Rise of the minor parties, NSW edition

I have previously written about the decline in the total vote for the major parties at federal elections and Victorian state elections, and there is also a story of a decline in the major party vote in New South Wales politics, although the story is not quite the same. While there has been a long-term decline, this mostly took place up until the late 1990s, with the major party vote then rebounding until 2019, when it equaled the record lows of 1999.

The first direct elections for the NSW Legislative Council were held in 1978, so that seems like a useful place to start this story. At that first election, when 15 members were elected, every single seat went to a major party, despite using a proportional system similar to that used today. At the last election, six out of 21 seats (29%) went to minor parties. What happened over those four decades? And how much was it paralleled in the lower house?

Let’s start with the primary vote. I’ve combined the total vote for the Labor, Liberal and National parties over this time period. While these voters may be casting votes for quite different parties, it does give a sense of how much voters restrict their choice to these longstanding parties, and it avoids the noise of looking at how much swings to the left or right affect a particular major party’s vote in the short term.

The trend in both houses is roughly similar, although the Council has produced a consistently lower major party vote.

Both houses had a vote of over 90% for the major parties in 1978, but they have dropped to 65% for the upper house and 75% for the lower house as of 2019.

The gap was at its widest at the 1995 and 1999 elections. Group voting tickets had been introduced in the 1980s to simplify the voting process, as voters had previously been required to number 15 boxes to cast a formal vote. By 1995 the ballot paper was ballooning in size and numerous small parties were taking advantage of GVTs to get a leg up. This process was also helped along when the Council was reformed in the early 1990s, switching from electing 15 members at a time for three Assembly terms to 21 members at a time for two Assembly terms, and thus lowering the quota from 6.25% to 4.54%.

While the Council vote was much lower than the Assembly major vote during this time, it still hit record lows for the Assembly.

GVTs were abolished prior to the 2003 election, along with reforms restricting party registration, and that election saw the major party vote bounce back. For the Council, the major vote bounced back from 64.7% to 76.8%.

The level of support has remained largely steady over the last two decades, with major support actually increasing in 2015 before dropping again in 2019.

The 2019 major party vote finally broke the records from 1999 after a plateau, with the Council vote dropping to 64.5% and the Assembly vote dropping below 75% for the first time.

This big drop can be explained by the emergence of a number of minor parties. One Nation returned to NSW for the first time in a long time, polling 6.9% in the upper house. This explains most of the decline in the major vote in the upper house. In the lower house, the Shooters, Fishers and Farmers had never previously ran candidates but polled 3.5%, while Sustainable Australia, Keep Sydney Open and Animal Justice polled 1.5% each. That's 8% of the vote from parties that had never (or barely ever in the case of the AJP) ran for the lower house.

All of this story has focused on the vote count, but what about the seats? I have previously analysed how an increase in the primary vote for independents and minor parties doesn't necessarily have much of a relationship with the number of seats they win in single-member systems. While the independents did well in the federal election, we saw the lower house crossbench shrink in Victoria despite a big drop in the major party vote.

Well in NSW we've seen that the proportional Council has seen almost as high a proportion of seats go to the crossbench as the non-major vote share, but the Assembly has been roughly steady, before spiking in 2019.

In the Assembly, the first peak in crossbench numbers came in 1988. The Assembly had been expanded from 99 seats to 109, and seven independents were elected in that enlarged chamber. It dropped back to four when the Assembly returned to its previous size in 1991, but those four members were critical in a hung parliament situation.

Through the era of the Labor government, there was a number of rural independents in traditional Nationals seats, with the total peaking at six in 2003 and 2007.

These independents were mostly wiped out in 2011, but the Greens broke through with their first lower house seat that year. Two more were elected in 2015. Another two crossbenchers won rural seats off the government in by-elections during that term, and then another two Shooters were elected in 2019 for a total of nine.

The Council numbers peaked at six out of 21 seats elected in 1999, the last GVT election and also the previous peak. Since 2003, the Council has followed a reasonably predictable pattern. The 2003 and 2007 elections saw two Greens, one Shooter, and one Christian Democrat. The Greens won a third seat in 2011, and in 2015 a third left crossbench seat went to Animal Justice instead.

In 2019, the pattern of two Greens, one Animal Justice and one Shooter, was repeated, but the Christian Democratic Party missed out on a seat for the first time since 1978, and One Nation instead won two seats. Thus the minor parties again won six seats, as they had done in 1999.

In my next blog post, I'm going to explore the dynamics of non-classic contests in the Legislative Assembly and how it interacts with how many people get elected.

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