Tony Abbott would rather deliver an apocalypse on his party than surrender the captaincy.

There are very obvious reasons why fears of a double-D are especially heightened.

With primary support at 38 per cent according to Newspoll, almost eight points adrift of its 2013 election marker, and a two-party preferred margin of 45-55 in favour of the ALP, the coalition is certainly in no place for electoral cockiness.

But the flip-side to the Liberal talk of Abbott being a loony millenarian is that a double dissolution may be just about the only way the current administration could construct a governing agenda, if it dared.

The Abbott’s prescription for the economy, health and education systems has been cruelled by a poisonous concoction of broken election promises, chronic policy mismanagement and an intransigent, obstructionist Senate.

On the economy, Abbott’s retreat is nothing short of shocking.

For a leader who proselytised from every available public pulpit for years about the budget “emergency”, it was extraordinary to hear him declare on Wednesday that a debt-to-GDP ratio of 50 to 60 per cent was a “pretty good result looking around the world”.

To put that in perspective, this is the equivalent of Australia’s current debt surging from $244 billion (15.2 per cent of GDP) to between $835 billion and $967 billion.

But this is entirely “manageable”, Abbott now says. So much so that the nation could afford May’s Budget to be dull and routine. Cough.

The failure of Christopher Pyne’s university reforms in the Senate this week – and the likelihood of a repeat failure in three months, providing the Abbott Government’s third double dissolution trigger – ought to give rise to another look at electoral reform.

Enter Liberal MP Tony Smith.

As chair of the Joint Standing Committee on Electoral Matters, Smith has the rare distinction in the 44th Parliament of securing unanimous support from the coalition, Greens and Labor for a drastic overhaul of Senate voting rules.

There were high hopes last year that the JSCEM report would trigger legislation to prevent a repeat of the 2013 election where candidates with piddling numbers of primary votes managed to secure six-year sinecures in the house of review through preference harvesting.

As Smith explained in the report’s foreword: “Combined with pliable and porous party registration rules, the system of voting for a single party above the line and delegating the distribution of preferences to that party, delivered, in some cases, outcomes that distorted the will of the voter.

“The system of voting above the line has encouraged the creation of micro parties in order to funnel preferences to each other, from voters who have no practical way of knowing where their vote will ultimately land once they had forfeited it to the parties’ group voting tickets.”

The two key recommendations by the JSCEM were abolition of group voting tickets, under which political parties control preference allocation for above-the-line ballots, and the introduction of optional preferential voting.

Simply put, these changes would restore the will of the voters by ensuring their votes went where they intended.

It would not stop independents being elected – they could get up with just 7 per cent of the vote in a double dissolution election – but it would stop so-called “lottery” candidates winning with a minuscule number of primary votes.

ABC election analyst Antony Green says Smith’s committee report was an excellent response to preference swap deals done by a burgeoning number of micro parties.

Green cites Wayne Dropulich’s victory in the original WA Senate 2013 election as a case in point.

Dropulich won one of the six Senate spots despite securing just 0.23 per cent of the vote.

His party, the Australian Sports Party, ranked 21st out of 27 parties in primary votes. Of the 20 parties that that contributed preferences to Dropulich, 15 polled higher than him.

Ironically, Dropulich failed to win a seat in the rerun election last year even though he increased his vote, albeit marginally to 0.33 per cent (Ricky Muir won his seat with 0.51 per cent).

“It is irresponsible to issue these ballot papers that are getting so big that people can’t read, using an electoral system that is impossible to understand,” Greens says.

Sadly, Abbott let the proposed electoral reforms lie dormant last year, firstly because he didn’t want to aggravate Clive Palmer ahead of the carbon tax repeal vote and then because of the desire to keep the rest of the crossbenchers onside.

But the demise of the university reform bill now leaves the Government with nothing to lose, especially with the next Budget looming.

The crossbench is clearly not going to help Abbott much in the future, given it hasn’t gone out of its way to assist him in the past nine months. Nor does it seem he’s in the mood to woo them either, calling the Senate “feral” earlier this week.

There would be no harm in dusting off Smith’s report and legislating its recommendations immediately. It does, after all, have the support of Labor and the Greens.

The crossbenchers may even start to behave a bit differently if a double dissolution election meant existential threat and not just another lucky spin in the lottery.