It's a Joyce Joke: Barnaby's Senate Mutilation Madness

This article includes ideas for one I was working on last year but didn't get around to finishing off then.  I've been provoked to now do so by the news (tweeted by the AFR's Tom McIlroy) that Barnaby Joyce will on 24 Feb "present" a Bill to "amend the Representation Act 1983 - proposing six regions per state and two senators per region".  The exact form of the Bill has not been seen, and perhaps the proposal has been shorn of its more patently offensive and wrong aspects prior to tabling, so for the time being I comment on the history of Joyce's 2019 comments on this issue.  [EDIT: Nope, it's got even worse, see updates at the bottom.] The article should also cover ground that is useful if Joyce has modified his proposal.  I will add more comments when I have seen the actual Bill, which I assume will go nowhere.

General Background and non-malapportioned version

The concept of Senate districts is an old chestnut that takes its inspiration from Section 7 of the Constitution.  The Constitution only says the people of each state vote as a single electorate until the Parliament otherwise provides, which in theory allows the Parliament to come up with some other arrangement without needing to change the Constitution.  Furthermore, the Constitution explicitly canvassed that Queensland could be split into Senate divisions by its state parliament, until the Commonwealth parliament decided otherwise.  

Poll Roundup: Barnaby 1, "Momentum" 0

2PP Estimate By 2016 Preferences: 53.3 to ALP (same as end of last year)
With historical One Nation adjustment: 52.8 to ALP
Labor would win election "held now"

With six new federal polls released in 2018 so far it's time for another federal Poll Roundup, a series which I issue roughly every second Newspoll.  As noted in a piece I did about second-term Opposition Leaders, the year began with widespread predictions of a painful year for Opposition Leader Bill Shorten and many people reading a lasting Coalition recovery into, well, a single Newspoll really.  However it has taken the Coalition just two weeks to hit another speedbump in the form of a multi-faceted scandal involving Nationals leader Barnaby Joyce.  The scandal, involving both his relationship with a staffer and various arrangements arising from it, escalated into an exchange of insults between the Prime Minister and his Deputy late last week.

In all this Joyce's behaviour has been that of the ultimate entitled politician, who has even claimed that he himself would never comment on Liberal Party leadership matters when in fact he's been doing so, and frequently, for years. Some of Malcolm Turnbull's comments in response to Joyce's situation have agitated Joyce into retaliating and encouraged Tony Abbott supporters to do their usual thing.  However, the idea that Joyce's lack of moral standards and spectacular political hypocrisy should cause the Liberals to replace their own leader with someone better able to work with such a person is ridiculous.

New England Washup and Bennelong By-Election Preview

I've decided to combine some post-result comments about New England with an overdue preview of the Bennelong by-election, which will be updated for any further polls that are published.  It's really not possible to talk about Bennelong now without talking about the former and whether anything seen in New England does or does not apply.

New England: Barnaby Bolts Back In

While Barnaby Joyce's re-election was always extremely likely given the lack of serious opposition, the scale of it surprised me.  Currently Joyce has 64.6% of the primary vote, a 12.3% swing to him, and a 73.6% two-party vote against Labor, a 7.2% swing to Joyce.  It seems that Labor are second, although in theory independent Rob Taber might overhaul the 4.4-point gap on the 17.2% of minor-candidate preferences.  Even if he does, his two-candidate result against Joyce won't be much better than Labor's.

My pre-election expectation was that Labor would not get much 2PP swing and that there would probably be a modest 2CP swing away from the result achieved by Tony Windsor in 2016, but that the gaggle of candidates running against Joyce might be able to take him to preferences and delay the result.  Instead Joyce has picked up a primary vote swing compared even to his 2013 result, when Tony Windsor wasn't on the ballot paper.

New England By-Election: Prospects And Polls

Seat: New England (Nat vs Ind 8.5%, Nat vs ALP 16.5%)

By-Election 2 Dec 2017

Incumbent: Barnaby Joyce (Nat)

Main opponents likely to include Rob Taber (IND) and ALP candidate

Former incumbent and 2016 opponent Tony Windsor (IND) not contesting
Outlook: High chance of comfortable Nat retain

With the date of the New England by-election set it's time for a general prospects and polls post that I will update through the campaign as opportunities arise.  I may be pretty slack about this as Queensland will be a higher priority and I have a lot of other stuff on at the moment.  I won't be doing live coverage on the night because of previously booked air travel, but there will be a postcount thread if it is needed.

Circumstances and history

The New England by-election follows the disqualification from office of incumbent Deputy Prime Minister and National Party leader Barnaby Joyce, who was found to be in breach of Section 44 of the Constitution because he was a dual citizen of New Zealand by descent, despite having been born in the electorate of New England.

Section 44 Strikes, But The Government Hasn't Lost Its Majority Yet

Many news sites have now claimed that, in light of today's dramatic Section 44 disqualification of Barnaby Joyce from Parliament by the High Court, the beleagured Turnbull government has now lost its majority.

This is an exciting claim, but it isn't actually correct.

Pending the holding of a by-election for the seat of New England, the government will, when the House of Representatives next sits, hold 75/149 seats, with one vacant.  74 seats will be held by other MPs.  75 is larger than 74.  75 is larger than half of 149.  75 divided by 149 is 0.5033557... .  It is more than 0.500000.

The government's new and very temporary position is no different mathematically to that of the Cook Liberal government in 1913, which won 38/75 seats.  The Cook government is widely referred to as having had a one-seat majority.

More Section 44 Cases In Spotlight

A very long time ago now two Greens Senators resigned after discovering they were dual citizens.  The Senate will refer their cases to the Court of Disputed Returns (typically the High Court) which will determine whether they were eligible to have been elected in the first place and, assuming that they weren't, will initiate a "special count" to fill their places.  In the weeks since then, however, many more MPs have come under the spotlight of the dual citizenship rule in Section 44 of the Constitution, and it's unlikely it has claimed its final victim yet.

The Constitution is very black and white about dual citizenships - section 44 says that if you are a citizen of another country, you are not eligible to be chosen or to sit in Parliament.  It doesn't seem to allow any ifs or buts about all that.  However, the High Court in Sykes v Cleary [1992] found that the Constitution was unrealistic and had to be "read down".  After all, if it were that straightforward then another nation could maliciously impose citizenship on Australian MPs and refuse to withdraw it.  Alternatively, for a given citizen of a given nation, procedures for getting rid of an unwanted citizenship might be unrealistically expensive, time-consuming, slow, dangerous, unreliable or unreasonable.