Pasokification is a real thing. All across liberal democracies we have seen the erosion in support for the traditional centre-left, social democratic parties – be that PASOK in Greece, Parti Socialiste in France and now, slowly, if the polls are to be believed, the Labour Party in the UK. One that has managed to buck this trend, however, is the Australian Labor Party (ALP). After returning to government with a slim minority in 2022, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese managed to do what no other social democrat seemingly can in the 2020s and won another election victory last year – this time increasing his majority from 51% in Parliament to nearly 63%.
So how did this happen and what have the ramifications been for the ALP since?
A Compass team – Director Neal Lawson, Deputy Director Lena Swedlow, and Political Affairs Officer Luke Hurst – sat down with Anthony d’Adam, a Labor Party Member of the New South Wales Legislative Council (the upper house of NSW’s state legislature) since 2019, and activist Kelly-Anne Livingston. This is a transcript of a conversation had in January 2026.
Neal Lawson
What’s the state of play of the [Australian Labor Party] and Australian politics at the moment – where are we?
Anthony d’Adam
Well, Labor’s obviously in a strong electoral position. I think the Tory equivalent, Liberal Coalition, is very weak. They’ve really suffered from a fundamental split in their base. They’ve lost sort of upper middle class professionals and particularly women in urban seats and those votes have transferred into this ‘Teal phenomena’ (Editor’s Note: this is a term for significant independent representation seen in Australian politics) and it’s basically put a massive barrier between them and being able to achieve a majority government because the numbers just don’t work for them. They need to those seats back and of course a lot of those voters have gone to teals and sort of moderately socially progressive smaller liberals are also coalescing behind those MPs and that’s changing the nature of the Liberal Party. It’s become a much more conservative, potentially reactionary, party and that just exacerbates their ability to be competitive in those seats because the voters that they need to win back are being alienated by a more extreme approach to their politics. I think we saw in the last election Peter Dutton, the leader of the Liberal Party, he initially thought he was on a winner by embracing Trumpian rhetoric and then Trump brought in the tariff changes and suddenly everyone looked at the Trump project and realised that this was anathema to the Australian experience.
NL
How big a factor was that then in the election?
AdA
Quite a factor. People just looked at Dutton and thought, no, we don’t want that. That’s not the kind of politics that we want in this country.
NL
So not the extent of Canada but similar-ish?
AdA
Yeah, very much. Because I think one of the interests of this is Labor won at both ends of the political spectrum, they took seats off the Greens, but primarily as a result of the declining Liberal Party vote. So because you’ve got a preferential system in Australia, those seats where the Greens were in a dominant position, they relied on a competition where it was either the Greens came first and the Liberals came second, or that kind of circumstance meant that Labor voters would then preference the Greens and they would get elected. But what happened in the last election is the Liberal vote collapsed which pushed the competition into a Labor-Green competition and Conservative voters, rather than voting Green, preferenced the Labor party. So Labor was able to squeeze out the Greens at one end and of course the collapse in the Conservative vote meant that they picked up on the other end. But really the consolidation of that teal block in parliament I think is really something that’s really shaped, I think, at least the electoral terrain for the next election.
NL
It’s interesting you start with the weakness of the opposition and not the strength of the ALP. What was it about the ALP’s track record in government and the manifesto that helped them?
AdA
Well, I’m not sure that the ALP, we won on a historically low primary, so people weren’t actively choosing the Labor Party and I think that’s, so in a sense, the support for Labor is very soft. If the coalition did get it’s act together then potentially Labor could be in a very difficult position because the primary vote is just not strong enough for us to be in a commanding position with the coalition.
Kelly-Anne Livingston
They just ran such a bad campaign. So it wasn’t just the MAGA stuff, it was the nuclear reactor stuff. So on the polling places, we had polling places wrapped in plastic signage talking about nuclear power. So they just backed so many odd horses in terms of what they thought was going to be a winner for them. I just think Dutton, just from reports, Dutton just was not listening to advice. He was just so confident. And they ran just such a bad campaign. And I think Labor’s was a very disciplined campaign, it had a very narrow message.
NL
Sounds familiar to us!
KL
It was all about cost of living, it was particularly about Medicare and public health, you know, and they were very disciplined and there could be nothing off-script, nothing. So if you wanted to about something, you want talk about Palestine? “Er- we’re just talking about cost of living”. So I think we had a very narrow focus and a sort of narrow suite of initiatives which went to cost of living and which we just hammered. But I think had the opposition’s campaign been stronger, better, then maybe our campaign wouldn’t have seemed as strong as it was, if that makes sense. It really was the contrast.
AdA
In April, it looked like Labor were going to lose the election. It really just turned very quickly. And it turned because the coalition campaign, there was nothing to it.
KL
They had been emboldened by The Voice. So we had this referendum on the Indigenous Voice to Parliament. And we were all shocked when we lost.
NL
You lost badly as well didn’t you?
KL
Yeah. I don’t think the ‘Yes’ vote was great, the campaign had its issues. But I think Dutton thought that the same politics that had defeated the Voice would then work for them in the election. And it just didn’t. And part of it was just luck, I guess. The tariffs, some people went ‘Trump’s not on our side’. He wants to damage Australia. He’s not our friend. So they put all of their eggs in this kind of MAGA basket because that is what had defeated the Voice and then of course the tariff stuff just had ordinary punters going, hang on a minute, he wants to kill our industry.
AdA
In Australia, the Fox equivalent is Sky News, but think in the UK Sky is a bit more moderate. Basically the narratives that came are fed by Sky News and that extreme sort of Right, Murdoch-influenced media. I think the Liberal Party started to believe that that actually had greater attraction in the electorate than it actually did.
KL
And I think they demonised the Greens on the left. We demonised the Greens on the left by saying they don’t care about cost of living, they don’t care about marginal issues. So if they want to think about Palestine – that’s marginal, that doesn’t affect your pocket. So they kind of tried to demonise Greens by saying they’re out of touch, they don’t really understand, they’re all concerned about these other issues and so you have weakness on the right and you have a population that’s really concerned about the cost of living, they’re feeling it, they managed to demonise the Greens and so it was just this middle path.
AdA
To Albanese’s credit, he places a lot of store in running an orderly, predictable government. And that’s partly a sort of baggage that’s come from the experience of when Kevin Raab and Julia Gillard were in office and we had a lot of leadership turmoil and the government seemed chaotic. And so I think a lot of those people who went through that experience, the parliamentary party, have taken on those lessons and really placed a great emphasis on being incremental, being orderly, being stable, being predictable. And I think to a certain extent that was appealing in a chaotic world. Trump was just turning the table in terms of global stability and you had a government that looked pretty reliable.
NL
Definitely echoes the Starmer style.
Lena Swedlow
I was going to ask about the relationship. We have this analysis in the UK, which is we have a Labour Party that seems to be chasing further and further to the right because it has that soft support, not a lot of primary support that is crumbling. And yet, the way that that should be going in government for us is not an orderly agenda about cost of living, to put it nicely. So how does that play out for the ALP and what is it you’re doing in government off the back of that election win and the dynamics that you described there?
AdA
Yeah, look, I mean, we’re still looking for a bold agenda to come out of the Labor government. I think, you know, that there’s been, you know some some changes… I’m trying to think of…
KL
Anything bold that we’ve done? *Laughs*
NL
You’re very similar to us!
KL
I think there’s a sense of frustration though that the members look at the majority and they think why aren’t we doing something? We’ve got this majority, we could be doing something. I don’t think they’ve got a clear idea of what. It’s just that we should be doing something more than we are.
LS
And how are membership figures? Are they falling? Are they stable?
AdA
There’s no public record of how big the Labor Party is.
NL
We habit it in same worlds, on different sides of the planet!
KL
Anecdotally, feels like we’re losing people to the Greens. Like left progressives, that they’re increasingly going to the Greens and increasingly this sense that how can you stay in? How can you stay in? If it’s not Palestine, it’s protest laws, it’s whatever it might be, there’s just a new issue where people go, right that’s it, that’s my bottom line, I’m out. We’ve just had renewals, we’ve all just got our renewals in the mail. The number of people who are like, I really have to stop and think about it, maybe this is the year, maybe this is the time. So it’ll be interesting to see what that looks like but at the same time I don’t think our state head office would be sorry to see us go.
NL
Albo’s dipping in the poles a bit, isn’t he, I think recently?
AdA
There’s definitely a Murdoch media agenda to try and bring Albo down. It’s quite an interesting contrast because in New South Wales, where the Labor Party is also in government, that’s the parliamentary party that I’m a member of, the approach of the Murdoch media is very positive towards our Premier. He’s a much more sort of right-wing, in terms of his political position, he’s been very strong in his advocacy around Israel and he’s taken some very concerning steps around civil liberties and protests. He’s very much happy to bend to the agenda that the Murdoch media are dictating. As a result, he gets plaudits from the Murdoch media and they sort of contrast Chris Minns with Anthony Albanese and try and paint Albanese as a bit of a vacillator.
KL
He’s very taken with the Royal Commission I think, and his response to the Bondi massacre.
NL
That’s the bit I picked up on.
KL
To his credit, he held fast for a number of weeks. No, we’re not going to do it. We don’t need to do it. This is not the best approach. We’ve set up our process. And then ultimately he ended up caving, which is such a bad thing and think it’s really, the Murdoch press has really dumped on there.
Luke Hurst
Isn’t Albanese nominally from the left faction?
AdA
Yeah, absolutely.
LH
Is that reflected in what he does?
AdA
No, I mean effectively Albanese is, over a period of time, he’s eviscerated the left. He’s basically drained the left of any kind of progressive content. So it’s now just a label. The national left, which is the dominant faction in the parliamentary party now, for the first time ever, the national left actually have the numbers, but it doesn’t translate into any substantive policies.
KL
I think he would argue he’s taking an incrementalist approach and he’s in a broadly progressive direction, but yeah, it’s not. anything to write home about.
AdA
They’re very small increments!
NL
Not visible to the human eye!
KL
They’re very selective as well. Again, it’s that bread and butter – health and education, energy costs, that kind of stuff. And willing to really play fast and loose with things like civil liberties, foreign affairs, defence.
AdA
He was also burnt by the Voice. I think he was genuinely committed to a reconciliation project and the Voice was sort of, you know, like the key device for that. And he backed it, in spite of it looking like it was going down, he still carried through and you know, there was an electoral cost, but I think the psychological impact of that was a much more timid, much more conservative approach to governing. He really wants Labor to be a long-term government, is his aspiration. But what that means in terms of long-term achievements, I mean there is an argument that the longer you’re in government, the more you’re able to gently shape the institutions. Particularly court appointments are, I think, good example of that. The industrial landscape is actually quite positive. We have made good gains for trade unions. The industrial legislation has been a significant achievement. And of course, we’ve had a lot of of volatility in terms of our industrial relations arrangements. The unions have been historically in decline. And if we can shift the dial and have more union supportive legislation in place for a longer period of time there is a hope that the union movement will resuscitate and that will obviously then have knock-on effects for the rest of society. There is a logic behind the approach. It’s just hard to get excited about it and it’s hard to excite people about it, particularly in an environment where we’re being picked at from the left by the Greens who are happy to use the platform that they’ve got to sound very progressive but of course they’ve got no capacity to deliver. They can be all things to all people but they don’t actually have the accountability and don’t actually wear the consequences of trying to have a more risky approach to government.
NL
So there’s quite a lot of interest in the ALP from the leadership of the Labour Party here, I mean not least because he’s an incumbent that won. Given what you’ve said, is there anything that Labour should be learning from the success of the ALP?
AdA
Look, I think, interestingly, Albanese is quite an inclusive leader. He has a strong emphasis on trying to bring everyone in to the core decision-making forum. So I think the government does span the broad spectrum of the Labor Party. There’s probably not that many radicals I would have thought in the federal parliament parliamentary party now. But he does, he’s a much more consultative leader than we’ve had in previous experience. So think that’s probably something that could be learnt for UK Labour. I think, my observation is UK Labour desperately needs to reincorporate the left. Labour should be a broad project, should be a party that spans a broad spectrum and is able to coalesce those social forces under one umbrella. If you’re, you know, ideologically driven to drive out sort of progressive voices out of the Labour Party then ultimately those voices and the voters that they reflect go somewhere else. And in a first-past-the-post system, I don’t think you can afford to lose the left. You actually need them part of your electoral coalition. And so there needs to be more attention to that. I don’t know whether there’s any truth to this, but restoring the whip to some of the rebels might have been a conscious decision by the leadership to try and-
NL
Given that they suspended them on a policy that they then U-turned on. So it was quite difficult to keep them suspended, I think, with any credibility.
KL
Some would say we’ve done such a good job on the two-child cap and it was inexplicable, it was like the history never happened! But to be fair, I think some of the things that Labour’s done here would be just unimaginable to our Labor. So the stuff around disability [welfare payments], we don’t understand it. We look at it from outside and we just think, why? What’s the narrative that makes that a kind of centrepiece of your Labour story? It’s inexplicable from our perspective.
NL
And you think that’s from a mainstream ALP perspective, not just from the left?
KL
Oh, absolutely. I just think that we look at that and we keep asking ourselves, what’s the narrative? All these elements we hear about, what’s the story that they’re weaving together? Albo had a story. And he has his own personal story which we get a bit sick of and he gets mocked for it but you know – child of a single parent, grew up in public housing. So this is his kind of narrative, ‘I care about families, I care about good public education, I care about good health care’. So even though that may be a set of modest undertaking from our perspective on the left, but it is a story and it is a progressive one. Whereas we look at some of the stuff that the current UK government has done and we just think ‘what’s it about’?
LS
Apart from the disability/PIP debacle, are the things you’re referring to?
KL
It just seems to be a succession of why are you targeting the most vulnerable. How does that fit your narrative? Even if you feel like it’s economically necessary, I don’t know if that’s the argument, but it just doesn’t seem to be any attempt to make that part of some kind of narrative or to explain it. So it does just look like punishing poor people from our perspective, which seems to us to just be so contrary to the Labour project.
AdA
think the other thing I’d say about the Australian Labor Party is the trade union movement is still very powerful. No MP in the Federal Parliamentary Party wouldn’t have a union sponsor. The unions really have a dominant influence over the party. They still control all the conferences because we’re a federation with the state branches and each state branch has a 50-50 model and that’s mandated in the national rules so unions still exercise a substantial influence in both the left and the right and so you’ll have right-wing MPs who will still be very solid on trade union issues. A lot of trade union officials have made a pathway into parliament through right-wing unions. When it comes to industrial questions they’re solid and so I think that does have a substantial influence around you know just what’s what the sort of permissible extremes are for the Labor Party.
NL
Yeah, can see that and we’re definitely missing that here aren’t we? Although it might be changing.
LH
Here it feels like the unions on the right side are quite strong.
NL
As servants of the leadership.
LH
As servants of the leadership, although they are fairly committed to basic industrial policy. The Employment Rights Act was backed by all the unions, but on other affairs, the right unions are quite loyal to the leadership. The left unions are increasingly alienated from the party and two of the biggest ones are now saying they may disaffiliate from the Labour Party. So it doesn’t feel like there’s as much of a route through the left unions anymore, but there is this kind of old labourist tradition on the right of the party.
LS
Yeah, it also feels like what you’re describing there is a real thread through all of the party no matter where you are in the party that this is part of the infrastructure that you have to work with and part of the industry, industrial policy is part of who you are as an MP. There’s not a singular thread that’s ‘industrial policy or not’ in this party. We’ve talked a little bit about the Greens and the Teals and how they’ve interplayed with the election. But what are the cross-party relationships like? What’s that dynamic like between the Teals, between the Labor Party and the Teals? And Labor and the Greens?
AdA
So I think the Teals have almost entirely directed their fire at the Liberal Party. So they’re only running in seats where the Liberal Party was the incumbent.
LS
Does that show any change in its state of changing?
AdA
Well, there has been. There’s a guy called David Pocock who’s a Senator in the ACT. Now the ACT is the Australian Capital Territory. It’s dominated by the public sector. You know, the vast majority of the electorate, it’s the most educated, affluent electorate. And, you know, Labor has dominated the ACT in terms of electoral representation. No Liberals have been elected from the ACT to the House of Representatives. You had David Pocock emerge, and he’s really, he’s eliminated the Liberals out of the – we have a situation where the states are guaranteed 12 Senators, but the territories have been given two senators each and so that means in a proportional representation system generally there’s Senators from the territories split one conservative one Labor party – what’s happening in the ACT is that Pocock has basically taken the liberal spot in the Senate but that’s then led to his organisation starting to make inroads in the Territory government and now he’s I think potentially a viable competitor for the Labor Party which has been in government in the Territory, in coalition with the Greens interestingly, for more than 20 years, 25 years or something, continuous Labor government. I think that’s starting to look a bit shakier as Pocock’s influence starts to rise.
KL
So he’s not a Teal.
AdA
He’s not a Teal formally, but his politics is very similar. So at this point in time the Teals don’t present an electoral challenge to Labor.
NL
But they’ve helped you by defeating in some of the right, haven’t they?
AdA
Absolutely. And so we cultivate the relationship with the Teals and there’s a similar phenomena in the New South Wales Parliament. So in New South Wales, Labor’s actually in a minority government and there’s a lot of cross-benchers and some of whom broadly align with the Teals, but that kind of independent representation has become much more common in Australian parliaments and they tend to be elected from conservative seats, they’re not always, but by and large mostly conservative seats get taken by independents and Labor works with those independents and has a very productive relationship with them.
LS
And that’s allowed by the national party and encouraged by the party and encouraged?
AdA
Yeah, absolutely.
KL
I mean the Teals are also very pragmatic. They’re all women, they have a similar set of priorities, they all very focused on their priorities. They don’t mind if they have to work together. And they take each issue on its merits. And so they’re incredibly pragmatic. So for all of the propaganda, which is about them being very independent, in fact, overwhelmingly, they work with Labor on most issues. And then they’ve extracted their sort of high priorities, the Integrity Commission was one of theirs. And so they’re actually very good operators in terms of getting the outcome that they can live with and they’re very good at sort of reshaping things at the margins to get a win but it’s not necessarily a substantial piece of policy. They get a lot of inquiries and that kind of thing, special envoys. You know, these kind of little pieces that they’ll tack on to things.
LS
Just listening to the idea of running coalitions and welcoming, you know, essentially independents to sit with you and vote with you and all of that is just foreign.
KL
Mind you, we have a very different approach to the Greens.
NL
Yeah, I was going to say, that’s much more hostile.
AdA
Much more acrimonious.
LS
Even when you’re in coalition?
AdA
Well, the ACT is unique. An example of Labor-Green cooperation that I think is a model that we can work with: we had a very problematic experience in Tasmania, one of the states where Labor was forced into coalition with the Greens and the relationship was very poor. Since that time, Labor really has refused to work with the Greens. As a consequence, it’s been out of office in Tasmania for a very long time and doesn’t look like it’s got any prospects of winning government in Tasmania on its own in the future. So the relationship’s actually quite destructive, but it’s a cultural thing, this ingrained hostility. A lot of it’s due to sort of primary production in Tasmania. Tasmania is, in terms of the national average, has more blue collar people, timber, less higher educated citizens and a big focus on primary production so issues like salmon farming, timber, they’ve become touchstones and Labor has tried to straddle that pretty ineffectively. And the Greens have been able to capitalise on agitating around those issues. So their vote has been relatively stable in Tasmania, but that’s really meant that the relationship has been a poor one. And of course, where the Greens are strong is in those sort of progressive inner-city seats. They’ve traditionally been the seats that have been held by left-wing Labor MPs. And so the electoral competition both with the local government and at a state federal election, because of that conflict, it’s become very hard to work across the party boundaries.
LS
And you mentioned there was membership falling. Have you seen defections of councillors or elected reps from Labor to the Greens? Because we’ve seen a touch of that here.
AdA
Not really, I mean people don’t generally defect to the Greens from an elected position. Party members do, but not elected officials. Generally they would just go independent.
LH
I’m quite interested in the, you’ve touched on it already, but the faction system within the Labor Party, and this could be completely wrong, but somebody I was chatting to about this a while ago said that there are fairly formalised structures for interaction between the factions?
AdA
Yeah, absolutely.
LH
Which is quite interesting because here it feels like, I mean Labour in the UK is like rife with factions which just snipe at one another and there are no even semi-formal processes for that to surface in productive, constructive ways. So what does that look like in Australia and how does it help?
AdA
Within the Labor Party, up until the early 70s, each of the state branches operated on a winner-take-all model. And then there was a process of what we call national intervention. So we’re a federated structure, the party operates as a federated body. And up until probably the last 20 years, the national executive has tended to have a fairly hands-off approach. And we had interventions in the Victorian and the New South Wales branch in the 70s to establish proportional representation. So they’re getting structural recognition to the factions. So an example is, so I’m pre-selected from the conference as a member of the upper house. It’s a list system in New South Wales, our upper house. And each faction gets allocated seats in proportion to their vote on the conference floor. Now, if I died or resigned from my position in the upper house, that position would be given to a left candidate, and this is written through our rules, according to the principles of proportional representation. So there’s an acknowledgement there that you have to preserve whatever the factional balance is that’s been established by the numbers as they sit on the conference floor. So that’s led to a very formalised factional structure. In a sense, it’s also led to conflicts within the left and the right because rather than, you know, there’s not a lot of movement in terms of the proportion of the vote on conference floor. In New South Wales, for example, the left has sat at about 33, between 33 and 40% since 1956. Those numbers haven’t moved a lot. And so the left know they’re going to get this many seats, the right know they’re going to get this many seats, and so the competition then becomes intense within the factions. So I’m associated with a grouping notionally called the soft left in New South Wales and we compete with the hard left which is the Albanese faction so it’s kind of a bit of a weird… the labels don’t actually matter much.
KL
It’s not actually that soft.
NL
And they’re presumably not that hard either.
AdA
It’s a historic description but that competition occurs within the faction and can be quite acrimonious. You tend to have better relations across the factional divide with the members of the right than you do within your own faction.
KL
Because it’s safe. So you can have a joint position on, like go back to say Labor Friends of Palestine because that’s probably where we’re most involved. So we’ve got right wingers who are involved in Labor Friends of Palestine, because it’s a sort of, we can’t take anything from them and they can’t take anything from us. So we come together on the issue and yeah, there’s no broader ramifications if it makes sense?
AdA
And that norm also applies to lower house seats. So, although in New South Wales we have a rank-and-file system, so party members get to pre-select their local candidates in a sort of one member, one vote approach, by effectively, through this sort of normative process, the parliamentary party is two-thirds right, one-third left, right? And there might be slight adjustments, but broadly the numbers on conference floor, they try and replicate that in terms of the composition of the parliamentary party. And the left have gotten stronger at a national level as a result of union amalgamations. There’s not a lot of, we don’t have unions changing sides in Australia. Unions are very centralised and most of them operate on a collegiate electoral system and so in order for the alignment of the union to change you actually have to win multiple- it just doesn’t happen. So the unions stay in the same camp and have been in the same camp literally since…
NL
Am I right though that when you join the ALP you join one of the two factions? Or you’re allocated? I thought it was almost kind of mandatory that you were in one faction or the other?
AdA
No, most party members, rank and file party members, are members of a faction. In the parliamentary party, almost everyone’s allocated. To be factually not aligned… You can’t. There’s two MPs in the federal level who are factually unaligned. There was one factually unaligned person in the New South Wales Parliamentary Party, but he subsequently joined the left caucus. It’s just very hard to operate outside of the factional structure. You just can’t get reselected without that support.
KL
But in branches most people identify with the faction. They might identify with a person, like they might say, I really like Anthony [Albanese], I really like this person or that person, their local junior Senator, their local member. But they’re not factionally aligned.
NL
I just want to go back if I can to the preferential voting system, because you know we’re proponents of proportional representation, but even a preferential system gives you quite a lot more fluidity and it demands that you with your electorate, and our friend in Manchester Andy Burnham says this all the time, that when he moved from Westminster to becoming a mayor and people had a second preference, you had to talk to everyone because you could win their second preference. And so you had a very different conversation rather than just targeting your 25%. You spoke to almost everyone. And then you look at innovation like the Teals which is, you know, we may not be on board with their more kind of economically liberal politics, but in terms of a piece of political entrepreneurship, your system created the space for that, didn’t it? So there’s a bit more fluidity and a bit more movement rather than straight first part of the post.
AdA
Ultimately, you end up with candidates winning who broadly the majority supports. You never have a situation where, as a result of a split vote within the progressive forces, you end up with a radically different political representative than the majority of people actually want to.
NL
That just doesn’t happen in this country. Progressive tragedies we call them and we get them all the time. There was how many? There was huge amounts, hundreds every year in every general election.
AdA
I think the Australian system is a very good one. Compulsory enrolment, compulsory voting and we’ve got compulsory preferential. So at a state level we’ve got optional preferential voting so you don’t actually have to number every square. At a federal election, to cast a ballot vote you have to number every square so you have to exercise a preference from top to bottom. And so that means it forces people to actually choose. They have to decide, do I want One Nation which is like the equivalent of Reform or do I want a liberal? You know, in a liberal seat, people are strategically voting, but their voting is through a preferential system, so ultimately they have to choose the least bad candidates. And I think the other interesting thing about the Australian system is the bicameral structure with proportional representation in the second chamber. It gives the opportunity for you know, so in the upper house in New South Wales we have the spread of parties. The Labor Party has 42 seats, the Liberal Party has 15 seats, and then you’ve got four Greens, you’ve got an Animal Justice Party, you’ve got a Cannabis Reform Party, and that bloc operates as a progressive bloc in the chamber. And then you’ve got a Libertarian, you’ve got three people who were effectively Reform-type candidates, One Nation candidates, but all three of them have resigned, they fell out with the leader because, you know, I think it’s very similar, personality driven. You’ve got one person who dominates the party, everyone who has an opinion who disagrees they get shut down and so they leave. So the three of them, for different reasons, have all resigned from One Nation. Then you’ve got shooters and fishers parties, so the gun lobby have two votes in the upper house. We used to have a Christian Democrat but they lost, so a sort of religious party. Then we’ve got the Liberal Coalition, so that’s the National Party representing country areas and the Liberal Party.
KL
Also within the party, there’s diversity in the upper house, because it gives you the capacity to, they may not win a lower house seat for whatever reason, but it brings a different skillset, brings different talent in, gives you flexibility.
AdA
And it also means that the agenda is, you know, like those voices are reflected in the political system. We may not agree with gun ownership, but having them represented means that in every parliamentary debate they’ve got a voice. It’s reflected. And a good example in New South Wales, the Animal Justice Party, they used to have two MPs, but they’ve just missed out in the last election, to have one of their MPs reelected. They’ve got one MP, she’s very effective. On every issue, it doesn’t matter what it is, she’s able to get an animal perspective, right? We were dealing with Strata reform around, you know, apartment block management. So she inserts an amendment about pet ownership for people in Strata. We’re debating cemeteries, she inserts an amendment around burial rights for pets. So she’s actually very effective. And because, she’s there, she’s able to support the government on particular issues. We’re more inclined to try and accommodate her where we think it’s reasonable, the animal perspective gets built into the legislation. It actually makes for a more plural, more inclusive. And the Chamber’s very collaborative. Our upper house has a very extensive committee system and that means that we’re able to inquire into issues and develop very comprehensive reports that really drive the policy agenda in New South Wales and every committee reflects that balance in the upper house. We’ll have three government members, we’ll have two cross-benchers and then two coalition members. The government won’t control most committees. And of the two cross benches you’ll have one right-wing crossbench one left-wing crossbench, so that broad pluralism that’s reflected in the chamber is also reflected in the committee system and that means your inquiry process is really very deliberative, very inquisitorial and you know like really delving deep into issues and you find you find interesting coalitions emerge on particular issues, around the outcome of inquiries. So it’s actually quite productive and a good model, I think.
LS
I’ve got one more question. Which is building on that point of the culture of pluralism and the structure of pluralism in the Parliament and meaning that those fringe voices or other niche voices get heard. Comparing that to the UK and the way that we’ve seen this bubbling away protest vote expressed various elections in different ways and now threatening to express itself as a Reform majority – what are your fears around the far right in Australia? They don’t seem to have as much of a grip or a path to power but they must exist?
AdA
Yeah, they absolutely exist. And really, I think the issue is really immigration and how immigration is managed and you know we’ve got a pretty chequered past in terms of how we’ve managed immigration I think. For social democratic parties across the world immigration is a real challenge because there is a sense of cultural anxiety that you can’t ignore. It’s a reality. In Australia, I think multiculturalism has been the dominant ideological position, certainly of the Labor Party. The Liberal Party have broadly been committed to it. You see a bit of that being eroded. The debate around immigration really is a proxy for a discomfort with multiculturalism. And I think what’s happening in Australia, because we’ve had a very open immigration policy, Australian society is very diverse. I don’t think it’s electorally viable for a conservative party to win on a sort of hostility to multiculturalism. So that is a bit of a bulwark against the rise of the far right. That’s not to say that we don’t have people trying to weaponise the immigration debate for political purposes. Andrew Hastie, who’s sort of a competitor, a prospective leader for the Liberal Party in Australia, is starting to dabble in that space. We’ve had One Nation, it is resurgent. The weakness of the Coalition has translated into a growth in support for One Nation.
KL
The referendum I think really damaged the kind of reconciliation journey with our First People that we have. We were shocked by just how resounding it was.
NL
It’s a bit like our Brexit, you know, you don’t know your own country all of a sudden, do you?
KL
Yeah, and it’s really damaged those conversations and it really hurt the leaders of the indigenous communities who really, it was a period of grieving and I think it’s really set back. But we saw during that campaign, some truly wild campaigning from the right. I mean, we haven’t seen it before.
LS
So it’s there?
KL
Oh, yeah. Yeah, it’s definitely there.
AdA
And increasingly, you know, in recent months, we’ve seen higher visibility from neo-Nazis. So we had an incident just earlier in the year where effectively neo-Nazis had a rally in front of our Parliament House. Had a sign that said “Abolish the Jewish Lobby”, just the fact that neo-Nazis were able to be so prominent is a new phenomenon.
KL
And we’ve had the rallies, the Reclaim Australia rallies happening this year.
AdA
Those forces are definitely present in Australian society. Are they at a point where they threaten the political system? No, they’re not there yet. And I think that there’s, you know, because of the nature of what’s happened electorally to the Liberal Party, it would be hard for them to, because, you know, those Teal seats, they’re not going to go for sort of reactionary discourse. So they’re in a real bind, right.