For independents and minor parties, picking a side in a hung parliament is perilous

On election night 2010, Tony Windsor was having drinks with supporters in Tamworth.

He'd been easily re-elected to the seat of New England as an independent. 

"It was a pretty jubilant night," he says.

A few hours' drive away, Rob Oakeshott was celebrating his win in the seat of Lyne. Until that night, he had been hoping for a post-election camping trip with his kids.

"Probably three or four beers in, around 11 o'clock that night, you start getting phone calls and start having to divert your attention and realise the next morning's going to be pretty busy," Oakeshott says.

He was "pretty busy" for more than just the next morning.

The 2010 election resulted in a hung parliament — the first Australia had seen at the federal level in 70 years, with Labor and the Coalition on 72 seats apiece. It meant both parties needed to negotiate support from MPs outside their parties to form government.

Oakeshott, Windsor, and four other crossbenchers were thrust into 17 days of intense negotiations with Labor leader Julia Gillard, who wanted to continue as prime minister, and Liberal leader Tony Abbott who wanted her job.

It's the kind of scenario that the major parties are hoping to avoid this election, while many on the crossbench hope it eventuates, because of the extra influence it would bring them in Canberra.

And all political players have been thinking about how the hung parliament worked last time and what they'd do differently if a similar scenario comes to pass next weekend.

The greatly expanded crossbench elected in 2022 heightens the chances that neither major party reaches a majority in parliament and needs to govern in minority.

Parliament deadlocked

Back in 2010, there was the newly minted Greens MP Adam Bandt, whose party did a deal to support Gillard continuing as prime minister. There was a WA National called Tony Crook who wasn't formally part of the Coalition agreement, who nevertheless offered his support to Abbott.

There was Andrew Wilkie, who had won a surprise election on preferences after placing third on the primary vote.

"I had no experience in the workings of the parliament," he says. "I assumed back then that I was going into a room with political giants who had so much expertise and skill and political nous that I had to be very careful that they could run rings around me."

"Interestingly, I have discovered that there are less political giants in Canberra than I had first thought."

Wilkie also did a deal with Gillard, in return for Labor promising poker machine law changes.

With those deals in place, the parliament was still deadlocked, and so it came down to the final three independents: Oakeshott, Windsor, and North Queenslander Bob Katter.

They decided to work together to organise joint briefings and share notes. 

"The initial plan was to get the crossbenchers together and get us on a bit of a unity ticket, without working as a party, but just making sure that we weren't picked off by the major parties and played off against each other," Oakeshott says.

The crossbench of today is very different in complexion to the crossbench of 2010. It's much larger, dominated by members from urban electorates, and poses more of a threat to the major parties.

But they've clearly been looking back and learning lessons from how the negotiations and parliament operated back then.

Oakeshott and Windsor say their negotiations with Abbott were rocky from the beginning.

"I think Tony just assumed that the country members of parliament, they'll have to come our way," Windsor says. "In the last week, he suddenly realised that no, it doesn't work that way."

"So out came this gush of money and promises and phone calls. It said to me that this bloke is not serious about the work."

For Oakeshott, there were fundamental policy differences that set negotiations off on the wrong foot from the very start. 

"It became problematic from the first conversation," Oakeshott says. 

"[Abbott] was happy to talk about any legislation at all, but just nothing about climate change, nothing about the NBN.

"So we immediately ran into a roadblock with each other … it was very difficult to recover from there."

In the end, Katter backed Abbott, while Oakeshott and Windsor supported Gillard, giving Labor government by the tightest of possible margins.

Don't do a deal, suggest 2010 independents

The Greens negotiated a long list of commitments from the Labor government in 2010, many of which never came to pass. When I asked Bandt if, in light of that, the deal was worth it, he was quick to point out what the deal did achieve.

"We achieved a lot: dental into Medicare for kids, $13 billion for clean and renewable energy, seeing Australia's climate pollution come down," he says.

"Did we get everything we wanted? No. I don't think anyone did in that parliament but it achieved some real change.

"We would have an open mind about how to structure arrangements in the coming minority parliament … the priority is getting outcomes."

Oakeshott didn't get much progress on many of his priorities in 2010. Back then he was trying to advance proposals for an Indigenous Voice to Parliament. 

"The irony of that 15 years later," he says.

"NBN has been butchered and made a bit of a mess, and then the carbon pricing got torn up as well.

"You certainly reflect on whether it was all worth it or not. I think it was. I hope it was."

He says he'd seek more concrete commitments from the government were he in the same position again. 

"We just kept it all pretty vague at the time," he says. "And most of those fell over, unfortunately."

The pokies reform that Wilkie was promised in 2010 also never happened.

"When Julia Gillard effectively tore up the agreement between us and I then became a loose cannon, I discovered I had more influence in Canberra," Wilkie says.

"Looking forward to future parliaments, I have learned not to do a formal deal at all."

Most of the crossbenchers of today seem to agree, and have told the ABC that they wouldn't do any formal deals with either side.

"I think the preference for a crossbench would be to keep it fluid," Oakeshott says. "I think that's one of the lessons learned."

'I don't think we needed all that showtime'

After making their decision, Oakeshott and Windsor found themselves defending their decision to back a Labor government, despite representing traditionally conservative seats.

"That was sort of the hot topic at the moment," Oakeshott says. "When I tried to explain it in the couple of weeks after the election there were bomb threats at the local RSL club when we were trying to have meetings to discuss it."

Most of the current independents similarly represent conservative leaning areas, whether it's the inner-city independents who won seats that had been long held by the Liberal Party, or regional independents like Helen Haines in Indi and Katter in Kennedy.

If they do need to pick a side, they may find themselves with the same dilemma.

"I made a decision that was balanced between the best interests of the local community and the best interests of the country, not on a brand of a political party but on the legislative agenda at the time, on the local issues that we could get resolved with one side or the other," Oakeshott says.

"They were the focus of attention, not … is this a conservative leaning seat or not."

The pressure for independents in ex-Liberal and National heartland seats to go the conservatives' way is unlikely to disappear, and the nature of a hung parliament thrusts crossbenchers and their suddenly critical votes into the media spotlight.

"I don't think we needed all that show time," Oakeshott says. "I think we, in many ways, lost control of our own narrative and then others took over."

In 2010, he announced his decision on which side he'd back at the end of a now-infamous 17-minute speech at Parliament House. If he had his time again, he says he'd probably have done it closer to home on the mid-north coast of NSW.

"That would have been enough for a governor-general to have reassurance that there's the opportunity to do a stable parliament," he says.

"I just think an announcement back home on my own patch, on my own terms would have been much more satisfying for me and my community, rather than trying to meet the expectations of a hungry media."

The great unknown

Not all hung parliaments are created equal.

We may find ourselves in a situation where, like 2010, both major parties are on a similar number of seats, but a long way from the majority number of 76.

Oakeshott says that creates a "much more interesting chessboard".

"I think how the crossbench internally manages that [is] something that they need to give a lot of consideration to," he says. "That's something to watch because government could be formed by splitting off different crossbenchers, and that's something that just wasn't there before."

While the independents will resist any moves to structure themselves in a more party-like way, they may find collaborating and organising themselves together may become a necessity in a more complicated parliament.

Alternatively, we could find ourselves in a situation with a hung parliament where one major party is very close to 76, and that party is the only viable government. That government would then be negotiating with a very diverse crossbench to get its legislation passed.

Or we may find ourselves with one party winning a majority of seats. But if they do so without winning back many seats from independents and crossbenchers, this conversation won't be going away. A hung parliament will remain on the cards, and this debate will be punted to 2028.

That's three of the many possible scenarios leading to very different looking parliaments. It all depends what voters decide next weekend.

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