Australia’s Emerging Four-Party System
Australia, like many but far from all representative democracies, has long been in the grip of a political duopoly. Two major political groupings have alternated as the governing political party since soon after Federation in 1901. The Australian Labor Party – a genuine social democratic party growing out of the labour movement in the colonies – faced a conservative opposition that traded under various brands and by the 1920s had coalesced into a coalition between the city-based Nationalist Party and the rural based Country Party. By the end of World War II, the former had reconstituted and rebranded as The Liberal Party of Australia. The conservative coalition ruled for 27 years from 1949 and for 29 of the next 50 years. During that latter period the Country Party also re-branded as, the National Party, rather confusingly since its electoral base was still firmly anchored in the bush.
But Australia’s two party system has in recent years come under increasing pressure from the strong populist upswell that has manifested in many other Western nations, including The United Kingdom, France, Germany and, of course, Trump’s America. The arrival of One Nation, led by the erstwhile Pauline Hanson, has now won lower house seats in South Australia and its first federal lower house seat. Current polls have the party routing the two established conservative parties at the 2028 federal election. That’s a long time away but the vibe is trending and has panicked the coalition. Liberal party Opposition leader, Angus Taylor has reached for the old favourite – immigration (dog whistle, race) – in an attempt to undercut One Nation’s most magnetic pull. He has tried to tie this move to the other main One Nation attack front – the crisis of housing affordability. It’s not just migrants taking your jobs; they’re also kicking you out of your homes. Hence, Taylor’s proposed policy of limiting the annual net migration number to the number of new houses constructed, presumably in the previous year. How one sets a number for gross migration, the only variable under the government’s control, to meet a net target, when outmigration of Australian residents is beyond control and highly variable, has not been vouchsafed. Nor has it occurred to Taylor, and the brains trust around him, trat in recent years the number of net migrants has been below the number of new houses constructed. His proposed policy, if implemented, would require an increase in gross immigration, good news for the employers desperately trying to find workers to fill vacancies in construction and the care services – and to One Nation’s racist siren call.
But wait, there’s more. Those coming in must have the ‘right’ values and cultural background to ‘fit in’ to Australian society. No prizes for guessing that means being white from an Anglo-European homeland – and even then, some exclusions are warranted. What about all those migrants from other climes who are already here? The 900,000 plus of Indian heritage and 700,000 plus from China? Well…it depends. If you have taken out citizenship, fine – you’re a true-blue Aussie. But if you ‘only’ have permanent residency, then you can stay, work and pay taxes. But you will not be eligible for the full range of social security benefits and other government supports. Bad luck, ‘if you don’t like it, you can go back to where you came from’, a One Nation rallying cry.
Taylor’s lurch to the right is strategically aimed at joining its coalition partner, the Nationals in a joint effort to de-fang One Nation and win back support from traditional conservative voters, while continuing to ‘shill’ for the large mining interests and big business. The coalition’s problem is that the more successful this strategy, the more it threatens to further alienate voters in the cities, the people living and working in the urban electorates that they were pushed out of at the 2022 and 2025 federal elections, the latter giving Labor a majority of epic proportions, and the seats that they must win back if they are ever to form government again as the current coalition. To gain those seats, especially in metropolitan Sydney and Melbourne, risks losing rural and regional seats to One Nation – and vice versa.
This conundrum has a historical path. In earlier posts on the past two federal elections [https://www.mikeberrywriting.com/mike-berry-blog/2022/6/5/stop-press-red-sea-refuses-to-open]
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I demonstrated that the Liberal Party was now, in terms of seats in the Lower House, the minor party in the coalition, the tail on the dog, outnumbered by representatives from the Nationals and the National’s dominated Liberal National Party of Queensland. If the polls are right – big if – One Nation will become the formal Opposition after the 2028 election with the coalition pushed to the crossbench, a fate not unlike Britain’s Liberal Party during the twentieth century. If that happens then a new conservative coalition, combining the old with One Nation may emerge, eventually to be consummated in RURA, one integrated rural and regional political party headed by the indefatigable Hanson or her successor, renegade National, Barnaby Joyce.
This admittable bizarre outcome has been given oxygen by Taylor’s ill-conceived immigration policy. Former Labor strategist Kos Samaris in the Guardian’s online New Daily has argued that this misstep has likely alienated up to 500,000 permanent residents facing exclusion from government support, noted above. Moreover, many of them reside in the very metropolitan seats that the coalition must win back to govern. These permanent residents now have an incentive to quickly become citizens, many have already met the eligibility requirements, joining family and fellow community citizens ready to whack the coalition at the next election.
That scenario would leave two established parties, Labor, and RURA plus the Greens. But wait, there’s more. The other recent political/electoral development in Australia, starting in 2016 and gathering pace at every federal election since, has been the rise of independent candidates, so that the total share of the popular primary vote for the two major parties has fallen to little over three fifths, down from the eighties. Recent speculation has focused on the eleven independents elected in 2025 forming a new political party. Leaving aside the contradiction of independents forming a group, these members have already developed a loose network, perusing proposed government legislation together and supporting each other’s legislative position. A formal merger would help the group circumnavigate the recent restrictive laws on the maximum limits on political donations. Many have accepted the media’s designation of the group as ‘teals’, a colour mixing blue and green. [For American readers this will be confusing. In Australia, Labor’s colour is red, Liberal is blue, the Nationals predominantly yellow, the Greens well…green, and One Nation (appropriately) orange.] This suggests that such a party would look something like a rebirth of an earlier third party. Let’s call the new party ‘The Australian Democrats 2.0’.
The original Australian Democrats broke away from the Liberal Party in the 1980s as a protest against the move to the conservative right under then Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser. The Democrats 2.0 espouse a similar small-l liberal political philosophy of individualism with a greenish touch of concern for environmental issues like climate change and social inequality and exclusion. They likewise profess to be the champions of small business, the economy’s little Aussie battler, betrayed by the Liberal party’s focus on ‘the big end of town’. The teals are pro-business and anti-unions.
The parallel between the new and old Democrats is a stretch. The latter formed around a charismatic leader, Don Chipp, who had been a Minister in a coalition government. His fellow schismatics were used to party discipline with similar backgrounds and philosophies. The putative new Democrats are a disparate group separated by state, background and personal philosophies and hot button issues. Some are closer to the Nationals, others to the old Liberals (at least one refuses to adopt the teal label). There is no obvious charismatic leader, though two of the longer term members would have some appeal, both within the group and in the wider electorate, and two have ruled themselves out of such a venture. None have had experience in government; neither has Pauline Hanson, though Joyce has, as cabinet minister and Deputy Prime Minister. But let’s go with it.
This admittedly extreme scenario sees Australia’s political system settling into a four-party configuration: Far right (RURA), centre-right (Democrats 2.0), centre-centre (Labor) and Greens (centre-left). The odd genuine independent will sneak into the House at the edges. In the short term this is likely to benefit Labor, as confusion reigns in the other parties as they battle to sort out their positioning and messages, while dealing with the inevitable internal power conflicts over precedence and privileges. But in the longer run some move back to a duopolistic situation could develop as a coalition of RURA and Democrats 2.0 face off against a coalition of Labor and Greens, a situation rife with strife.
But whatever happens, Australian politics in the post-neoliberal age is unlikely to return to the cosy two-party system sanctioned by the central limit theory of political science. Something similar seems to be happening in the UK, with the explosion of Reform, the renaissance of the Greens and the hanging on of the Liberal Democrats by their fingertips.