Governing from a Minority

Isn’t it funny, when a party finds itself needing support to form a government. Suddenly they become excited by the idea of a minority and feel that it can be good for parliament.

All the comments around how it will be a good thing for the government to be held to account and say that it will result in better policy.

Yet at all other times they complain about the independents and cross benchers being a disadvantage to governing. 

Again the two major parties continue to play games showing that what they really care about is how much power they can wield. They will say or do anything to get that power and the second they don’t need the cross benchers they will return to the autocratic approaches of the past. 

I think the three Incumbent Independent members are taking the correct approach. Now is their chance to make changes that the major parties will never do any other time. Often it is the approach of the major parties to limit the effectiveness of the minor parties and independent members. Effectively entrenching their positions as either the government or as opposition.

I won’t go in to depth about the ways they do this but it may be a topic of a future post. 

However this does pose a little bit of a crossroad for both Labor and the Coalition, if they sell the farm now to gain power they may well give away some of that control in the future. It will be interesting to see how far they will go to gain control of the parliament.

I think they have been caught out a little by the terms from the three independents, I would think that almost anything was on the table at the start.

It may well have been easy for either party to swallow their pride on many of their policies but how will they react to loosing some of their hold on future power.

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