Australian Democrats

The Australian Democrats (in regular parlance, just the Democrats), is an Australian social liberal party formed in 1977 from the earlier Australia Party by Don Chipp, who left the Liberal Party of Australia to do so. His stated aim was to "Keep the Bastards Honest" (the "bastards" being politicians in general). Despite its name (and the name of the rival and liberal conservative Liberal Party of Australia), the Australian Democrats can be considered the counterpart of European liberal parties. After a poor performance at the 2004 federal election and the 2006 state election in South Australia, the Australian Democrats' future as a political force is in question.

Policy

The party's original support base was disaffected middle-class traditional Liberal voters from the centre-right Liberal Party's socially liberal, "wet" wing. The party aimed to combine liberal social policies with centrist economics. However, the major parties, including the social democratic Labor Party, have moved to the right on economics since the early 1980s, shifting the 'centre' of Australian politics well to the right. Thus the Democrats have come to be seen as leaning to the left on economic as well as social issues.

The Democrats' agenda includes interventionist economic policies, commitment to environmental causes, support for reconciliation with Australia's indigenous population through such mechanisms as formal treaties, pacifist approaches to international relations, and left-wing approaches to social issues such as sexuality and drugs, and constitutional and treaty protections for human rights. Its core support base is overwhelmingly tertiary-educated, and middle-class. They also explicitly target voters who seek a brake on the powers of the government of the day to change things, with their long-term hold on the Senate balance of power.

The party has a platform of participatory democracy, with policies supporting proportional representation and citizens' initated referenda. Many important internal issues (such as electoral preselection and leadership) are decided by direct postal ballot of the membership. Although policies are theoretically set in a similar fashion, Democrat parliamentarians have extensive freedom in interpreting them.

Support

Support for the Democrats historically tended to fluctuate between about 5 and 10 percent of the population and was geographically concentrated around the wealthy dense urban neighbourhoods (known in Australia as the "inner-suburbs and CBD") of the capital cities (especially Adelaide). Therefore, they never managed to win a House of Representatives seat (despite coming close on a number of occasions). During the 1980s, 1990s and early 2000s they typically held one or two of the Federal Senate seats in each state, as well as a handful of representatives in state parliaments and local councils.

However, the rise of the Greens and internal bickering in the early 2000s changed this, and the Democrats are now in heavy decline - receiving 1.24% nationally, and less than 3% of the vote at all but a handful of booths, even in their Adelaide heartland. Their voters are turning to the Liberals (to the right) and Greens (to the left) in almost equal numbers.

Leadership

The Democrats are notable for their willingness to elect female and Indigenous Australian parliamentary leadership. Of the party's ten leaders, six have been women. Aboriginal Senator Aden Ridgeway was deputy leader under Natasha Stott Despoja.

The leaders of the Australian Democrats have been:

Don Chipp (1977-1986)
Janine Haines (1986-1990)
Janet Powell (1990-91)
John Coulter (1991-93)
Cheryl Kernot (1993-97)
Meg Lees (1997-2001)
Natasha Stott Despoja (6 April 2001 to 21 August 2002)
Brian Greig (2002)
Andrew Bartlett (2002-2004)
Lyn Allison (2004-present)

Andrew Bartlett is currently deputy leader.

A short history

In terms of percentage votes, the Democrats' electoral peak was probably the 1990 federal election. The failure of then-leader Janine Haines to win a House of Representatives seat led to a leadership change; her successor, Janet Powell, was too radical for many in the party and lacked electoral appeal. After an affair with another Senator, she lost the support of much of the caucus. These internal divisions damaged the party in the early 1990s, although recovery occurred under Cheryl Kernot.

During the Hawke and Keating Labor Governments (1983-96), which pursued economic rationalist neoliberal policies, the Democrats positioned themselves to the left of the ALP government and thus at the left end of mainstream Australian politics. However, the party's progressive-liberal politics remained attractive to middle class Liberal supporters who were disaffected by the Liberal party's social conservatism ("wet" Liberals).

After the election of the Howard government in 1996, this philosophical division became apparent; there was no longer a single obvious location for the party on the political spectrum. The left of the party was horrified by John Howard's policies, and wanted to undermine and block them whenever possible. Others wanted to engage with the government, using the Senate balance of power to negotiate with it and moderate its legislation. The question was whether the Democrats should be a centrist party, at least on economics, (though socially liberal and environmentalist), ready in most cases to negotiate with the government of the day whether Liberal or Labor (the position suggested by the party's "wet Liberal" roots) or a left-wing party, to the left of both mainstream parties on economic as well as social policy, in strong and consistent opposition to the Liberals and willing to take an obstructionist approach in the Senate to the Howard government's legislative program (a position on the political spectrum more similar to the Greens).

This conflict manifested itself in tensions over Cheryl Kernot's policy on industrial relations (see the Workplace Relations Act of 1996). Under Kernot, after negotiations and some compromises from the government, the Democrats voted for the Howard Government's right-leaning industrial relations legislation which decreased union power and allowed a larger role for individual employer-employee contracts. Kernot, however, remained both ambitious and broadly opposed to the Liberal government. This, together with her personal ambition for a role in government, lead her to defect to the ALP in 1997. Initially both Labor and the Democrats benefitted from Kernot's move, with polls showing that the Democrats had attracted a significant "sympathy vote". In the 1998 federal election, the Democrats came within 3% of taking Liberal Foreign Minister Alexander Downer's seat of Mayo in the Adelaide Hills under Australia's preferential voting system.

Internal conflict over the government's proposed Goods and Services Tax (GST), during the 1998 federal election and in Parliament in 1999 was extremely damaging to the Democrats. Meg Lees campaigned on a modified GST platform, opposing the GST on food and books. After negotiations with Prime Minister Howard, Meg Lees and Andrew Murray (both part of the centrist element within the Democrats) agreed to support the GST legislation with exemptions for most food and some medicines. Many left-wing Democrat voters and a large number of party members regarded this as a betrayal, and two senators on the party's left, Natasha Stott Despoja and Andrew Bartlett, voted against the GST.

After very poor state election results in 2001, Lees was replaced by the articulate young left-leaning senator, Natasha Stott Despoja. Stott Despoja worked hard to bring dissafected former Democrat voters back in the 2001 federal election, although she was not able to bring back enough voters to prevent the loss of a seat to Greens Senator Kerry Nettle, indicating the loss of Democrat votes on the left. (The task was not made any easier by the Tampa affair.) Ongoing tensions between Stott Despoja and Lees (who quit the party in 2002, but was supported by some of the Senators, nicknamed the Gang of Four by the media) forced a protracted leadership battle in 2002, which eventually led to the election of Senator Andrew Bartlett as leader. However, the tension led to Meg Lees leaving the party and becoming an independent.

Since the decision to support the GST in 1999, and especially after the very public infighting in 2002, the Democrats have suffered a severe decline in public support. Although the left-right division within the parliamentary party and between the parliamentary party and the grass roots membership has existed for many years, the recent leadership battles have created bitterness within the party, and exposed the disunity to public scrutiny. With the Australian Greens picking up many of their voters on the left, and some voters from the centre returning to the Liberals, the Democrats are facing their greatest crisis to date.

At the height of the disunity in 2002, most political observers believed that the party would soon split or disappear as a serious force in Australian politics. Under Senator Bartlett's leadership the Democrats found a degree of stability and an end to public feuding, but they have made little progress toward recovering their traditional share of electoral support and are now largely ignored by the media.

On 6 December 2003, Andrew Bartlett stepped aside temporarily as leader of the party, after an incident in which he assaulted Liberal Senator Jeannie Ferris on the floor of Parliament while intoxicated. The party issued a statement stating that Deputy Leader Lyn Allison would serve as the Acting Leader of the party. Bartlett apologised to the Democrats, Jeannie Ferris and the Australian public for his behaviour and assured all concerned that it would never happen again. On January 29 2004, after seeking medical treatment, Bartlett returned to the Democrats leadership. Andrew Bartlett has not consumed any alcohol since that incident.

Almost totally ignored by the media during the election campaign, the Democrats suffered a massive loss of support at the 2004 Federal election, reducing them to 1.24% of the national vote. Nowhere was this more noticeable than in their key support base of suburban Adelaide in South Australia, where they received between 7 and 31% of the Lower House vote at polling booths in 2001, and between 1% and 4% in 2004. None of their Senators up for re-election survived the vote. Most electoral analysts concluded that, while most of the party's left-wing support had gone to the Greens (who now had an equal number of Senate seats with the Democrats and seemed to have taken their place as the leading minor party), many of the party's centrist middle-class voters from a 'wet Liberal' background had returned to the Liberal Party, helping the Howard Government to win a majority in the Senate, the first government to do so for a quarter of a century. With their Senate numbers almost halved, the Democrats face complete annihilation at the next election if the 2004 result is repeated.

Following the loss, Bartlett did not stand for the normal post-election leadership ballot with Allison becoming the new leader and Bartlett the deputy. However, Allison, like Bartlett, has failed to gain any real media exposure or to increase the party's support in opinion polls.

On 1 July 2005 the Democrats lost most of their remaining parliamentary influence when the senators elected in 2004 were sworn in, giving the governing Coalition outright control of the Senate. On 5 January 2006, the ABC reported that the State Electoral Commission of Tasmania had deregistered that branch of the party for failing to provide a list of members.

On 18 March 2006, at the 2006 South Australian State election, the Democrats were reduced to 1.7% of the Legislative Council (upper house) vote. Their sole MP up for re-election did not survive the vote. In the days following the election, rumours circulated that popular Senator Natasha Stott-Despoja, facing re-election in 2007, might quit the party - which she herself has denied on ABC. ^*

Early July, Richard Pascoe, national and South Australian president, resigned, citing Sandra Kanck's politically damaging comments, as well as slumping opinion polls and low recent election results. Some analysts believe this is the final nail in the coffin for the future of the Democrats, however at the same time, some believe that few news sources are reporting it correctly. The media have been accused of sensationalising it as saying Kanck says MDMA isn't dangerous, and that rave parties are safer than pubs. It has been criticised that both comments were taken out of context, as her comments on MDMA were for terminally ill patients, and Kanck was referring to raves being safer than pubs, as she claims there are rarely brawls at raves (possibly due to MDMA use) in comparison to pubs.^*^*^*^*

External links

Liberal parties | Political parties in Australia