Australian hung parliament – lessons from 1940

Australia has woken up to its first hung parliament in 70 years. The 21 August 2010 election has striking similarities with its 21 September 1940 forebear. Like now, Australia was involved in a faraway war which had bipartisan support. Like now Australia had a first term government (with Menzies leading the United Australia Party) and like now it had an insipid election campaign where Menzies refused to make any specific promises (though his opponent John Curtin was more forthcoming).

In 1940 Menzies and his Coalition partners dropped eight seats to Labor and its allies leaving it with 36 out of 74 seats. It turned to two Victorian independents to keep them in power. Arthur Coles is best remembered as a founder of Australia’s second largest retail group. But he was also Mayor of Melbourne in the 1930s and he gave that up to win the seat of Henty in 1940. Alexander Wilson was a member of the Northern Irish aristocracy who joined the Australian squattocracy when he moved to Victoria to become a wheat grower. He ran as an independent in 1937 and held on three years later.

Coles and Wilson were conservatives and they gave their support to the UAP. With the war worsening in Europe, Menzies spent most of 1941 in London arguing strategy with Churchill. But his position was worsening at home. He was forced to resign in favour of Country Party leader Arthur Fadden. Coles and Wilson were upset at Menzies’ overthrow and didn’t like Fadden’s agrarian-socialist philosophy. They voted against his budget causing the Government to resign in October 1941. After pressure from Governor General Gowrie, the independents agreed to support a Curtin ministry. The Labor Government muddled through to 1943 when they inflicted a crushing defeat on the Conservatives.

The 1940 election showed it is possible to avoid an election for three years despite a lack of a majority. The three key independents in 2010, Rob Oakeshott, Bob Katter and Tony Windsor, all have impeccable conservative records that make them an ideal fit to back Tony Abbott as the next prime minister. As an independent state MP in 1991 Windsor kept Liberal leader Nick Greiner in power.

But as I wrote last night there is no guarantee it will happen this time. Katter and Windsor have unfinished business with former colleagues in the National Party. Both despise Barnaby Joyce and Katter said Nationals leader Warren Truss “attacked me personally last night”. Both support the NBN rollout, which the Coalition has rejected on the philosophical grounds it is owned by the Government. Katter said there is no alternative. “A privatised broadband, I mean, please, don’t even talk about it, privatised Telstra has been absolutely disastrous for rural Australia,” he said.

Oakeshott has said a key policy of any government should be an ETS – putting him at odds with the Abbott agenda. He called climate change a top priority. “I would personally say, let’s go back to the Garnaut report and try and get something through based on that,” Oakeshott said today. “The template is there, stick to the script, keep it simple.”

Oakeshott said he wanted a “fairer go” for regional and rural Australia. There will be a major focus on regional and rural issues by whatever party forms the next government. There is no reason why Labor cannot be that Government. But as the Menzies experience shows, another brutal assassination of a leader would be their death knell.