How the Senate has changed since 1975

There has been a great deal of focus this week on the events of the Dismissal of Gough Whitlam’s Labor government, fifty years ago last Tuesday.

I have been particularly drawn to examining how the role of the Senate has changed since 1975, but also throughout the history of the federation. Changes in electoral systems, the size of the Parliament and a fragmenting party system has produced a Senate quite different to the one that blocked supply in 1975.

There has been a story told this week that the Dismissal had a chastening effect on the Senate, preventing a repeat in the last fifty years. Yet I don’t see anything fundamental that has changed in the relationship between the houses to prevent such an event happening again. Rather I see a change in the party system meaning that the conditions of 1975 have not been repeated. If they were, I think it’s entirely possible we would again see a standoff between the houses.

I should say I am not an expert on the events of 1975. Anne Twomey’s recent video series on YouTube has been very helpful in understanding the events of that year. But I think I know enough to clarify some things about the events that took place.

Most of the focus is on the actual dismissal of Gough Whitlam by John Kerr on November 11, 1975. While this perhaps could have been handled better, or in a different way, the fundamental issue that led to the crisis was that the government faced a hostile majority in the Senate, and faced an opposition that was willing to press their advantage (likely because of the government’s poor polling).

Out of 60 senators, 30 of them were Coalition members (one of whom had been elected as an independent then joined the Liberal Party), along with an independent senator, Albert Field, appointed by Queensland premier Joh Bjelke-Petersen to replace a deceased Labor senator. There was a second controversial appointment of a candidate other than the preferred Labor candidate to replace Lionel Murphy in New South Wales, but that senator, Cleaver Bunton, supported the government on supply, so it’s not relevant here. Field ended up absent from the Senate for the final month of the government’s term while his eligibility was challenged, but this still deprived Labor of a vote, giving the Coalition a 30-29 majority.

My personal outrage is not so much drawn to Kerr’s decision, but Bjelke-Petersen’s decision (and Tom Lewis in NSW) to distort the partisan balance of the Senate. These decisions would no longer be possible today – Australia’s last successful referendum in 1977 required a state parliament to appoint someone who remained a member of the political party who had won the seat at the last election. It was that decision that particularly weakened the Whitlam government’s upper house position.

If you look back at the history of Senate majorities, there have been a handful of occasions where opposition parties have held a majority in the Senate, but it rarely lasts long. Here is a short list:

• Liberal Party won the 1913 election, but Labor maintained a Senate majority thanks to Labor having won every single seat at the 1910 election (and also winning a slight majority of 1913 seats) – Joseph Cook called Australia’s first double dissolution election in 1914 and lost.
• When the ALP split in 1916, the conservative elements who split from the ALP and formed government with the Liberal Party (and eventually formed the Nationalists) did not hold a majority in the Senate, as the remaining parts of the ALP still held a majority. The Nationalists gained a majority at the next election in 1917.
• The Scullin government won power in 1929 at a House-only election, while the Senate elected at conservative victories in 1925 and 1928 continued until the next election in 1931.
• The Curtin government was a minority government when they took power mid-term in 1941, and the conservative Coalition maintained a Senate majority. The next election in 1943 gave Labor a clear majority.
• The 1949 election saw Robert Menzies lead the Coalition back into power. The electoral system was changed to proportional representation. While the Coalition won a slight majority of seats contested at that election, Labor still held the vast majority of seats elected in 1946, so maintained a Senate majority until a double dissolution was called in 1951.

Excluding short-term examples like 1975 or lame-duck examples like the first months of the Rudd government (when the old Coalition majority was still there), these are all the examples I can find.

The first thing to note is that they all ended within a year or two, and in all five cases the resolution came from an election (including Australia’s first two double dissolutions).

But they also were all caused by the old majoritarian electoral system.

From 1903 until 1946, the Senate was elected by one of two versions of a ‘block vote’ system, which (given some basic party discipline) gave every seat in a state to the party with the bigger vote. The preferential variant introduced in the 1920s allowed preferences to play a role, but ultimately the block with the highest votes won everything.

This produced a ‘windscreen wiper’ effect that often led to absurdly disproportionate majorities, far in excess of what you’d see in the House of Representatives. Following the 1946 election, Labor held all but three senators – the Coalition had won just one state in 1946, after not winning a single state in 1943.

From the formation of the two-party system in 1909 until 1955, there was always a majority for either the government or opposition in the Senate. The introduction of proportional representation in 1949 created the potential for multi-party politics, but it was only with the ALP split in 1955 that this became real. From 1955 until 1975, the government only held a majority in the Senate for one term. The gap between government and opposition was often filled by the Democratic Labor Party. But while the Menzies government failed to win a majority at the 1955, 1961 or 1964 elections, they did win 30 out of 60 seats.

Which brings me to my next point – the PR system we have has a tendency to produce results close to a deadlock, which may be preferable to massive unearned majorities, but I think it was a key factor in the Dismissal. This was particularly true of the 10-seat double dissolution elections in 1974 and 1975.

The Whitlam government’s victory in the House of Representatives in 1974 was slim but clear. Labor polled 49.3% of the primary vote to 45.7% for the Coalition, and won 51.7% of the two-party-preferred vote. This produced a 66-61 split in the House.

The Senate result, however, was basically deadlocked in four of the six states. In New South Wales, Victoria and Western Australia, there was a 5-5 split. In South Australia, the Liberal Movement’s Steele Hall won the tenth seat, with Labor leading the Coalition 5-4. In Tasmania, Labor led the Liberal Party 5-4, with ex-Liberal independent Michael Townley winning the fifth seat. Townley rejoined the Liberal Party in early 1975.

Only in Queensland was there a clear skew, with the Coalition winning a 6-4 split in that state.

So overall this produced a split of 29-29-2, which became a 30-29 lead for the Opposition in early 1975 when Townley rejoined his former party.

In a proportional system, it is very difficult to ‘run up the score’. This is particularly true with even-numbered magnitudes. Since you need to gain quite a large lead to gain a sixth seat, a 5-5 split can eventuate even when there is a large gap.

In 1974, Labor had a substantial lead in the two biggest states, yet won the same number of seats:

• NSW – Labor had 49.9%, Coalition had 41.6%
• Victoria – Labor had 46.7%, Coalition had 43.0%

DLP preferences undoubtedly helped the Coalition, but the low DLP vote meant that they didn’t win any seats – their preferences instead boosted the Coalition, basically producing a tied Senate.

This tied Senate was then nudged over into a hostile Senate by the appointment of Albert Field, and the events of 1975 then followed from there.

So why haven’t we had similar problems again? It is still theoretically possible that an opposition-dominated Senate could threaten to bring down a government, even if constitutional change will prevent a repeat of Bjelke-Petersen’s move. But what has changed is the party system. Multi-party politics has made such a scenario far less likely.

The rise of the Democrats and then other crossbench parties in the 1980s and 1990s has made it harder for either major party to get close to a majority. The only time when a major party came close to a majority was in 2004, when the Howard government won a majority thanks to winning three seats in every state at the 2001 and 2004 election, and winning a fourth seat in Queensland thanks to Barnaby Joyce running a separate Nationals ticket. There was a temporary decline in multi-party politics around 2004 with the decline of the Democrats, but it has bounced back since then, and neither major party is close to winning a majority.

But the nature of six-seat Senate elections does create the potential for a major party to win half of the seats with substantially less than half the vote. I wrote about this in 2023 as an argument for expanding the parliament.

Interestingly I recently discovered that the Australian Democrats opposed the expansion of parliament in 1983, and Senator Michael Macklin specifically focused his opposition on his concern about a switch from five to six seats. Specifically he was worried that, if both major parties managed 43% in every state, you would have a perfectly tied Senate, 38-all, with no room for crossbenchers.

By the time we had our first six-seat election in 1990, the major party vote had dropped enough for this to be less of a concern, but I can understand the concern in the party system of 1983.

So what has changed since 1975? The change to the constitution hasn’t removed the potential for such a situation to happen again. It is entirely plausible that a government in the House could again face a Senate dominated by their opponents, and that Senate could use the blocking of supply to force an election. If such a circumstance was to occur again, I think a prime minister in that position would learn a different lesson – that trying to avoid an election won’t work, and ultimately such a deadlock needs to be resolved by the voters.

Thankfully this is not an immediate concern now, but it’s not because of constitutional or norm changes. It’s because we no longer have that strong two-party system. Yet another win for multi-party politics.

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