There has been a common story all over Australian politics of the major parties losing ground.
We now have the largest crossbench in both houses of the federal parliament in any of our lifetimes. New South Wales now has 13 members of the lower house crossbench, and Tasmania now has numerous members outside of the major parties. The ACT elected its first independent MLAs in decades, and there are a sizeable number of crossbenchers in Victoria, South Australia and Queensland. The Greens also broke through in the NT last year for the first time, along with three independents. All of this has tended to go along with declining primary vote shares for the major parties, and the election of many minor parties to proportional upper houses.
Yet Western Australia stands apart. There are no crossbench members of the lower house, and limited prospects for any of them to win at this weekend’s election.
First, let’s take a look at the primary vote share for minor parties and independents.
For the purpose of this blog post I am treating the Nationals as a major party. I know they are quite different in WA compared to the east coast, but they operate quite differently to other small parties and you can’t really make a fair comparison with other jurisdictions if you treat them as a minor party.
The primary vote share for minor parties and independents peaked in WA in 2001. That was One Nation’s best election, when they polled 9.6% in the lower house and won three seats in the upper house.
2001 was also the year that the Greens first broke away from the pack, polling 7.3% in the Assembly and winning five seats in the Council. The Democrats vote halved, while Liberals for Forests also polled 1.6% and won a seat in the Assembly.
Putting aside 2005, four other elections had a combined vote of 18-21%: 1996, 2005, 2008 and 2017. This is not out of the norm for other jurisdictions, but it doesn’t have the same upward momentum we see in federal politics.
I started my chart in 1989, but if you look at 1986, less than 2% of the vote was cast for minor parties and independents. The elections prior to 1986 were impacted by the split in the National Country Party, with two duelling parties (one in coalition with the Liberals, the other not) contesting the 1980 and 1983 elections. So 1989 seems like a good point to start this analysis.
The 2013 election had the lowest vote for minor parties and independents since 1989.
2021 was also quite low. It’s also important to note that 2021 was truly exceptional with an enormous Labor vote all on their own. It’s not surprising that the minor parties and independents were dented by this swing to Labor just as the conservative major parties were.
This next chart shows the number of non-classic seats in WA since 1989. A non-classic seat is any race where the 2CP is not Labor vs either Liberal or National.
Unsurprisingly the number of Liberal vs Nationals contests is far more than you see in the eastern states, but it has declined in recent years. It likely reflects that there was an incumbent Liberal-National government which contested the 2013 and 2017 elections, thus creating an incentive to minimise contests between the parties. In 2021, it is more explained by the enormous Labor vote making it hard for them not to make the top two.
There was also a lot more independent contests in the 1996-2008 era, but the independents have now largely been wiped out. In 2017, the only seat to fit this criteria was Baldivis, where the Labor margin was cut to 7.2%.
2001 stands out on its own as there were six seats that ended up being contests between a major party and a minor party. Two of these races involved Liberals for Forests, one of which they won. The other four involved One Nation.
The Greens only made the 2CP for the first time in Fremantle in 2021. This is long after they started breaking through federally and in New South Wales in the 2000s. Although it is worth noting that the Greens did win the seat of Fremantle at a 2009 by-election. The subsequent behaviour of that MP seemed to set the Greens back in that area for quite a while.
Related to the last chart, this next one shows how many crossbench members were actually elected.
Western Australia has now gone three election cycles in a row without a single lower house crossbencher winning a seat.
Of course, things could change. The Victorian election of 2010 produced a lower house with no crossbench, yet three were elected in 2014.
There are a few serious independents worth watching in seats like Fremantle, Churchlands and Nedlands, and the Greens are making a push for Fremantle. Yet it seems quite likely that Western Australia’s Legislative Assembly will still be entirely dominated by the major parties after this weekend.
How big might the impact be from local elections not being compulsory in WA? I’d have thought that they serve as an important method for someone outside the major parties to get a foothold in the local community.
I wonder as well whether WA’s lack of party affiliation in local elections also hinders independent candidates, as people that run in local elections all appear independent unless they explicitly state otherwise, so when they run for state parliament (usually for Labor), they may already have goodwill from people who otherwise wouldn’t vote for that major party.