How likely, and scary, is the prospect of a minority government after the election?

News.com.au

02-05-2025

ANALYSIS
Spend a week on the road with any politician and certain phrases, through sheer, merciless repetition, will bore their way inside your skull, to be embedded there permanently.
You find yourself mentally completing the candidate's sentences. You hear a question, during a press conference or an interview, and know exactly how the candidate will answer it before they open their mouth.
This is an inevitable part of the political process. The boffins who run election campaigns know that to reach as many voters as possible, their candidate's lines must be repeated again and again and again and again and again and again and again.
Which is annoying, when you're absorbing every word spoken, but also illuminating. You pick up on patterns. Granted, they're usually pretty obvious.
We could talk about a dozen of these key, incessant phrases from the last week of Peter Dutton's campaign, but for the purposes of this article we'll choose one: 'a Labor-Greens government', or if you prefer, its close variant 'an Albanese-Bandt government'.
Mr Dutton has constantly, constantly sought to raise the spectre of a minority Labor government beholden to the Greens. The idea is to convince Australians that voting for, say, Labor's Rebecca White in the Tasmanian seat of Lyons is almost tantamount to supporting Greens leader Adam Bandt.
'If the Prime Minister is re-elected, it is only with the Greens in cahoots,' the Opposition Leader told ABC Radio on Friday.
At other points in the campaign, Mr Dutton has expressed worry about Australia ending up with a 'European-style' composition of MPs in parliament, with small factions like the Greens or Teals able to hold legislation hostage.
How probable is a minority government?
According to the polls, both public and private, Anthony Albanese may well retain his majority after the election, which would stave off the minority government bogeyman for another term and render the rest of this article moot.
This would be in line with most of Australian history. Before 2010, we had gone about seven decades without any minority government holding power.
But Mr Albanese could also slip under the 76 seats required for a majority in the House (75 would be enough if he could convince a crossbencher to become speaker).
On the other side, a Coalition majority government was only a quite faint possibility even when Mr Dutton led in the polls, because the Liberals and Nationals are coming off such a low combined base. He would need to flip more than 20 seats.
A more readily achievable objective, for Mr Dutton, is to pull roughly even with Labor on seats and then convince some crossbenchers, probably a combination of the Teals, to vote with him on confidence and supply.
Put aside both majority government scenarios. What happens, after Saturday night, if neither side has won outright?
Say Labor has 74 seats and the Coalition has 72. The specific numbers don't matter so much as the fact that they're in the same ballpark, and are under the threshold for a majority.
Both sides would then go to the crossbench seeking enough votes, in the House, to guarantee confidence and supply. That means, if a no confidence motion occurs, at least 76 MPs must be committed to oppose it. And the same number must be willing to vote for appropriation bills, which enable the government to spend money.
Whichever major party can add enough support to reach 76 will form a minority government.
It's important to recognise what that would not guarantee. The crossbenchers would essentially be agreeing not to bring down the government, and little more. They would not be agreeing to support all government legislation.
And they would be free, during the post-election negotiations, to demand concessions from both Mr Albanese and Mr Dutton in exchange for their support. That is what happened back in 2010, when Julia Gillard offered up things the Greens and country independents wanted, and convinced them to support her over Tony Abbott.
How scary is the minority government scenario?
When Australia has a majority government, almost all negotiation happens either within the governing party or in the Senate.
All that usually matters in the House is whether everyone in the biggest party – Labor, for these past three years – votes the same way.
The Senate is more diverse; it is incredibly rare for any party to hold a majority in that chamber. So that is where policy debates erupt most fiercely, and where deals are made, and concessions offered, to get things passed.
Running a minority government would require Mr Albanese or Mr Dutton, whichever of them were prime minister, to conduct similar negotiations in the House as well. So a Prime Minister Dutton, for example, could not implement his proposed cut to the fuel excise without convincing enough crossbenchers in both the Senate and the House to support it.
What I'm dancing around here is the logjam argument – the idea that a minority government would be hamstrung and unable to get anything substantive done.
It's a fairly weak one.
Yes, there would be another annoying step to overcome every time the government wanted to pass legislation; the crossbenchers in the House could not simply be ignored. That might lead to more horsetrading. You can mount a credible argument that it would slow things down.
But it would not require a fundamental rearrangement of how the Australian parliament functions. These same negotiations already happen in the Senate. They're routine.
And of course the minor parties would argue that giving them more influence over legislation, and more leverage at the negotiating table, would enable them to better represent the interests of their electorates. They'd frame it as a good thing.
The other argument against minority government, and the one Mr Dutton has favoured in these closing days of the campaign, is that it could have a radicalising effect on whichever major party is in charge.
If Mr Albanese's survival as a second-term prime minister hinges on the goodwill of the Greens, he will make concessions to them, implementing policies outside the mainstream. That is the theory of the case being offered by Mr Dutton.
Hence all the talk about a 'Labor-Greens' or 'Albanese-Bandt' government.
The hypothetical inverse, here, would be a Dutton government propped up by One Nation. Or to adopt the parlance, a 'Dutton-Hanson government'.
For what it's worth, which is for you to judge, minority governments are not all that rare when you look around the world. Many countries in Europe, and indeed our neighbour New Zealand, use a version of proportional representation, which makes it extremely difficult for any one party to reach a majority.
Those nations still function. They still get stuff done.
But the concerns about minority government are rooted in reality, and worth thinking about before you cast your ballot today.