Overview
The Australian Capital Territory election on October 19 will be the eleventh since self-government was established in 1989, and the seventh since Labor came to power in 2001. Labor seeks to maintain a longevity in office unknown in modern Australian politics, and to extend beyond a decade the chief ministership of Andrew Barr, the third to hold the position during Labor's time in office after Jon Stanhope and Katy Gallagher. The territory's Tasmanian-style Hark-Clark proportional representation electoral system has meant Labor has relied on support for most of that time from the Greens (and for the first term by the Australian Democrats), excepting one term of majority government from 2004 to 2008.
There are reasons to think the government faces a more challenging environment at this election than it did in 2020, which was conducted at the height of a pandemic that proved a boon to state and territory incumbents the nation over. The Liberals also have a notably moderate leader in Elizabeth Lee, after going against Canberra's progressive grain under the arch-conservative leadership of Alistair Coe in 2020. The opposition duly took a more liberal tack post-election as the government pursued reforms on recreational drug use and euthanasia, although its position on the former hardened in time. Such attitudes were not always warmly received by the local party's highly active conservative tendency, but the parliamentary party has mostly maintained a united front. Two complications to this picture were the demise of Jeremy Hanson as deputy leader in December 2023 and the expulsion from the party room in December of Elizabeth Kikkert, who will run at the election with Family First.
The drugs and euthanasia issues have exemplified the territory's tendency to be a flashpoint of culture war battles, also evident during the term through the government's compulsory acquisition of the Calvary Catholic public hospital and the Director of Public Prosecutions' contentious handling of the Bruce Lehrmann case. The other major recurring issue of territory politics in recent times has been a two-stage light rail project, of which the first stage from Gungahlin to Civic in the city's north began operation in April 2019. A second stage across Lake Burley Griffin and through the southern suburbs has long been opposed by the Liberals, whose present policy is to limit it to a short stretch north of the water.
The 2020 result marked a breakthrough for the Greens, who tripled their representation both in parliament (from two seats out of 25 to six) and the coalition cabinet (from one to three). Whereas past arrangements of this kind proved unmanageable in Tasmania, relations between the two parties in the ACT have been relatively smooth, notwithstanding the Greens' opposition to a horse-racing subsidy and friction over party leader Shane Rattenbury's tardiness in alerting Labor to the fact that one of their number had been the subject of sexual misconduct allegations.
The electoral outlook
The ACT electoral system is Tasmanian-style Hare-Clark, a proportional representation system in which ballot papers list party candidates in a randomised order, thereby depriving parties of the power to determine the order in which their candidates are elected. The territory is broken into five five-member electorates, an arrangement instituted at the 2016 election, increasing the size of parliament from 17 seats to 25. There had previously been three electorates, two with five-members and one with seven.
With the Greens monopolising the cross-bench after each election since 2004, the Liberals have wanted for both potential coalition partners and, in perhaps the most progressive polity in the land, the electoral support needed for a majority in the particularly challenging context of Hare-Clark. The closest they came was under the leadership of future Senator Zed Seselja in 2012, when Labor and Liberal won eight seats apiece with a single Greens member holding the balance of power. From there the Liberals went backwards at consecutive elections under Jeremy Hanson and Alistair Coe, doing particularly badly to drop two seats in 2020 amid a best-ever performance for the Greens.
Where the Greens had only managed to win seats in Kurrajong and Murrumbidgee in the first election under the new configuration in 2016, the second yielded two seats in Kurrajong and one in each of the other four. This left Kurrajong with four seats for a broadly conceived left and one for the right, and each of the others with three and two. The electoral challenge facing the Liberals is to recover a seat in Kurrajong and for either a Liberal or a potentially supportive independent to gain seats at Labor's or the Greens' expense in three of the other four electorates.
Other minor players who could potentially find places on the cross-bench include former Liberal leader Bill Stefaniak, who will again target the northern suburbs with his locally oriented Belco Party, and a grouping called Independents for Canberra, which is fielding candidates in all five electorates. Principals of the latter include Thomas Emerson, the son of Rudd-Gillard minister Craig Emerson, and Clare Carnell, the daughter of former Liberal Chief Minister Kate Carnell, though the latter abandoned plans to run in May due to health issues.
Historical background
Self-government for the territory was established under Bob Hawke’s government in 1989, and was locally unpopular at the time. This was reflected by the results of the inaugural election, when various minor groupings scored over 60% of the collective vote and eight out of the 17 seats, including four members who ran on abolishing self-government. The shifting sympathies of the cross-benchers produced two changes of government during the first term, but voting soon settled into more familiar partisan patterns. Labor governed in minority under Rosemary Follett from 1992 to 1995, followed by two terms of minority Liberal government under Kate Carnell from 1995 to 2000 and Gary Humphries from 2000 to 2001.
Labor came to power with Greens and Democrats support after winning two seats from Liberal-leaning independents in 2001, then secured the only majority in the parliament's history when they gained the Democrats' seat in 2004. They were unable to repeat the feat in 2008, when the Greens went from one seat to four after their vote rose from 9.3% to 15.5%, but remained in government after the Greens rebuffed a coalition offer from the Liberals that included two cabint positions and the deputy chief ministership, against the advice of then federal leader Bob Brown.
Labor was led through this period by Jon Stanhope, who handed the reins to Katy Gallagher on his retirement in 2011. Gallagher led the party to a narrow win in 2012 when the Greens lost three of their four seats, two to the Liberals and one to Labor. With Gallagher’s departure in December 2014, the Labor leadership passed to Andrew Barr, Australia’s first openly gay head of government, who led the party to more comfortable victories in 2016 and 2020, although both parties lost seats on the latter occasion to the Greens.
