Comment: why major parties are threatened by independents

There's been a scare campaign about the dangers of minority government. But does that serve your interests, or the major parties'?

The Gillard minority government passed more legislation than any other in recent history. Source: AP

In the last week or two before the election, the biggest scare campaign we’ve seen isn’t about Medicare or Gonski, it’s a bipartisan fear of the Greens, Nick Xenophon, Tony Windsor, Rob Oakeshott and the so called “dangers” of minority government.

It’s hardly a surprise that the major parties are scared of the smaller ones: they’ve wasted so much time on internecine battles and ideological warfare that they forgot about the vast majority of the country who couldn’t give a wet faecal damn about their petty squabbles. They’ve also utterly discounted the amount of information we have access to, and how easy it is for alternatives to reach us, and real information to find its way into our back pockets.

"The Coalition’s dark warnings about repeating the chaos of the Gillard minority government depends on us all believing the myth that it was minority government causing the chaos."

I call male bovine excrement on that claim.

The Gillard minority government passed more legislation than any other Australian government, and instituted sweeping reforms like the carbon price, the NBN, the Gonski report and the NDIS. It was by no means perfect, but it was hardly a government unable to govern. The chaos of those years was primarily caused by Kevin Rudd and Tony Abbott, aided by the Murdoch press, throwing the longest “it’s MINE, she took it and I want it BACK” tantrum in history.

" I hope many Australians see the scare campaign against minority government for what it is"

The punters are still saying the Coalition will win the election on Saturday, albeit by a narrow margin. I hope they’re wrong. I hope the huge number of undecided voters, and all those people fed up with the major parties playing at politics rather than concentrating on government, will stick to their guns and vote for independents and minor parties who promise and deliver on policies that matter. I hope many Australians see the scare campaign against minority government for what it is – a plea for the absence of change we desperately need – and ignore it.

It might be easy to turn our backs on politics, disgusted and despairing over the state of what we see, but elections are important. This is the only chance we have to influence how our taxes are spent, how our jobs are created, how our health care system is managed, how our education is delivered and how the vulnerable people in our country are cared for. These things matter, greatly. Revolutions have been fought, people have died for our right to have a say in how our country is governed. We should take it seriously, even if the people in power don’t.

A minority government is a thing of horror to the major parties only because it forces them out of their inward facing boxes, out of their comfortable positions where the enemy within matters more than the constituents without.

" the security of majority government is no longer something the two major parties should take for granted"

Australia’s history of majority government occurred during decades of growth, the years of being “the lucky country” where economic and personal security was never under serious threat. But the world has changed so much that it’s even reached our parochial little backwater, and security is not something we can take for granted any more. It makes sense that this should translate into politics; the security of majority government is no longer something the two major parties should take for granted, if only because they failed to manage security when they had it.

Whoever you vote for this weekend, make sure it’s someone who will take governing as seriously as you take the issues of government. Make sure it’s someone who will vigorously represent your beliefs about the economy, jobs, health, education and social welfare. Three years is a long time to have people in power doing things you don’t want them to do. And if the last few years in politics have taught us anything, it’s that nothing we say or do, nothing we protest about, or disagree with, or very much want, nothing will matter to a majority government until the last few weeks of their term. And by then it’s far too late. 

 

Jane Gilmore is a writer from Melbourne. She writes about politics and feminist issues, and her work has appeared in Fairfax, The drum, The Guardian, and more. 

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