"Unrepresentative Swill" - A Keating Line Way Past Its Use-By Date

"But one Treasurer borrows and turns a short term borrowing into a medium term borrowing—no more money is borrowed; a short term borrowing just becomes a medium term borrowing—without telling our Treasurer and our Treasurer immediately responds and tells him he has to regularise it and you, who let 75 per cent of borrowings run everywhere, have the gall to get up and talk about the Loan Council and to set up a Senate committee. Then you want a Minister from the House of Representatives chamber to wander over to the unrepresentative chamber and account for himself. You have got to be joking. Whether the Treasurer wished to go there or not, I would forbid him going to the Senate to account to this unrepresentative swill over there—"

With these words, spoken on 4 November 1992, then Prime Minister Paul Keating created a colourful insulting description of the Senate that has endured to this day, and is commonly seen when anyone wants to attack a Senator they do not like.  In the last month alone, Twitter users have used Keating's line at least 76 times, mostly but not exclusively to attack Senators or the Senate itself.  In the last month for instance it has been used especially to attack UAP Senator Ralph Babet, but also to attack Coalition Senators Linda Reynolds, Michaelia Cash, Gerard Rennick and Bridget McKenzie, JLN Senator Jacqui Lambie, Greens Senator Sarah Hanson-Young, ex-Greens Senator Lidia Thorpe and ex-Labor Senator Fatima Payman.  But no Labor Senators, funny that.  

It has also been used to attack the 18 Senators who voted for Babet's "urgency motion" on the subject of "care" for babies who supposedly survive abortions as often as he says they do.  (Babet was repeating a push that was the subject of an earlier Bill the premises of which were debunked last year, for no likely outcome beyond culture warring, attention getting and rage farming, but I digress.)  And people have started using the term to attack MPs or parties they do not like whether they have anything to do with the Senate or not.  (Malcolm Mackerras also uses the line as a title for his blog, albeit while making different attacks on the Senate voting system to Keating's, and making it clear that he does so on that basis.)

The truth is that while there are big problems in how the Senate is elected in terms of in-theory representation, in practice the Senate was ultra-representative at the time Keating made his comment, while the House of Representatives was anything but!  And while the current Senate has more hangers-on with no national mandate to speak of, it's still much more representative than the Reps.  One of Keating's most famous lines was, so far as the facts go, highly misleading, and the way it continues to be used by others to delegitimise the Senate's diversity and trivialise the Senate's role is quite unfortunate.  

The Senate in 1992

The Senate as at the time of Keating's insult consisted of state Senators elected for six years at the 1987 double dissolution, state Senators elected for six years at the 1990 half-Senate election, and Territory Senators elected for three years in 1990.  As at 4 Nov 1992 it contained 32 Labor, 34 Coalition (28 Liberal 5 National 1 CLP), 7 Democrats, 1 WA Green, independent Brian Harradine and independent Janet Powell, who had been elected as a Democrat but defected after being controversially deposed as leader.

The table below shows how the seat shares in the Senate compared to the actual and average vote shares at the two Senate elections.

The Senate as at 4 Nov 1992 was in fact super-proportionate!  In these days Group Ticket Voting existed but minor party vote shares were too small for it to have much net impact in half-Senate races. Each of the big three had a representation slightly above their share of the vote across the two elections, at the expense of the Call To Australia (Fred Nile) party and various parties and independents who across the two elections collected less than 1% of the vote apiece.  Furthermore with the reactionary CTA's 1.4% unrepresented (as is to be expected given the splitting of Senate contests into states) it only makes sense that the Coalition was the most overrepresented force - not that it was very overrepresented.  The only Senators present without a national mandate for their party were Harradine (elected from Tasmania on a low share of the national vote) and Powell (who having defected from the party she was elected under had received no votes in her current guise when last elected - I don't even show BTL votes in this circumstance.)

Compare the House of Representatives.  It's called the House of Representatives not the Representative House and there's a good reason for that - single-seat contests result in disproportionate representation of political opinions.  They tend to favour major parties and small parties/movements with intensely local followings, at the expense of third parties with widespread but moderate support.  

The House of Representatives at 4 Nov 1992 was a Labor majority government with Labor holding 77 seats (52.0%), the Coalition 69 seats (46.6%) and independents 2 (1.4%).  Yet this parliament had been elected (with one Labor seat lost to an independent since) at an election where Labor had polled 39.5% of the primary vote, the Coalition 43.5%, the Democrats 11.3%, proto-Greens 1.4% and others (mostly independents) 4.4%.  Even on a preferential basis, Labor had very narrowly lost the 2PP, and yet they had a majority government.  The Democrats set a record that still stands for the highest party vote share that did not return a single House of Representatives seat.  

Early Adventures

Was it just that Keating didn't approve that in this instance the Senate was being too representative of voters for his liking?  That his government elected in majority with under 40% of the vote was being pestered by the Coalition and Democrats who between them represented more than half?  It's not so simple, for two reasons.  Firstly, a younger Keating had expressed similar views long before, minus the swill, even when Labor was in opposition:

10 May 1979: "That is what the Government is trying to do now. It is trying to keep control so that it will be able to run a government from opposition in the Senate, that unrepresentative chamber. That is the only construction I can put upon this change. I think that reflects very poorly upon the nature of the Liberal-Country Party coalition in this Parliament."

21 Nov 1979: "One can see from the way in which the Tory brain works that the Tories think that the disproportionate and unrepresentative nature of the Senate will mean that the States with a smaller population can keep a stranglehold upon a future Labor government and that when pipeline proposals are made by that government, they can be blocked by a conservatively dominated Senate."  

2 April 1980: "Nevertheless, the Senate is an unrepresentative chamber and there is no reason why the representative chamber- which is the House of Representatives- ought to feel obliged to comply with any view on this matter put by the Senate."

The early Keating, therefore, had a view that the malapportioned Senate was at risk of being undemocratically dominated or at least blocked by the Coalition using wins in the smaller states to block Labor majorities in the Reps.  At the time, there was some basis for this, because the gap between the Coalition and Labor in the 1977 Senate election had been lower in NSW (c. 0.2 quotas) and Victoria (c. 0.5) than in SA and Tas (c. 0.7) and WA (c. 0.8) though the biggest gap of all (1.0 quotas) was in Queensland.  And in 1980 Labor would go on to outpoll the Coalition in the NSW and Victorian Senate races, while being outpolled by them in all the other states.  The view probably also reflected legacies of the Dismissal, which had been partly made possible by Labor narrowly failing to turn a 3.4% primary vote Senate lead into any more Senate seats than the Coalition in 1974.  

Yet by 1992, whether Keating had noticed or not, this rationale had quite disappeared (Labor had actually done very badly in Victoria in 1990).   So it wasn't a sudden relapse of fears of malapportionment biting that saw the PM return to this territory after twelve and a half years of him not calling the Senate "unrepresentative" in Parliament.  Rather, emboldened by Bill Clinton's US election win on the same day (our time), Keating went on a two-day Senate-bashing bender. While the outrage over the "swill" line was still flying, Keating played the big card of announcing that if the Coalition won the 1993 election, Labor would pass the GST thereby eliminating the Senate and in particular the Democrats from any influence.  This meant that voters couldn't throw Keating (who was unpopular in office even when winning) out while maintaining hope that Labor and the Democrats would defang the GST anyway.  To rub it in some more he called Senators "pansies", "defamers", "cowards" and other such pleasant things.  

For whatever reasons (and Victorian voter revolt against the new Kennett government was also in the mix) in the next few days national polling turned on its head as Labor recorded the biggest poll-to-poll implied 2PP gain in Newspoll history, soon sending Fightback! to the panelbeaters.  (For a history of the polling for the 1990-3 term see here.) 

Keating did defend his position on the 7:30 Report, using state-based malapportionment to troll the Senate's behaviour without giving any evidence that it had any real impact on the Senate at the time (it didn't) but also questioning that a party with 10-11% of the vote should be trying to push the government about.  Of course, such a party can only do that if the Opposition helps it.  

Keating's line, therefore, was not a serious attempt to assess whether the Senate was representative of voters.  It was part of a barrage in which Keating sought to trivialise the Senate to raise the stakes and force voters to think about whether they really wanted the GST and the Coalition's Fightback! package.  It had a political context with a use-by date of 13 March 1993 but continues to be used way out of, and ignorantly of, that context more than thirty years later.  

The Senate Today

For all that people might want to call the current makeup of the Senate "unrepresentative" today, they mostly in doing so draw attention to how representative of different opinions it is!  That's not to say there are no problems with it, either in theory or practice.  Here is the same table as above, showing the makeup of the Senate at the moment:

The "big three" are each over-represented by a few percent (the Coalition by more than Labor and the Greens individually, but less than the two combined).  Two minor right parties are present, but under-represented.  Various other minor parties with small vote shares are unrepresented, though their preferences contribute to results for the successful parties.  Representation for states and territories means that there are two forces (JLN and Pocock) represented off very low national vote shares, though Pocock may be considered similar to the teals who captured a few percent of the Reps vote but were not much of a force in the Senate.  Finally there are four Senators - an unusually high number - who have left or been kicked out of their parties and hence, as independents, don't represent anything.  (It helps that all the parties they left were over-represented anyway.)

Those complaining about UAP Senators, Greens Senators, and Coalition Senators who vote for socially conservative abortion-related urgency motions etc as examples of "unrepresentative swill" are simply wrong. That these attitudes are represented in the Senate suggests it is more representative than if they were not.  And using the label for defectors is missing the point that they can appear in either chamber; there are also presently two of them in the Reps.

Sure there are some issues with the Senate's actual representativeness, and its state-based malapportionment (which I support scrapping or at least reducing) is a timebomb.  But it is closer to capturing the range of voter views than the House of Reps in which a party (Labor) that polled 32.6% at the election won 51% of the seats, a party (Greens) that polled 12.3% won 2.6% of the seats, and two minor right parties (UAP and PHON) that together polled 9.1% of the vote won nothing.

That's not to say our Reps system is wrong.  I think there are things to be said for having one house that provides the Executive and allows for local representation, and another which aims to represent the community more broadly (preferably without state-based distortions).  But even today the Reps is objectively less representative than the Senate, while in 1992 the Senate, far from being "unrepresentative swill", was about as representative as you can get!

Keating's line was great politics at the time, but that didn't really mean that it was fair.  It has long outlived its usefulness and it is time for it to be retired.