Post-electoral musical chairs

It is now more than a week  since the election and negotiations proceed to determine who will form the next government; noting that we already have a government, albeit in caretaker mode.

Incumbency could become very significant in this complicated post-electoral game of musical chairs, as Jack Waterford explained in The Canberra Times recently. Waterford’s point was that if Julia Gillard were to go to Government House now and sought a fresh appointment as PM, she would get it, on the grounds that until a no-confidence vote in the House of Representatives went against her, she is entitled to assume that she the confidence of the House.

A no-confidence motion would require either 75 votes to be successful, because the Speaker does not vote, by tradition, unless there is a tied vote – though interestingly in the ACT the Green Speaker of the Legislative Assembly has been known to temporarily give up his post as Speaker so that he can cast a partisan vote.

That would be hard for Tony Abbott to engineer, because most of the independents would probably not back him unless he could show that the Government had done something awfully bad, on the scale of the Whitlam loans scandal, at least.

Also, no confidence votes are not easy to engineer. In Australia, a motion of no confidence in a government has succeeded in less than a handful of cases.

Generally, such motions are tied to a matter of Supply – related to the Budget or a budgetary bill – and only the true partisans are generally keen to stop or delay budgets as Malcolm Fraser did in 1975.

It is much less likely that an independent would support such a motion. In part this is because a PM who is defeated on the floor of the House might be tempted to advise the Governor-General to call an election for the House or even to seek a double dissolution election. In a double dissolution election, history says the electorate is likely to become polarised, squeezing smaller parties and independents out.

This might not happen nowadays, but then again, it might, causing the erstwhile king-makers to become suddenly unemployed or, worse still, irrelevant.

So, it may be that at this stage Labor has a slight advantage in the race to the Treasury benches, but time will tell if a new precedent might be set this time. After all, Tony Abbott follows in a long line of Liberal politicians who have seen fit to break with tradition in the quest for power. Billy McMahon and Malcolm Fraser come to mind as examples of the supreme pragmatism that often imbues leaders who wear the mantle of conservatism.

Tony Abbott may be another such man.

Patrick Callioni is a former senior public servant, with the Queensland and Australian Governments, and is now the Managing Director of consulting company, Enterprise Intelligence Pty Ltd, which specialises in helping business to do business with government and vice-versa. www.enterpriseintelligence.net.au His books Compliance Regulation and Financial Services & Waves of Change: Managing Global Trends in the Financial Services Industry are available at Amazon