This opinion piece by Georgina Downer was originally published in the AFR on Feb 10th 2025.

Minor parties and independents might wear bright colours and be great campaigners, but they lack the experience and ability to govern.

While the two major parties of Liberal and Labor may have won the weekend’s by elections in Victoria, delving deeper into the results shows the two party system in serious crisis. Australia needs a strong two party system to overcome the serious economic and security issues facing it. Minor parties and independents might be great campaigners, but when it comes to the serious policy issues facing Australia, they lack the experience and ability to govern.

It’s no secret that Labor is on the nose in the State of Victoria. Premier Jacinta Allen is not blessed with the Teflon coating of her predecessor, Daniel Andrews. No amount of blaming external events and economic conditions can stem the hemorrhage of her support. Since Andrews’s retirement in September 2023, support for Victorian Labor has plummeted from 39% to 22% according to opinion polls by the Resolve Political Monitor. In the same period, the Coalition is up from 32% to 42%.

There are obvious reasons for this. Anyone driving around Victoria can feel the appalling state of the roads as road trips start to resemble dodgems. Graffiti covers public infrastructure conveying lawlessness and criminality. And that is not just an impression. It’s real. According to the Crime Statistics Agency, the criminal incident rate is up 12.5% in the last year. Victoria’s recently retired Treasurer who caused Saturday’s by election in Werribee left the State in a parlous fiscal position, with Victoria the fourth most indebted state in the advanced world outside of the US.

It’s no surprise then that Labor’s primary vote fell by 16.65 points in the by election in the once heartland Labor seat of Werribee. Voters there expressed their dissatisfaction with Labor, over its handling of crime (it’s up 13.3% in the City of Wyndham), lack of infrastructure investment and cost of living issues in a community where most people work in logistics and health care.

But while the result was a shocker for Labor, it’s also shown the pervasiveness of the problem with declining levels of support for the two major parties. The Liberal Party, which should have benefited from Labor’s unpopularity, only recorded a 3.71% increase in support from the 2022 election. It was independent candidate Paul Hopper who benefited the most. While he won’t win the seat (Labor is likely to retain it), Hopper won 14.70% of the vote, an increase of almost 9 points since he first ran in 2022.
As we enter the Federal election campaign, all eyes will be on whether the two party system will take another hammering delivering minority government.

We haven’t seen such low levels of two party support since the Great Depression and World War Two. It was the collapse of the United Australia Party in 1943 after it only won 22% of the vote which led to the establishment of the Liberal Party in 1944. Up until 1944, there were frequent splits on the centre right. As for Labor, it’s been 70 years since the last major Labor Party split. The fact that the two party system as we know it today was able to navigate the crisis of the late 70s, with both parties reinventing themselves in the 80s without splitting or falling apart entirely, was truly remarkable.

Since the 2016 support for the two major parties in Australia has fallen. In 2016, the two major parties took 76.77% of the vote. This dropped to 74.78% in 2019 and then 68.27% in 2022.
This move away from the major parties isn’t merely an Australian phenomenon. In Britain, which since Brexit has experienced a politically volatile period, support for the two major parties has declined from 82.3% in 2017 to 57.4% in 2024.

The Coalition and Labor must address this lack of support or risk internal splits and further political instability. Australia benefits from the two-party system. The two-party system delivers governments with a mandate and an ability to govern, not just campaign. When elected with a majority, the two major parties are clearly accountable to the electorate to deliver on that mandate. Failure to do so means they are punished at the ballot box, and the fear of that punishment naturally motivates them to deliver on the promises made.

At a time of economic and geopolitical insecurity, we need the two party system to work more than ever.
Since the election of the Menzies Government in 1949, there have only been two minority governments in Australia – the Gillard Government in 2010 and the Turnbull Government in 2016. Our limited experience of minority government should give us cause for concern. Minority governments become bogged down in a toxic cycle of bidding war politics, as independents who hold the balance of power engage in horse trading to extract their support. These independents know that they will never govern themselves, so make promises they never have to keep as no one will ever hold them accountable for them.