National
Why Wilkie wants you in parliament
Political commentators discussing the Gillard minority government are starting to sound a lot like our elected leaders did in the pre-reform version of Question Time: “It’s a new paradigm … No it isn’t … Yes it IS! (Mr Speaker)”
Parliament sits in 18 days’ time and, paradigm or not, both sides of the house will be working overtime to figure out how the damn thing works.
The one thing we do know is that it won’t work the same way – four wild-card MPs on the government benches have the potential to derail any piece of legislation, meaning the consultative process on many Bills will be longer. No more Kevin Rudd thundering “vote the way I *#%^ing tell you” (the former leader has a reputation for rather direct communication behind closed doors).
But as inconvenient as this will be for the party whip, the Gillard government will console itself that it’s just for three years – if , that is, the ‘rainbow coalition’ can survive that long.
However, Labor operatives harbouring that thought may be proved quite wrong. Andrew Wilkie, the only non-party affiliated independent backing the government, may have won a beachhead for a new, unaligned class of politicians.
Whereas Tony Windsor, Rob Oakeshott and Adam Bandt come from major party backgrounds, or in the latter case with a current party apparatus behind him, Wilkie’s the lone-wolf of the lower house – and he wants to see more wolves there next time around.
Wilkie has been a member of the Liberal Party in the past, and more recently joined the Greens to run for the Senate in 2007. But since then he has, with a motley band of volunteers, run his own show, with an almost-successful tilt at the Tasmanian lower house – defeated by just 315 votes – followed by his federal success in the seat of Denison.
“I wasn’t intending to run again straight away after the state election,” he says, “but to do so well turned my mind to the next state election. Then, to my own surprise, I found it turning to the federal election.”
Wilkie had limited campaign funds – he chipped in around $20,000 of his own money – “that’s a lot for me” – and gathered a similar amount in donations. The campaign relied on “a bit of word of mouth, a web site and relied a lot on the media”.
This is all sounding alarmingly democratic – if Wilkie can run and win, surely anyone can?