Prior to the election, Tony Abbott claimed that
the election would be a referendum on the carbon price and Julie Bishop repeated this the day after the election (8 September). Since the election both Abbott and Environment Minister Greg Hunt have claimed people voted to repeal the ‘carbon tax’ and have been pressuring Labor without necessarily using the word ‘mandate’. But on 10 October, in response to Clive Palmer creating a four-member voting bloc in the new Senate,
Abbott did say:
I’m confident that everyone in this parliament very well understands that the new government has a clear mandate to get certain things done.
What is this mythical beast called a ‘mandate’?
There is no doubt that Abbott has a mandate to form a government as he has a majority in the House of Representatives, the Parliamentary chamber in which governments are formed. The Governor-General asks a person who has ‘the confidence of the House’ to form a government and, unless there is a split in the Coalition, Abbott can clearly claim that confidence.
No problems with
that mandate, but that is the end of certainty.
Votes can be one way of considering a ‘mandate’ but the national vote does not automatically lead to Government. In fact, five times in 26 elections since 1946 a government has won the seats it needed to form government
with less than half the national two party preferred (2PP) vote:
| Year | Winner | Winner’s 2PP (%) | Winners majority |
|---|
| 1954 |
Menzies |
49.3 |
7 |
| 1961 |
Menzies |
49.5 |
2 |
| 1969 |
Gorton |
49.8 |
7 |
| 1990 |
Hawke |
49.9 |
9 |
| 1998 |
Howard |
48.9 |
13 |
John Howard in 1998 is a stand-out: the lowest recorded 2PP to win government but with a significant 13-seat majority. My own recollection of the 1998 election is that much of Labor’s increased vote occurred in Labor’s own seats, which did nothing to help it gain the additional seats it needed to win, although increasing its national vote.
So it is possible to achieve a mandate to govern but not a popular mandate from the voters.
Can we take the number of seats or the size of the majority as an indication of a mandate?
The way the single member seats in the HoR work also reflects that national votes do not match seat numbers. As the vote increases, the number of seats often increases in greater proportion. Some of the more significant wins in this way are:
| Year | Winner | Winner’s 2PP (%) | Winner’s seats/seats in HoR | Winner’s seats (%) | Winners majority* |
|---|
| 1949 |
Menzies |
51.0 |
74/121 |
61.2 |
27 |
| 1958 |
Menzies |
54.1 |
77/122 |
63.1 |
32 |
| 1966 |
Holt |
56.9 |
82/124 |
61.2 |
27 |
| 1975 |
Fraser |
55.7 |
91/127 |
71.7 |
55 |
| 1977 |
Fraser |
54.6 |
86/124 |
69.4 |
48 |
| 1983 |
Hawke |
53.2 |
75/125 |
60.0 |
25 |
| 1996 |
Howard |
53.6 |
94/148 |
63.5 |
45 |
| 2013 |
Abbott |
53.5 |
90/150 |
60.0 |
35 |
[* The majority shown is over the other major party and does not include minor parties or independents.]
Two other interesting results were:
| Year | Winner | Winner’s 2PP (%) | Winner’s seats/seats in HoR | Winner’s seats (%) | Winners majority* |
|---|
| 1980 |
Fraser |
50.4 |
74/125 |
59.2 |
23 |
| 1987 |
Hawke |
50.8 |
86/148 |
58.1 |
24 |
In both cases, Malcolm Fraser and Bob Hawke won the national vote by less than 1% but finished with comfortable majorities.
By contrast in 2010, Labor under Julia Gillard scraped home in the national vote,
50.1% to 49.9%, but managed only 48% of the seats (
72 out of 150).
In the recent election about a quarter of Abbott’s seats came from the conjoined Liberal National Party in Queensland. It won 22 of 30 seats on a 8.9% share of the national first preference votes. Its share of the Queensland first preference vote was
45.7% and its 2PP, 56.5%: but this gave it 14.7% of the seats in the House of Representatives, and an amazing 73.3% of the Queensland seats.
So the number of seats in the HoR bears no direct relationship to the proportion of votes and suggests, that other than being able to form government, the number of seats held or the size of the majority are not very good indicators of a mandate.
And the vote was so close in a number of electorates that a shift in vote of 4,754 voters (about 0.04% of total votes) would cause Abbott to lose eight seats; a shift of 7,196 votes (0.06%) would lose him 12 seats; and a shift of 29,904 votes (0.25%) would lose him government (18 seats). While Abbott may claim a win on national votes and seats, it is on a slim margin when examined at the seat level.
If we break-down the 2013 election there are, in fact, several different mandates and not each is consistent with Abbott’s
claim of a mandate.
In Victoria, Tasmania and the Northern Territory, the Coalition won the 2PP but by less than 1%. It would have taken only 20,809 voters in total across those three jurisdictions for Abbott to have lost the 2PP in them. Does he claim a mandate from those jurisdictions because 0.6% of voters (or 0.17% of the national vote) made the difference between winning and losing the vote? A fairly flimsy claim in my opinion, which means his mandate from Victoria, Tasmania and the Northern Territory is marginal at best and in Victoria Labor did win a majority of seats.
In the ACT the vote was strongly Labor: 42.9% of first preference votes and 59.9% of the 2PP. So there is definitely no mandate for Abbott there, which is quite understandable given his ‘promises’ regarding the Public Service.
Chris Graham has also analysed the vote in distinctly Aboriginal communities and shown that in communities outside the Northern Territory the average vote for Labor was in the order of 71% and as high as 94%. In the Northern Territory seat of Lingiari different Aboriginal communities showed different swings, both to Labor and to the Coalition, but generally a move back towards Labor after a strong shift to the Coalition in 2010. As Graham headlines his article: ‘Abbott has no mandate from Aboriginal Australia’.
Abbott said
in his victory speech that ‘a good government is one that governs for all Australians. Including those who haven’t voted for it.’ Does that mean he will take account of the mandates he does not have, from Aboriginal people and the ACT voters, or the marginal mandates from Victoria, Tasmania and the Northern Territory, and also the views (mandate) of the 5,583,200 who did not prefer the LNP as their government?
If he doesn’t, can we say that his is not a ‘good government’ by his own definition?
If he can’t really claim a mandate on the proportion of votes or the number of seats, or lacks a clear mandate from some groups and jurisdictions, that brings us to Abbott’s claim that the election was a ‘referendum’.
To be won, a normal referendum requires a majority of the votes and a majority (4) of the States. He did win the vote, 53.5% to 46.5%, and he also won
all six States but, as with the discussion of the size of his victory, he won two by less than 1.0% and one by 2.4%. It would have required only 22,116 voters out of about 12 million, or 0.18%, for Abbott to have lost three States and therefore technically to have lost a ‘referendum’ – I think a bit too close to claim as a
clear mandate.
Although on the figures Abbott may have just won a referendum, did the voters really enter polling booths with the carbon price foremost in their thoughts?
In July, prior to the election,
polling was showing that, although a majority still opposed the carbon price, 53% against and 34% for, there was a general trend of slowly increasing acceptance since 2011. Also, a month before the election ‘climate change’ was rated
last of ten issues that may influence voting. There was, however, a marked difference on party lines: while climate change was a clear last amongst LNP voters, it was actually sixth for Labor voters. How this may have affected voting is impossible to say but it does reduce the likelihood of voters seeing the vote as a referendum.
The fact is that on election day
exit polls suggest between 3% and 8% of the voters considered the ‘carbon tax’ an influence on their vote. Only 1% of LNP voters mentioned the environment or climate change as an important consideration while 13% of ALP voters did.
So perhaps it was not a referendum at all – well, at least, not so far as the voters were concerned!
The final word on ‘mandates’ should rightly belong to Abbott himself. After the LNP election loss in 2007,
he wrote:
The elected Opposition is no less entitled than the elected Government to exercise its political judgment and to try to keep its election commitments.
So, thank you Tony: the 5,583,200 voters who preferred Labor have also created a mandate as you pointed out in 2007, although it is not the one you are claiming now.
What do you think? 