Numbers to horrify all Libs: Labor can win a parliamentary vote on female MPs alone

There is a numbers game that Labor MPs play among themselves that cuts through every argument about the state of democracy in Australia, and the location of our political centre. It has a particular resonance on the 50th anniversary of the dismissal of the Whitlam government, as one side of the old two-party system is governing without scrutiny while the other keeps pressing the self-destruct button in opposition.

The game, as one senior federal Labor minister explained it, goes as follows. Imagine the division bells are ringing for a vote on government legislation in the House of Representatives.

“If every bloke on our side stayed in their offices, we’d still win the vote,” he said.

The 50 Labor women would outnumber by seven the 34 Coalition men and nine Coalition women on the opposition benches. Labor would need the support of just four of the 13 MPs on the crossbench to pass the legislation. The crossbench, incidentally, contains 10 women – one more than the King’s loyal opposition at the moment.

The government has no intention of pulling a gender stunt. But it would be an interesting exercise to contemplate if, and when, the Liberals replace their first female leader Sussan Ley with either Angus Taylor or Andrew Hastie next year.

If you could travel back to 1975 and tell Gough Whitlam and Malcolm Fraser that one of their parties would be facing an existential crisis in 2025 while the other had just been re-elected in a landslide – and with a majority of its MPs being women – both would assume, without hesitation, that Labor would be in the doghouse of opposition. Neither leader then could have contemplated a world in which the defeated Liberals would have adopted, at the instigation of the National Party, a climate-change platform that risked further alienating the swinging voters in the cities who decided the past two elections.

The Labor Party that Whitlam and Fraser knew was the one prone to civil war in the 20th century. The Liberal-led Coalition was the pragmatic outfit, willing to represent middle Australia as it was, not as a radical fringe wished it to be.

Now let’s flip the observation and think what Whitlam and Fraser would say of their respective tribes if they were still alive today.

Whitlam would probably repeat the observation he made of Bob Hawke’s government on the 10th anniversary of the dismissal in 1985: “There are many people in the Labor Party who are so frightened of putting a foot wrong that they won’t put a foot forward.” Anthony Albanese heard a version of this critique in his first term from Labor’s old economic reform guard in Paul Keating and Bill Kelty. Albanese has a landslide to show them that his cautious approach worked to set up a second-term landslide.

Fraser would have the more interesting perspective once you got past the predictable condemnation of his former party, which he quit in protest after Tony Abbott became leader in 2009.

Fraser was the last Victorian to lead the Liberals to a federal election victory, in 1980, and the last to win a majority of seats in both Melbourne and Sydney, in 1977. He was also the only Liberal prime minister to represent a rural electorate, Wannon in Victoria’s western districts. The other eight, Robert Menzies, Harold Holt, John Gorton, Billy McMahon, John Howard, Abbott, Malcolm Turnbull and Scott Morrison, all served middle and upper-middle-class electorates in Melbourne or Sydney. Only Morrison’s old seat of Cook, in Sydney’s Sutherland Shire, remains in Liberal hands today.

Sussan Ley is the third Liberal opposition leader from a regional electorate after Fraser and Alexander Downer. History is not on her side as Downer did not survive to contest a federal election, and his old seat of Mayo in South Australia now belongs to the crossbench.

There is an understandable reflex within the parties themselves as well as in journalism and academia to view Labor as the agent of change in our system, and the Coalition as defenders of a conservative status quo. Labor as the idealists doomed to short-term government, and the Coalition as the ruthless masters of power with a disinterest in social or economic reform.

The way we remember the dismissal in the media reaffirms this bias. Every anniversary contains a checklist of Whitlam’s achievements and the scandals that brought down his government. Fraser’s role is secondary, even though he was the clear winner at the time. Fraser understood the electorate and the governor-general better than Gough in 1975, but he wasted the landslides that the people gave him in 1975 and ’77.

The modern cultural warriors of the Liberal Party have Fraser in their basket of deplorables alongside Turnbull. Yet Fraser was an agrarian socialist in his day. His mindset of intervention echoes the Coalition’s approach to climate change. But this is not the reason why Fraser offers a window into the Liberal contemporary problems. It’s the relationship with the Nationals.

Fraser governed as his mentor Menzies had before him, and his rival Howard after him, with a broadly based city-country mandate and a junior Coalition partner that could be relied on when the big policy calls had to be made. It was Fraser, with the active support of Country Party leader and deputy prime minister Doug Anthony, who gave practical expression to Whitlam’s abolition of the White Australia Policy when they welcomed the Vietnamese refugees. Menzies before him had John McEwen’s support in running an expansive postwar migration program, while McEwen as trade minister was himself the catalyst for the relationship with Japan. Howard had Tim Fisher in his corner for both gun control and the goods and services tax.

The continuity from Menzies to Fraser and on to Howard after the 13 years of the Hawke-Keating Labor government is easily forgotten because of a collective bias in the way the political class views the major parties. We tend to measure the success of Labor governments by their reform legacies, and Coalition governments by their election wins.

Yet this game provides a counterintuitive storyline if you divide the past 50 years into two blocks, with another, less colourful anniversary at the dividing line, the 25 years since the introduction of the GST on July 1, 2000.

You can track the demise of the two-party system and the end of the reform era across these two timelines. The 1975 election, the most bitterly fought since the conscription plebiscites of 1916 and 1917, was the last time the major parties had more than 95 per cent of the primary vote between them. Don Chipp took a shot at the duopoly at the next election in 1977 with the launch of his Australian Democrats and hit the bullseye. He claimed a primary vote of 9.4 per cent, at the expense of both sides – a feat Pauline Hanson’s One Nation party matched at its federal debut two decades later in 1998.

The GST saved Howard’s government in 1998 by giving it a positive second-term agenda based around generous income tax cuts and family payments. Liberal pollster and strategist Mark Textor later said tax reform allowed Howard to “repolarise” the electorate into a “left versus right contest” on the economy.

“We had to refocus the agenda on an economic agenda, not Hanson’s fragmented social agenda,” Textor told me. But the implementation of the GST almost killed the government in 2001 before the Tampa affair and the September 11 terrorist attacks on the US recast the prime minister as a wartime leader. The GST was the last contested economic reform to survive a change of government.

Howard’s WorkChoices died with the fall of his government in 2007, while the removal of Julia Gillard’s carbon price and mining tax was the rallying cry for the return of the Coalition to office in 2013. That election, which Abbott won in a landslide, was the first of the postwar era in which the third-party and independent vote was above 20 per cent. This vote rose to 30 per cent in the 2022 election, which brought the Albanese government to power.

Labor’s second-term landslide this year was achieved with a primary vote of just 34.6 per cent, well below the levels that prevailed during the party’s three heaviest postwar defeats under Arthur Calwell in 1966 (40 per cent), Whitlam in 1975 (42.8 per cent) and Paul Keating in 1996 (38.8 per cent).

There is no mystery to Labor’s emergence as the default party of government in our post-duopoly politics. It is the party most willing to see Australia as it is, in which the economy is centred on the labour of women, two-thirds of the electorate living in the capital cities, and the majority of the population being a first or second-generation migrant.

The Coalition is not a viable alternative while it emits regional-based grievances on issues such as climate change, and city voters perceive that the Nationals, not the Liberals, are the ones calling the policy shots.

George Megalogenis is an Australian journalist, political commentator and author.

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