What Australia’s election can teach us

Canadian commentators are hoping to learn from Australia’s mistakes after a deadlocked election has left Oz in limbo

For Canadians, the Australian electoral system is a compelling alternate political universe. We’re both commonwealth nations with parliamentary democracies, so observers have been keen to draw lessons for Canada from this weekend’s election Down Under.

It’s still not clear who won Australia’s election. The Labour party is tied with the Liberal-National coalition with a few fringe candidates holding the balance of power. To the National Post’s Kelly McParland, a similar situation here would be a nightmare. “Imagine there’s a federal election in the fall, and the Liberals and Conservatives emerge from it absolutely deadlocked,” she writes. The sight of party leaders having to “prostrate themselves before a motley little gathering of independents” like “Helena Guergis, Garth Turner, Bill Casey and Elizabeth May” might not be pretty.

The Australian deadlock is partially a result of the country’s preferential, rather than “first past the post” voting system. This “‘preferential’ hocus pocus” is exactly what Canada’s left would like to see here, according to the Ottawa Citizen’s David Warren, because it would “offer a way to get Greens and other crackpot Left parties into Parliament.”

Another quirk of the Australian system is that party leaders aren’t elected at conventions, but chosen by the caucus. They’re frequently dumped if the party’s fortunes take a turn for the worse. Imagine “how the Jean Chrétien-Paul Martin rivalry inside the Liberal Party would have played itself out under Australian political rules,” speculates the Globe and Mail’s Jeffrey Simpson. Chretien would have been booted much earlier, as would have Brian Mulroney, and Liberals would now be sharpening their axes for Michael Ignatieff.

This kind of system promotes the assumption “that changing leaders is easier than the heavy lifting of developing new policies,” according to the Toronto Star. Australia’s Labour party actually dropped 5 points in the polls after replacing its leader, suggesting that although Liberals might be tempted to “try the quick fix of a leadership change,” they’d be better off coming up with policies Canadians can get behind.