Pauline Hanson emerges as the queen of a potentially unruly Senate
If Malcolm Turnbull thought the last parliament’s Senate was unmanageable, the election hasn’t exactly simplified things for him
Nick Xenophon as late as Wednesday night was hopeful the NXT might pick up the last Queensland Senate spot – but it wasn’t to be.
Pauline Hanson has emerged from what has felt like the never-ending federal election with four senators, which makes One Nation the largest small bloc outside the Greens. Xenophon is just behind with three senators.
Arise, Queen Pauline of the parliament.
Pauline Hanson's back, and the disaffection genie is well and truly out of the bottle
Katharine Murphy
When the final results emerged on Thursday, the record shows the Coalition has 30 senators (down three), Labor has 26 (up one), the Greens have nine (the South Australian Robert Simms failed to get back so they are down one) – and the crossbench now numbers eleven, which is three more than the last parliament.
That last parliament would be the one the
Coalition complained was unmanageable.
Four Hansons, three Xenophons, Derryn Hinch in Victoria is a newbie – then some of the band from the last parliament is back together –
Jacqui Lambie is back in Tasmania, Bob Day, the Family First senator, in South Australia, the LDP senator David Leyonjhelm is back in New South Wales.
Bottom line? The Coalition will need nine votes to get anything through the upper house.
In practical terms this will mean the government needs either Labor, or the Greens to pass anything in relatively straightforward fashion.
If Labor and the Greens are a no, the government will have to hustle nine crossbenchers to say yes – quite the task given the spread of views on the crossbench.
The simple thing to say now the election is finally done and dusted is Malcolm Turnbull’s two major objectives in the recent poll: to emerge from winter on the hustings with a clear personal mandate, and to take a fire hose to the Mos Eisley Cantina in the Senate, have backfired, and badly.
Turnbull’s own political position is weakened.
The Coalition only just controls a majority in the lower house and the Senate crossbench has expanded, not contracted, courtesy of his call to take the country to a double dissolution
As well as the free-range populists and the ideologues, this election cycle has delivered two political blocs emphatically opposed to the Coalition’s core free trade, open-market, philosophy:
One Nation and the NXT.
But the simple story isn’t the only story to tell today.
The first thing to say is this new Senate is genuinely representative, ranging from progressive left through the shades of centrism to reactionary right.
Representative is good. Representative might go some way to encouraging disaffected voters to keep engaging with the federal politics – you never know, people might buy in if they feel their interests sometimes rate in dispatches in Canberra.
The prime minister has some profound calls to make.
Malcolm Turnbull can attempt to forge a centrist path on big and important issues like budget repair if he chooses to engage Labor seriously and in a bipartisan way – that pathway is open to him if he and Scott Morrison are prepared to make compromises rather than just declare it’s my way or the highway.
Labor also has some big calls ahead. All the incentives in this parliament push the opposition in the direction of mischief rather than productive compromise –
Bill Shorten is going to have to decide the balance between public interest and the Labor party’s political interest in fomenting discontent in the Coalition’s already febrile ranks.
Shorten’s call is actually more difficult than it looks.
And recent history also tells us we shouldn’t assume that newcomers to professional politics make a seamless transition to life as a senator.
Truth is, standing here today, we don’t have perfect wisdom on how the Senate will operate.
Clive Palmer’s Senate bloc exploded on impact.
Nick Xenophon and
Pauline Hanson are seasoned operators – but who can say how their colleagues will adjust to their new high pressure public lives?
https://www.theguardian.com/austral...s-as-the-queen-of-a-potentially-unruly-senate
