Party which forms government

The six original states and so far the only ones are guaranteed equal representation in the Senate and a minimum of six Senators per state. Until , Senators were elected in much the same way as Representatives, except that three or more Senators were chosen in each state at each election. Thus, until the election, between three and six Senators were elected statewide at each election, by a plurality system that often led, as we shall see, to one party winning most or all of the seats being contested.

A candidate is elected if he or she receives at least that many first preference votes. This is one-seventh of the votes cast, or one divided by the number of seats being contested six , plus one. To be elected, however, a candidate does not have to receive During that period, however, a minor party candidate was elected to the Senate having received barely six per cent of the required quota in first preference votes.

The details make the process of electing Senators even more complex than this brief summary might suggest. To illustrate, Sharman predicted that the decision to increase the number of Senators per state from ten to twelve would work to the disadvantage of minor party and Independent candidates.

One might think otherwise, because increasing the number of seats has the effect of reducing the percentage of votes necessary to win one of those seats: if five Senators are elected, the quota needed to win each of those seats is However, Sharman argued, it also is necessary to take into account the difference between electing an even or an odd number of Senators. If an even number is elected e. Therefore, he concluded, increasing the number of Senators elected from five to six actually should damage the prospects of minor party and Independent Senate candidates, not improve them.

It assumed that one of the major parties had a right to a Senate majority and that the essential purpose of elections was to determine which one.

For our purposes, there are two simple points to be emphasized. First, since the general election of , Representatives and Senators have been elected in different ways. And second, this difference in modes of election usually has resulted in different party balances in the two houses.

From the perspective of the officers of the House of Representatives House of Representatives Practice 94 :. The result of proportional representation has been that since the numbers of the Senate have been fairly evenly divided between government and opposition supporters with the balance of power often being held by minority parties or Independents, whose political influence has increased as a consequence.

Governments have frequently been confronted with the ability of the Opposition and minority party or Independent Senators to combine to defeat or modify government measures in the Senate. There is the not-very-well disguised implication here that the advent of PR for Senate elections has caused a problem. The electoral settlement for the Senate mitigated the dysfunctions of the single member electorate basis of the House of Representatives by enabling additional, discernible bodies of electoral opinion to be represented in Parliament.

The consequence has been that parliamentary government of the Commonwealth is not simply a question of majority rule but one of representation. The Senate, because of the method of composition, is the institution in the Commonwealth which reconciles majority rule, as imperfectly expressed in the House of Representatives, with adequate representation. Those who work on one side of Parliament House can argue that the House of Representatives is the more representative body because the weight of each vote cast in House elections is roughly the same, whereas the equal representation of states in the Senate means that the electoral power of a Tasmanian voter, for instance, is much greater than that of a voter living in the much more populous states of Victoria or New South Wales, the homes of Melbourne and Sydney respectively.

Consider the view of the Senate that Partridge expressed before the first minor party Senators arrived on the scene following the election:. The fact is that the element of responsible cabinet government has prevailed over the federal principle for the most part, and cabinet and parliamentary government in this country has not developed in a manner different from British development.

If there are important differences between Australian and British parliaments and cabinets, they are traceable rather to differences in the history and the character of the two societies than to problems or conditions created by the existence of federalism in this country.

Table 3. The table divides general elections into pre and post periods. As it shows, between the emergence of the modern party system in and the Act, there were only two brief periods following the and elections when the government did not hold a majority of seats in both houses.

Thirteen of the 15 general elections during this period resulted in one-party or coalition control of the House and Senate. Contrast this pattern with the 26 general elections held between , the first time that Senators were elected by PR, and Italics indicate a government majority in the Senate. Year of election. Number of seats. Twenty of those elections produced governments that did not hold a majority of Senate seats.

Since the election of , the only time that governments have had majorities in the Senate was during the period following the elections of and The introduction of PR for Senate elections unquestionably led to major and lasting changes in the distribution of House and Senate seats among the political parties and, consequently, major and lasting changes in the dynamics of Australian national politics.

Only the first PR elections for the Senate, in , produced divided government in the sense that one of the two major parties or coalitions controlled the House and the government while the other controlled the Senate. Increases in the size of the Senate and, therefore, in the number of Senators to be chosen in each state at each election, have made it increasingly easy for minor parties to win seats but see Sharman As we have seen, at a normal half-Senate election at which six Senators are elected in each state, the quota of votes needed to win one of those seats is only As the size of the Senate has increased, the magnitude of both quotas has declined.

However, the absence of one-party control of the Senate depends as well on the relatively equal support that the two major political forces have enjoyed since the election. Modern Australian politics has not been characterized by landslide elections. For a party to win four of the six seats contested in a state at a half-Senate election, it would have to win Figures reflect the composition of the Senate after newly-elected Senators have taken their seats. What is particularly noteworthy is how evenly the Senate has been divided since between the Australian Labor Party ALP and the major non-Labor party or coalition.

There were at least two minor party or Independent Senators in office following each of the 18 Senate elections since Fifteen of those 18 elections produced Senates in which the number of minor party and Independent Senators equalled or exceeded the difference between the number of ALP Senators and the number of Senators representing its major opposition.

And half of the 18 elections resulted in two seats or less separating the two major political forces in the Senate. If Labor or its opponents had been able to amass consistent and consistently large majorities in the Senate, the presence of a relatively small number of Independents or minor party Senators would have mattered much less, and perhaps not very much at all. It is the combination of PR elections for the Senate and the generally equal balance of forces in Australian national politics that has created opportunities for the Senate to exert influence as an independent force in government.

The principal defining point of distinction between the two stages has been electoral reform. But as they indicate, there is a second factor that must be added to the equation: the discipline that prevails within parliamentary parties in both houses and especially in the House of Representatives. If the Labor, Liberal and National parties were relatively loose coalitions of factions, and if factions of one party sometimes found common ground with factors of one or more of the other parties, then minor party and Independent Senators would not have the potential leverage that they enjoy when Labor and its opponents confront each other like armies trained to march in lockstep.

In Chapters 6 and 7, we will be looking at how Senators have voted on divisions—votes on which the position of each participating Senator is publicly recorded. Analysis of comparable votes in the US Congress is complicated and time-consuming because it involves examining the individual voting decisions of Senators or, even worse, Representatives.

Fortunately for our purposes, analysing divisions in the Commonwealth Parliament is much easier because, in for instance, there are only eight votes in the Senate to be examined: one vote for each of the five parties represented in the Senate and one vote for each of the three Independents. During —, which is the time period we will examine in the later chapters, each of the four parties with two or more Senators can, in most cases, be treated for voting purposes as a single entity, because the members of each party almost always vote together.

Such is the strength of party discipline in parliamentary voting that defections by Coalition Senators now are rare and defections by Labor Senators are virtually unknown. Since the Coalition returned to government in , only the Australian Democrats and the Greens when there have been two of the latter serving together in the Senate have split their votes from time to time.

Party discipline in Parliament is so strong that many analysts now refer to the Commonwealth as not having a system of responsible government but, instead, a system of responsible party government. It is the fight in the party room, not on the floor of the house, that is the heart of our system. It is in the party room, not on the floor of the house, that changes in the leadership occur—that prime ministers are forced to yield, that ministers are forced to resign portfolios.

The cabinet is not a committee of parliament but a committee of the governing party or parties. Party discipline in the lower house is possible because of the deals done in the backrooms of the party. Sharing of power occurs not between executive and legislature but between the party and its leaders. Thompson In the first Parliament, elected in , 59 of the 75 seats in the House were held by members associated with Free Trade and Protectionist parties; Labor held 14 of the remaining 16 seats.

Two years later, after the election, the House again was divided among the same three groupings, with Labor picking up nine seats at the expense of the Free Trade and Protectionist members who nonetheless held two-thirds of the seats. The combination of single-member constituencies and preferential voting has contributed to but has not been the sole cause of the development of a party system that, for purposes of the House of Representatives, comprises two and one-half parties combined into two opposing forces.

One side of the political divide has been occupied since the first days of the Commonwealth by the Australian Labor Party.

Since the fusion of , the other side of that divide has been dominated by the Liberal Party or its predecessors, the Nationalist and United Australia parties. Representatives of the National Party or its predecessors, the Country and National Country parties, also have won House seats at each election since , though a smaller number than either the ALP or the Liberals. For most of the time since then, the Liberal and National parties in the House have been in a formal or informal coalition—hence the characterization of the House as comprising two and one-half parties but two opposing political forces.

More often, however, each party has run its own candidates and encouraged its voters to cast their second preference votes for the candidate of the other party. Thus, the preferential voting system has protected the Liberal and National parties against the danger that they could split the non-ALP votes in certain constituencies, thereby allowing the election of ALP candidates whom they and most voters opposed.

Just as the threat posed by the growing electoral success of the Labor Party stimulated the fusion of those opposing it, the discipline that Labor imposed on its candidates and MPs compelled its opponents to become equally concerned with maintaining internal party cohesion in parliamentary voting.

As early as , the Labor Party required its candidates to agree to a pledge:. I hereby pledge myself not to oppose any selected Labor candidate. I hereby pledge myself if returned to the Commonwealth Parliament to do my utmost to ensure the carrying out of the principles embodied in the Federal Labor Platform, and on all such questions to vote as a majority of the Federal Labor Party may decide at a duly-constituted caucus meeting. The Australian Labor Party is quite open about its demand that its representatives shall be its delegates, and it enforces discipline over parliamentary members with a formal pledge.

Members of the party pledge themselves to be bound by the platform and rules of the party and by the decisions of the executive and conference, not to oppose any endorsed Labor candidate at any election and to vote according to the majority decision of the caucus of the parliamentary party on all questions in parliament. They face expulsion from the party if they break any aspect of the pledge. Jaensch , emphasis added. With respect to the Liberal Party, the situation is much the same in practice though not in theory: [42].

It is a matter of frequent celebration in Liberal Party rhetoric that in contrast to their Labor rivals, Liberal Members of Parliament are free men and women, able to exercise their minds and judgments as they see necessary. This is true only at the margins. The solidarity of the Liberal Party in parliament is hardly less marked than that of the ALP, and for much the same reasons.

Singleton, et al. Even the occasional free votes do not necessarily reflect party decisions to allow their members freedom of choice. If the party insists on discipline instead, it then may have to face the embarrassment of defections, possibly coupled with the awkwardness of penalising members for their unwillingness to abandon their individual consciences.

And even if party discipline prevails, enforcing the party position still may cause lasting resentment on the part of those members who felt compelled to vote for a party position that contradicted their own intensely held views. There have been two transformative events in the history of the Commonwealth Parliament. The first was the emergence in — of a disciplined party system; the second was the switch to PR for Senate elections beginning in To get a feel for how both events changed the Senate, we can take a moment to look at the Senate before fusion and then during the period between fusion and the advent of PR.

Ian Marsh is our guide to the pre-fusion period. In his Beyond the Two-Party System and other writings, Marsh advocates an alternative conception of policy-making in Australia that emphasizes ad hoc coalition building that would escape the constraints of the two-party system with its disciplined party voting in Parliament and its concentration on policy development within ministries and Cabinet.

He contrasts — the dynamics of contemporary policy-making, and especially the role of Parliament, with the situation that prevailed during the first years of the Federation until , when fusion occurred and the party system coalesced into the Labor Party and a non-Labor bloc. Parliament was a substantial arena in the —9 period. This contrasts with the dignified and ritualistic role it has come to play in the two party era. Parliament provided the prism through which cross-cutting aspirations were refracted and refined into programs and measures Parties first needed to attract substantial electoral support for their programs.

Then governments were created and unmade according to their ability to gather majority support for their measures in parliament. Furthermore, they were required to obtain majorities in two chambers.

Marsh , In the first ten years, the Senate used its powers regularly against governments. It functioned as the house of minorities it was intended to be, using its committees to gather information and to build opinion among senators. The committees became the key institutional mechanism for investigating strategic issues. There were frequent disagreements between the houses, particularly on tariff issues.

Disputes between the chambers were fierce, but accommodations ultimately were reached. Indeed, these cameo dramas became an occasion for public learning. The site of contention was not party conferences or internal party committee processes, but parliamentary committees and debates within and between the houses. The political drama constituted the setting in which the educative role of political investigation and deliberation was more fully realized. Marsh The first case he mentions, the tariff bill, was discussed in chapter 2.

He continues:. Conflict between the houses also arose in relation to the British Preference bill in October The H of R had suggested the amendments were unconstitutional in form. The Senate also sought provisions postponing operation of the coloured labor clause in relation to shipping.

The H of R sought an amendment that had the effect of granting preference to British goods irrespective of the means of transit. The Senate held firm after several exchanges with the H of R. By taking part in an election, parties hope to get as many of their members as possible into a representative body, like parliament or a municipal council. At the same time they try to hold as many posts as possible in the government , or in the municipal or provincial executive.

Political parties have various functions. One is promoting the interests of their voters. They also draw up party programmes. Citizens can join political parties, enabling them to help shape the party programme.

The leader of the Scottish National Party said on Newsnight last night that she will attempt to keep the Conservative Party out of government after the election, even if it has up to 40 seats more than any other party. But Scottish Labour has said previously that the largest political party forms the government.

Is this right? In these terms, no. Labour are correct in saying that the party with the most MPs after every election since has proceeded to take power. But as Nicola Sturgeon says, there's no rule preventing a smaller party or parties taking over either. The most important thing about forming a government is that it must "command the confidence of the elected House of Commons".

When one party has an overall majority—that is, more MPs than every other party put together—this condition is obviously satisfied.

So in the event that Labour won an overall majority in May, the current government would have to resign and the Queen would invite Ed Miliband to become Prime Minister.

But the more likely scenario— according to the opinion polls —is a hung parliament, in which no single party has an overall majority of MPs. This happened in , resulting in the current coalition. What then? It doesn't have to include the largest party. That's easy.

But what's more complex is the dynamics of the game of thrones that would follow the election of a hung Parliament. As there could be a number of viable political combinations, and a government can stay in power with fewer than a majority of MPs actively supporting it, the party leader with the first opportunity to form the government has an advantage.

So are there rules about who gets the first attempt at trying to "command the confidence" of the Commons? In the short term, the incumbent Prime Minister is entitled to remain in office to see whether he or she has enough support to stay on.