As you would have read in an earlier blog entry, the Opposition and Greens teamed up to push the government to fund another 20,000 home care packages immediately.

Senator David Pocock says the Labor Government is keen to give the Opposition the credit because they see the independents (and presumably Greens) as a greater threat.

That’s a funny reversal of the usual trend in the Senate. Normally, when the government loses a vote independent and minor party crossbenchers are blamed or celebrated – even though the Opposition is just as important to making that happen.

In Representative, still, our paper about the Australian Senate, Ben Oquist and I quoted Fred Chaney on this topic. Chaney is a former Liberal minister, senator and MP (yes, he served in both houses of Parliament):

No single senator has any power to affect the outcome of the legislative program unless he or she is taking a position that is in common with enough of the rest of the Senate to make a majority. Senators Brian Harradine and Mal Colston have a critical role only when the ALP, Greens and Democrats are united in their opposition to a government measure. The united opposition group in such circumstances represents a democratically elected majority against the government measure. …

The thing to remember is that any single Liberal, National or Labor senator could be pivotal in the case of a close vote. In the 1970s, when senators on the conservative side were less bound by party discipline, they often used their power across the floor to achieve the same apparent dominance in the decision making process as Colston and Harradine. There seems to me nothing undemocratic or indeed undesirable in that circumstance.

Chaney’s full article is well worth the read.

Today we might substitute “the Greens” for “Brian Colston and Mal Harradine”, two independent senators of decades gone by. 

But the point stands: whenever there appears to be a single “kingmaker” in the Senate, they only became kingmaker because of the 38 other senators already lined up behind them.