Why one in three voters will ignore the major parties and support a hung parliament

Dec 05, 2024,
New Daily

The House of Representatives has 12 independents. There could be more after the next election.   


Come the election, the Prime Minister and the Leader of the Opposition will unite in warning voters against the perils of a hung parliament.

Only Labor or the Coalition can form government, we will be told. We should choose one or the other.


It is a message at least a third of Australia’s voters will ignore. An increasing number of people like the idea of a hung parliament.

They like, and even prefer, the policies advocated by independents or minor parties and appreciate that the best chance of those policies being adopted is by forcing a minority government to adopt them.

Whether a minority government surrenders to such pressure would depend on a number of factors including whether it calculates that the independents and/or minor parties would switch their support to the opposition. If that happened there would be a change of government without an early election.

No government wants to have its future as a government balanced so precariously on the decisions of independents and minor parties. Hence the Labor-Coalition unity ticket warning of the perils of a hung parliament.

But we already have a hung Senate. It is rare these days, and almost impossible to imagine, for a government to have a majority in the Senate.

Stitching up deals among the various groups and independents in the Senate keeps everyone busy. The job is made more difficult by some Senators quitting the party under whose auspices they were elected. So many loose cannons.

Last week’s end-of-year clearing of the legislative decks in the Senate – when 21 bills went through as one, and several others followed – was different only in degree from what has come to be a regular end-of-parliament exercise.

Proposed laws bank up while negotiators try to do deals, sometimes matching concessions in one bill to amendments in another on an entirely different subject.


In this year’s bargaining, the Greens agreed to pass the 21 government bills (some implementing core Labor policies) in exchange for a quite separate arrangement where the government agreed to provide half a billion dollars to improve energy efficiency in 50,000 social housing properties throughout Australia. That was the main pay-off for the Greens.

Two aspects of the deal, presumably to reward independent Senators Jacquie Lambie and David Pocock for their support, are yet to be announced.

This compromise with the Greens and two independents allowed Prime Minister Anthony Albanese to boast that his government won’t allow the tail to wag the dog. The government got its basic legislation through without changing it to meet the objectives of the Greens.


The Greens are insisting on some amendments, most of which are acceptable to the Minister, Tanya Plibersek. However, the Prime Minister stepped in because he was not interested in passing legislation that included amendments demanded by the Greens.

It will be a different matter next year when the legislation is considered on its own and not as part of a package. Assuming, that is, that Parliament meets in February. Tail-wagging dog won’t matter so much.

Governments of both political persuasions have become accustomed to being in the minority in the Senate for half a century and more – with just a few exceptions when the Coalition was in government.

It is rare that the government is in a minority in the House of Representatives, though that was what occurred throughout the first decade of the Commonwealth when there were three separate parties, none of which was able to muster a majority.

During that period, other than at election time, governments changed when a third party switched its support from the government to the other opposition party. A new government took office, without the benefit of a new election.

The same happened in 1940 when the government was supported by two (Country Party) independents who, midway through the Parliament, switched their support to the Labor Party opposition – which became the government without the intervention of an election.

The only other occasion of a minority government was the Gillard Labor government in 2010, which held office with the support of independents until the next election.

There is no precedent for what could happen in 2025.

The fate of either a Labor or Coalition government would be determined not by another party (as happened pre-1910) or by a handful of independents (2010), but by a huge mixed bag of minor parties, alliances and independents – a crossbench of unprecedented proportions.

The current House of Representatives includes 12 independents (half of them identified as teals), four Greens, one Katter Party and one Centre Alliance.

Two In Three Voters Do Not Support A Hung Parliament.