By Peter Boyle
and Steve Robson
The decline in the third party, and especially Democrat, votes in the federal election, compared to 1990, can be expected to renew the pressures for merger between the Democrats and Bob Brown's Australian Green Party.
The polarisation between Labor and the Coalition parties sharply reduced the vote for lower house Australian Democrat candidates. In Victoria it was halved from 8% (in the 1990 election) to 4%, reflecting in part also the damaging split with former Democrat leader Senator Janet Powell and her followers (including much of the Democrats' left wing). Powell also failed in her attempt to win re-election as an independent.
Only two of the Democrats' seven Senate positions were up for re-election on March 13. But while the Democrats appear to be able to hold their South Australian seat, Karin Sowada may lose her NSW seat.
The Australian Green Party also failed to win any Senate positions, and Brown himself failed in his attempt at the lower house seat of Denison in Tasmania, attracting only 14% of the primary vote.
However, the Greens (WA) are likely to elect another senator. Dee Margetts told Green Left Weekly on March 14 that it was very likely that she would be joining Christabel Chamarette in Canberra. "With 60% of the vote counted, I have 40% of the quota. This means there will be a run-off between the Greens and the ALP for the sixth Senate seat in WA."
Stewart Jackson, secretary of the WA Greens, said that voting in WA and Tasmania was not as polarised as in other states.
Green candidates affiliated with the Green Party contested seats in NSW, Victoria and Queensland. Most scored less than 4% (the amount required to obtain a refund on their deposits and funding of campaign expenses). The Green Alliance in NSW scored 1.19% of the Senate vote, trailing the National Greens with 1.9%. The Victorian Green Alliance attracted 1.02% of the vote compared to Janet Powell's 1.21%.
Standing in elections for the first time, the Rainbow Alliance stood candidates in the Victorian seats of Batman and Melbourne Ports. They attracted 2.8% and 1.8% of the vote respectively. The Rainbow also supported Janet Powell's re-election campaign.
Di Quin, the Democratic Socialist Electoral League (DSEL) candidate for Melbourne, won 3% of the vote. She had the highest vote of 15 DSEL candidates standing around the country. She told Green Left Weekly that the polarisation of the vote was understandable given the GST, the experience of the Kennett government of Victoria and the fact that a convincing alternative to the major parties had yet to be built.
Although a poll of Democrats last year rejected the idea of merging with the Australian Greens, the inability of either to make significant advances on its own in this election must make combining forces look more attractive.
Francesca Davidson of the Victorian Green Alliance told Green Left Weekly that the results showed that Green and progressive forces "have to realise that unless they come together in a truly broad and democratic alliance, they will fail to convince voters that they are a viable alternative. The New Zealand Alliance shows what is possible with a genuine and democratic coalition of green and left forces: they now pose a serious threat to the major parties at local and national elections."
But Davidson argues that an Australian Greens-Democrat merger "would be too narrow a coalition to really tap the potential energy of a third and progressive voice in electoral politics. Such an alliance would only attract the more conservative wing of the green movements.
"To attract the grassroots activists, the people prepared to do much of the hard work, we need a much broader alliance, one that includes groups with a genuine social justice charter. It was simply not good enough for the National Greens to claim just before the elections that they were concerned about unemployment.
"The Democrats' shift to the right has also backfired on them, and they have lost the share of the vote they gained between the 1987 and 1990 federal elections", she said.
Di Quin agrees on the need for some form of coalition, saying that the election outcome indicates a potential. "Keating said that the Labor victory was a victory for the 'true believers' in the Labor Party. Nothing could be further from the truth. I think the re-election of the Labor government shows that while the public may not like what Keating has delivered, they are not prepared to express their anger against Labor by voting in a Coalition government that has an even more right-wing agenda.
"However, we have to be prepared for the re-elected Keating government to continue to try to implement its conservative agenda, particularly privatisation, labor market deregulation and austerity. A formation like the New Zealand Alliance could appeal to the opposition this will generate."