Independents on the ballot in WA

Bill Shorten is no stranger to dirty campaign tactics.

He was, after all, guilty of them in 2016 when he claimed the federal coalition was secretly planning to sell off Medicare if re-elected, and a victim when, in the lead-up the 2019 poll, Josh Frydenberg claimed without evidence that the Labor leader supported an inheritance tax.

So, it was apt for Mr Shorten to lean on the experience last week when, appearing on ABC Radio in Melbourne, he was asked whether he thought the growing crop of independent challengers setting up campaigns in notionally safe Liberal electorates would back Labor in the event of a hung parliament.

No, was the short answer.

“First of all, Labor’s aiming to try and win the election, but I wouldn’t put words in the mouth of the independents, because then the Liberals would say, ‘See, that hints at some conspiracy’,” he said.

“The Liberals – the modern Liberal Party – they’re so busy saying, ‘What’s under the bed? The independents, Labor, you name it’.

“I don’t want to fuel any conspiracy theories that the government would then leap upon.”

Mr Shorten’s reluctance to provide commentary makes sense. Given his experience and awareness of Labor’s polling lead, he knows there’s nothing to gain from talking up the possibility of a minority government.

It also makes political sense not to offer commentary, given all the independent challengers who have modelled their campaigns on the ‘Voices’ archetype, which successfully knocked off Sophie Mirabella in Indi and Tony Abbott in Warringah, are exclusively targeting Liberal-held, blue-ribbon electorates.

Both reasons speak to a growing anxiety in both parties about where the balance of power will land after a likely May poll.

Here in Western Australia, much of this conversation has been muted in the aftermath of last year’s state election.

Labor’s dominance of state parliament, comparative fundraising strength and rebounding popularity since then has, in the minds of many, put the party in the box seat after years in the federal wilderness.

Indeed, on current polling, the party under Anthony Albanese’s stewardship can expect to pull off a swing of 5.8 percentage points on its 2019 result, enough to claim Swan, Pearce and Hasluck come polling day.

It’s a stark turnabout from the 2019 election, at which WA was a vital bulwark in the electoral wall that Scott Morrison’s government had built across resources-dependent electorates.

Few are willing to bet it will hold for Mr Morrison again, even if state Labor’s astronomical popularity has dipped some in recent weeks, with the prime minister increasingly being seen as an underdog for re-election.

Things aren’t quite as dire for the party over east, where independent challengers are spooking Liberal elders at the same time as the party is seeking to chalk up gains in NSW and solidify popular support in Queensland.

The anxiety was evident in late January, when polling supplied to Nine Newspapers found Climate 200-supported independents were either ahead of or neck-and-neck with incumbents in Wentworth, North Sydney and Goldstein, all notionally safe Liberal seats.

And while those seats have gained national attention, WA has not been without its own prominent independents, most notably Anglicare WA director of innovation and strategy Kate Chaney.

Ms Chaney, niece of former federal Liberal minister Fred Chaney and daughter of Wesfarmers and Northern Star Resources chair Michael Chaney, launched her bid for the seat of Curtin, held by the Liberals’ Celia Hammond on a 13.7 percent margin, earlier this year.

That followed entreaties by Curtin Independent, an outfit run by prominent former stockbroker and Wide Open Agriculture co-founder Anthony Maslin.

It’s not Ms Chaney’s first foray into politics, having had a brief dalliance with the Labor Party that ended after she quickly tired of the tribalism of party politics.

She’s also the first to admit the lure of politics didn’t come naturally.

“There are 20 good reasons not to go into politics,” Ms Chaney told Business News.

“But when two people approached me on the same day connected with Curtin Independent, I thought I really should have the conversation.

“Once I started talking to them, I realised there was this broad sense of disillusionment with the two-party system.”

While she’s campaigning to win, Ms Chaney professes no animus towards Ms Hammond.

Instead, she views major parties themselves as being incapable of handling the national issues she believes are important to voters in Curtin.

On integrity, Ms Chaney, like other independents, supports the introduction of a federal anti-corruption commission, as well as real-time disclosure of, and a lower declaration threshold for, political donations.

She also advocates for a far more ambitious stance on climate change than the major parties, favouring a 50 per cent reduction in emissions by 2030, as opposed to Labor’s stance of 43 per cent and the Liberals’ 27 per cent.

Her positions are not dissimilar to those taken by members of Voices for Durack, an independent organisation searching for a candidate to contest the vast, eponymous electorate that encompasses much of WA’s northern half.

Utilising organising principles typical of the ‘Voices’ movement, including so-called kitchen table conversations, the group published an interim report at the end of 2021 that outlined community sentiment ahead of a federal election.

Among the campaign’s prominent backers is Philip Gardiner, who served as a Nationals MP in the Legislative Council for a single term between 2008 and 2013.

Mr Gardiner told Business News he’d lost faith in the direction the federal party had taken under Barnaby Joyce, who he sees as being actively unhelpful in tackling climate change.

“If we had 20 to 25 independents in the federal parliament, don’t you think the character of it would change markedly? I do,” he said.

“You’re going to have people talking and aligning themselves on different things, but the politics will largely be reduced, and for every vote it’ll be a conscience vote.

“I think that’s very healthy; it’s honest, whereas currently politics can’t be characterised as being honest.”

Lynne Craigie, formerly president of the WA Local Government Association and the Shire of East Pilbara, has also been working with Voices for Durack ahead of the election.

She said an independent representative would have the capacity to address constituent priorities such as redistribution of tax revenue to the regions without being caught up in the wheeling and dealing of party machines.

Additionally, Mr Gardiner believes the incumbent member and current cabinet minister Melissa Price has limited capability to serve the seat while holding a senior role in government.

“I don’t think it matters who is in that role, it’s a very big area to try and get across and I do believe that people need to see the elected member,” Ms Craigie said.

“That might be very hard if you’re a senior minister with portfolios.”

Reform debate

That more independents in federal parliament could lead to a more functional legislature was borne out in John Daley’s final report for The Grattan Institute.

Published in June, the same month Mr Daley left the institute as chief executive, ‘Gridlock’ attempted to explain why many of the reforms the think tank advocated for through the 2010s never came to fruition.

Of the 73 reforms the report analysed, less than a third of all proposals were passed into law of instituted through delegated legislation in some form, with the remaining 50 failing due to a mixture of reasons.

As Mr Daley notes, reforms such as increased housing density, ending first homebuyer incentives, From page 9 and keeping superannuation contributions to a minimum collapsed because people didn’t like them.

However, reforms opposed by the major parties, referred to as ‘shibboleths’, ranked as the second likeliest factor for reform to fall over.

“Reforms that crossed shibboleths – beliefs that mark party or factional loyalty – almost always failed,” Mr Daley said.

“They have become a major obstacle to sensible reform, particularly in tax, superannuation, and energy policy.”

What makes these findings so pertinent is that many of the mentioned policy areas will likely arise as major challenges for whichever party forms government later this year, as management of COVID-19 shifts from public health responses to macroeconomic reform.

That includes improving the country’s miserly productivity rate, which grew at just 1.1 per cent in the most recent financial year, according to data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics.

Cassandra Winzar and Jarrod Ball, economists at the Committee for Economic Development of Australia, surmised the scope of the issue repeatedly in the think tank’s latest annual economic and political outlook report, arguing wages would only grow with improvements in labour productivity.

“Australia needs a broad suite of measures that support improved dynamism in the economy and assist in lifting labour productivity back to historical averages,” they said.

“This includes actions that facilitate greater mobility of workers, such as more seamless occupational licensing requirements and abolishing stamp duties on residential property purchases in favour of land tax.”

The treasurer, Mr Frydenberg, indicated a willingness to tackle COVID-19’s lingering effect on labour productivity when he signed off on the Productivity Commission’s five-yearly review of the national economy earlier this month.

Whether anything gets done with the findings is yet to be seen.

The commission’s previous report, released in 2017, argued for federation reform by way of removing duplication between federal and state governments, and transferring greater taxation responsibilities onto states.

No significant actions were ever taken as a result of those findings.

Other major reforms, such as the federal government’s stalled push for an anti-corruption watchdog, have similarly fallen flat in recent years.

While the Liberal Party has attempted to introduce an integrity commission of sorts, its model would not have had retrospective investigative powers or the ability to launch its own investigations, as is the case for most state anti-corruption bodies.

Helen Haines, independent for the seat of Indi, introduced her own Bill late last year which would have legislated for a commission with said powers.

However, it was defeated in the lower house after failing to gain an absolute majority in support.

On climate change, the federal government has shown more of a willingness to accept the global consensus on the need to achieve net zero emissions by 2050.

Even on that subject, though, the coalition parties have erred against legislating the target, a move previously attempted by independent member for Warringah, Zali Steggall.

That it was independent MPs, not the federal opposition, who championed these reforms in the first place is noteworthy.

It was a situation that Mr Shorten, again speaking on ABC Radio, was confronted about when asked whether independent challengers were effectively acting as the opposition to the ruling coalition government.

Again, his answer was no.

“I’m not going to go out of my way to bag any independents because I work very well [with] some of them, including Zali and Helen Haines, and I know they work well with me,” he said.

“We need safely managed change, a better future for all, and Labor is the party who can deliver that.”