Annabel Crabb on our 'unusual' democracy

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Speaker 1 Australia's democratic system is the envy of much of the world.

Speaker 1 With an impartial and beloved electoral body, preferential and compulsory voting, something we're pretty proud of, that compulsory one, and of course, Election Day sausage sizzles, it's got a lot going for it.

Speaker 1 But it's not without its quirks and its curiosities, including some that have shaped shaped politics and politicians as we know them today.

Speaker 1 In a special edition of Politics Now, Annabelle Crabb on Australia's robust democratic system.

Speaker 1 Welcome to Politics Now.

Speaker 1 Hi, I'm Patricia Carvelis, and for this very special edition of Politics Now, I'm joined by friend of the podcast and just friend of me, Annabelle Crabb. Annabelle, welcome.

Speaker 2 Thank you so much. It's lovely to be in your orbit orbit as per usual.

Speaker 1 You're perfect to have on at the moment because you are virtually an expert in Australia's democratic systems and civic duty is all about it. And can I say timing is everything, my matey.

Speaker 1 We've got the Whitlam dismissal anniversary of 50 years

Speaker 1 and we have the liberal leadership brouhaha and net zero. So the themes of your three-part series are almost perfect to explain this kind of moment we're in.

Speaker 2 It's weird, isn't it?

Speaker 2 Yeah, and there's all this research out at the moment, like the McKinnon report that came out yesterday about what people think about our democratic system and the extent to which they trust it, the extent to which they understand it.

Speaker 2 There's some Griffith University research from earlier this year saying that among young people, understanding of our democratic system is at like a real all-time low, and that

Speaker 2 general understanding of our civic order is really low by OECD standards.

Speaker 2 And like Megan Davis, who we interviewed for the show, said, who's a constitutional lawyer, of course, ventured, she wasn't completely convinced of this, but she said, oh, look, I've heard people speculate that one of the reasons why we have such a poor understanding of our democratic system is because of compulsory voting.

Speaker 2 We turn up every three years, our voting rates are really high, and we think that we've sort of done our civic duty by filling out the bit of of paper and having the sausage and our engagement between elections is not as significant as people who live in voluntary voting democracies, which is an interesting thought.

Speaker 2 I'm not, you know, I'm not sure if that's right, but it's a possibility, I guess.

Speaker 2 And I think, I mean, I've spent most of the last year working on this documentary since I said to the ABC, hey, what if I make a documentary about our electoral system and its function and history, but make it interesting?

Speaker 2 And they're like, okay.

Speaker 2 But I've done a book for kids as well

Speaker 2 for sort of year six level, because I think, you know, it is, it's a good time looking at what's happening to democracies around the world to just take stock and have a look at our own and understand what makes it different from any of the others.

Speaker 1 I think the uniqueness of our system and how special it is is what, you know, you really nail, which I don't think people really got until you did this project.

Speaker 1 I think those of us who are political nerds knew bits of it.

Speaker 1 And the compulsory voting thing, I think, is absolutely kind of in the zeitgeist of something we're very proud of and talk about in a more general, not just political nerds way, don't you think?

Speaker 1 But beyond that, I don't think there is a sort of sense of understanding the specialness of our system.

Speaker 2 Yeah, and I think, I mean, I definitely

Speaker 2 knew that Australia was unusual in having compulsory voting.

Speaker 2 And I definitely knew from having covered elections in America that

Speaker 2 the virtue of having an independent central electoral authority run by non-politicians being in charge of running the elections and making sure that it's the same everywhere and also being in charge of redistribution of electoral boundaries, which sounds like such a nothing thing, but actually is huge.

Speaker 1 Because what's the contrast? That's the important thing to

Speaker 1 what is the contrast in terms of being able to game the system politically when when you don't have it?

Speaker 2 Well, the contrast, I mean, in America where the Constitution there gives responsibility for running elections to the states. So each state sets their own electoral rules, right?

Speaker 2 I mean, in the show, we traveled to this place called Bristol, which is on the border of Tennessee and Virginia, which is like Tennessee's a red state. Virginia is a kind of purple state.

Speaker 2 It's just elected a Democratic governor and it went with Harris at the last presidential election. And the main street of Bristol, which is like a sister city arrangement, is the state line.

Speaker 2 So literally on one side of the road, abortion's legal, on the other side, it's illegal. You can smoke dope on one side, but not on the other.
And on election day, they have different rules, you know.

Speaker 2 And this is what it's like.

Speaker 2 all across America and they're constantly changing their electoral rules and in many states it's politicians that are ultimately in charge of drawing the electoral boundaries which is why you have these electorates that are bizarre shapes.

Speaker 2 The upshot of that is, I mean, the US House of Representatives at the last election, only about a dozen seats changed hands from party to party because they're all locked in. So what does that mean?

Speaker 2 It means that once MPs, congress folk are in there, they're in there for life, and their main kind of challenge doesn't come from the other side of politics, it comes from someone on their own side poaching their seats.

Speaker 2 So like that changes the way politics is conducted and

Speaker 2 I think it's terrible and I think

Speaker 2 our system of independent administration of elections is just worth its weight in gold.

Speaker 2 And the thing that I didn't know until I started researching this project is that we actually invented the idea of an independent permanent electoral authority. It was William Boothby in the 1850s.

Speaker 2 five or six who was in Adelaide

Speaker 2 and half the dudes in Adelaide had gone off to the gold rush and he was in charge of running an election. He's like, we've got to have this done independently.

Speaker 2 We've got to hire people and pay them to independently administer this election so that it's not being run by the people who are the candidates and so on.

Speaker 2 So that was kind of a radical idea and we've had since Federation an independent system and it's stood us in very good stead, I think.

Speaker 1 Yeah, and has so much across the political spectrum support too. That's the other part, right?

Speaker 2 I mean this is a place where

Speaker 2 if your electoral boundary gets redistributed and your seat disappears as an MP, they all just go,

Speaker 1 fair clop, all right.

Speaker 2 They suck, I'll get another job then,

Speaker 2 or I'll run in the Senate, but like, or, you know, or if a person loses a seat by 25 votes, you know, we've had very close margins, they don't, you know, they accept the umpire's decision.

Speaker 2 There's no kind of this is corrupt because we know that it isn't.

Speaker 1 Now, we've got a lot of questions from listeners about why Australia doesn't have fixed-term elections.

Speaker 1 People really want to know this, okay? Because we roughly vote, of course, every three years. PM determines within a sort of timeframe when to go to the Governor-General.

Speaker 2 Which is completely weird as well for one individual to have that power.

Speaker 2 And it makes it very difficult for the Australian Electoral Commission because they've got to run a half billion dollar operation with a temporary workforce of 100,000 people and like thousands and thousands of voting stations around Australia.

Speaker 2 And they've got to organise all that without the benefit of knowing what date it's going to be. I mean, it's kind of wild when you think about it.
I mean, it actually gives me a headache.

Speaker 2 I'm not a very organised person. So this is my literal nightmare.

Speaker 2 I would book it for the wrong date. I do that a bit.

Speaker 1 There's also preferential voting, which you've referred to, but it's admired by many. Even the author of Alice.
in Wonderland was a fan.

Speaker 2 That's so wild, isn't it? Like, so Lewis Carroll, who wrote Alice in Wonderland,

Speaker 2 in his real life, he was a mathematician, and he was obsessed with designing fairer systems for things. He was really into fairness.

Speaker 2 He also designed an early version of Scrabble, and he invented a device that allowed you to take notes in the dark. I mean, he was a weird cat, right?

Speaker 2 He also worked out, invented a new way of developing photographs using egg white. I digress, but he invented...

Speaker 2 a preferential voting system and he got so excited about it because he's like first past the post where you only put down you know you mark the box of one candidate is unfair because you know you end up someone might get elected on 25% of the vote then 75% of the electorate are annoyed because they voted for somebody else so he said you know it'd be fairer to have a preferential voting system where

Speaker 2 the voter can express more than one preference and say well if this person doesn't get elected then I want this person anyway got all excited printed a pamphlet sent it off to Parliament and around the place and tried to get them enthused.

Speaker 2 Nobody cared and he died. And then, 20 years after he died, Australia legislated a preferential voting system.

Speaker 2 We used the work of another mathematician called Nansen, who was in Melbourne, but it's, we continue to be the only nation that uses a full preferential

Speaker 2 system to elect single-seat candidates, which is kind of wild. And I did not know that before this project.
I knew that our system was sort of unusual. I just didn't know how unusual.

Speaker 2 And this is why we have how to vote cards, which no other country does, you know.

Speaker 2 It's also compulsory voting is why we get democracy sausage because

Speaker 2 if in voluntary voting democracies, it's not permitted to serve food near polling stations because it's an inducement to vote.

Speaker 2 And we talked to the UK Electoral Commissioner, who's a great guy, and he just said, oh, look, I respect your system. It's different from ours.

Speaker 2 But the bit that I just can't handle is the democracy sausage. You would so be arrested for doing that in the UK.
You would so be arrested. I know.

Speaker 2 He's like, yeah, because, I mean, like, there's states in America where it's illegal to serve up food outside a polling station because if you're barbecuing something delicious smelling outside a polling station, you're bringing people in to vote, right?

Speaker 2 And I mean,

Speaker 2 even if it's the PNC and not a political party.

Speaker 1 Yeah, they're smelling sweet sausage, aren't they?

Speaker 2 Yep, absolutely. So,

Speaker 2 no can do. No can do.
In our system,

Speaker 2 they're going to vote anyway because it's compulsory. So just knock yourself out, PNC.

Speaker 1 Knock yourself out. Okay, so you mentioned already the McKinnon Index that found

Speaker 1 lots of things, but it found rural communities are losing confidence in democracy. Young women in regional Australia were overrepresented in not understanding how democracy works.

Speaker 1 Just looking at some of those results, and you've done like a three-part television kind of deep dive into democracy in a very accessible way to give you credit like around the world we have a problem we know but in Australia how do we track do you think in terms of our engagement in it not super well I've got to say like

Speaker 2 and that's part of the purpose behind making this series and

Speaker 2 and that's why I wrote the book for kids which is also being bought by a lot of very furtive adults

Speaker 2 but I think and episode two of our series looks into this, at the relationship between this kind of massive disruption to media and the effect that that has on our ability to come together as a people and make decisions together about hard things.

Speaker 2 And I think, and you know, the Liberal Party is finding this out at the moment, there is a divide opening up between rural and urban Australia. And it's kind of happening on a number of issues.

Speaker 2 And I I think the same thing's happening in America.

Speaker 2 But in Australia, I mean, in America, you can win government without the big cities. In Australia, it's very hard to.
And that divide, I think, I'm...

Speaker 2 in my inexpert way, I'm sure that that factors into that response from that McKinnon research.

Speaker 2 One of the other interesting gendered patterns that, look this is from Canberra University's annual very interesting survey work that they do on digital media patterns.

Speaker 2 This year in 2025 was the first year where officially more people get news from social media than from legacy online media outlets, right?

Speaker 2 So

Speaker 2 We are splintering in terms of the way that we get our news and there's a significant switch off from news as well and it's much higher among women than it is among men.

Speaker 2 And the leading reason is that I don't consume news because it adversely affects my mental health. So it's a complicated, complicated system.

Speaker 2 But one of the issues with the fracturing of our media environment is it's very hard to come together as a demos, I guess, as a people who have different views on different things, but at least agreeing on the basis of the disagreement.

Speaker 2 Do you know what I mean? And I think that that is one of the great challenges to us in an ongoing

Speaker 2 way as a people.

Speaker 2 And I, you know,

Speaker 2 not to be a jerk, but I think public broadcasting is a very valuable

Speaker 2 kind of

Speaker 2 asset to have.

Speaker 2 Even if you don't always get it right, I think it's like

Speaker 2 it's a consistent presence across regional and urban Australia, and that's really important.

Speaker 1 I think that's absolutely right. So, like, okay, so you found lots of kind of different quite wacky, also world-leading elements.
Yeah. What's the wildest part of our democratic system?

Speaker 2 Oh, look, the thing that fascinates me, and it fascinates me about politics to this very day, is the role of individuals.

Speaker 2 Like, we look at our political system, we go, we've got a constitution, it's really hard to change.

Speaker 2 We've got, you know, all of the parliament is run by standing orders and rules and the ministerial code, and then you've got the vast kind of regulated bureaucracy.

Speaker 2 And so you look at it from space and you think, well, this is it's a completely predictable system and it's run by rules. Actually, change happens outside the Constitution, outside the parliament.

Speaker 2 People change things. The only reason we have preferential voting was because Billy Hughes was panicking in 1918 that he was about to lose.

Speaker 2 He's the guy who was like, he got elected as a Labour Prime Minister. He was a socialist lawyer from Sydney.

Speaker 2 And then he fell out with the Labour Party and ratted on them over conscription, which he favoured and they didn't.

Speaker 2 And then he reinvented himself within months as a Conservative Prime Minister, leading the Nationalist Party.

Speaker 2 And at that point, a bunch of farmers who are just like, I'm sorry, our Conservative Prime Minister is a socialist lawyer from Sydney.

Speaker 2 No.

Speaker 2 And so they started running candidates. And that was splitting the Conservative vote, right?

Speaker 2 Like, so in a Conservative seat, maybe if half of them voted for the Nationalists and half of them voted for the farmers, it would give Labour the opportunity to come through the middle and win.

Speaker 2 Like, this is the kind of weakness of first-past-the-post voting. You can have a Conservative seat that ends up going to Labour because you've got two Conservative candidates, and vice versa.

Speaker 2 So, Billy Hughes, he was incredibly cunning and very impulsive.

Speaker 2 Anyway, so Hughes is like absolutely crapping his DAX because these farmers are running and it's going to actually advantage his old nemeses in the Labour Party.

Speaker 2 So he smashed legislation through Parliament to introduce preferential voting.

Speaker 2 And it worked for him because people could then vote, you know, farmers one, nationalists two, then Labour, or the other way around, and he'd still wind up with a Conservative government.

Speaker 2 So it worked for him until his beautiful system then actually elected a bunch of farmers who then he then needed to be in coalition with.

Speaker 2 This is the very beginning of the love story between the Liberal Party and

Speaker 2 the Nationals. And they said, well, we'll serve in coalition with the Nationalist Party.
This is in 1922, but only if that asshole Hughes resigns. So that was the end of his prime ministership.

Speaker 2 So what your original question is, what do I find fascinating?

Speaker 2 What I find fascinating is the number of circumstances in which dudes who are anxious about losing their jobs have changed the rules to try and suit themselves and then it ends up being an exploding cigar.

Speaker 1 Yeah, that is fantastic. That is such a good insight.
Look, we mentioned earlier, we're recording this on a Tuesday. It's been 50 years since the Whitlam dismissal.

Speaker 1 And I've got to say, the Whitlam dismissal, 50 years, like that's a, you know, it's a pretty significant milestone. But it is like the seismic political event.

Speaker 2 It's the defining

Speaker 1 of my kind of childhood. That concept, that story was the pivotal Australian story.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 As we reflect on it, and there's a lot of people, including the Prime Minister, who's a Labour Prime Minister, reflecting on it today, you know, analysing what the Governor-General did, you know, how it unfolded, the journals who were there in the room.

Speaker 1 Is there a sort of image, a quote, a feeling from that that stays with you?

Speaker 2 Well, I was two when it happened, so my interest in it was moderate.

Speaker 1 Knowing you, maybe not so moderate, maybe.

Speaker 2 I've always, you know, been intrigued by the story and conducting some interviews for this show.

Speaker 2 And we've stayed away from the dismissal in this show just because we knew that it was coming out around the same time so there'd be plenty of material about it.

Speaker 2 But I interviewed Nikki Sava, who was there as a journal at the time. And the press gallery, as you'll see in our second episode, was like super different then from the way it is now.

Speaker 2 It was much more of a closed shop.

Speaker 2 She said to me something that I thought about afterwards. She said, I thought it was going to be the end of our democracy.

Speaker 2 She said it was so dramatic, it was so controversial, people were losing their minds, it felt like the end of everything. It felt like the country would blow up, like civil war blow up, right?

Speaker 2 And she said, but the weird thing is that it didn't, you know, that it, it somehow democracy went on. And I thought, gosh, that's interesting, isn't it?

Speaker 2 Because, I mean, what an extraordinary thing to happen. And if we take a step back from that day and just look at what happened in the ensuing years,

Speaker 2 well, yes, there was, well,

Speaker 2 may we say, you know, God save the Queen, but there's nothing will save the Governor-General. Maintain your rage, and people did.
But

Speaker 2 the Fraser government was elected in one of only

Speaker 2 two instances since the 1950s that a government has held power in the lower house and the upper house. Very, very rare because the Australian people

Speaker 2 are super,

Speaker 2 super suspicious about the idea of handing a party absolute power.

Speaker 2 And the way that we vote in the Senate is so sneaky and interesting because we use our green ballot papers to elect a party to government, and then we use our Senate bed sheets to just create

Speaker 2 a swarm of crossbenchers that will make that government's life a living hell. Like, that is what we generally do.

Speaker 1 And I love it. And we actively know.

Speaker 2 And we're doing it.

Speaker 2 I know. I mean, it's sort of brilliant.

Speaker 2 And that's the other thing that I admire about the Australian people is that we, even when a politician changes the system to advantage themselves, we're like, not so fast, champ.

Speaker 2 We find a way to crimp their ambition. Anyway.
But what happened in the Fraser years is sort of instructive, right?

Speaker 2 Because you did have a a party that had the ability to pass any legislation that it wanted,

Speaker 2 but a lot of those Whitlam reforms survived and they survived to this day, right? Like, so that's interesting, I think, too.

Speaker 2 And Fraser came under a huge amount of subsequent criticism of having wasted that opportunity, of having

Speaker 2 ignored or dodged this opportunity to reverse a lot of the Whitlam agenda and so on.

Speaker 2 And I think

Speaker 2 what Fraser looked at and saw when he looked at our country was a country that had undergone this chaos, rapid change, upheaval,

Speaker 2 and I think he opted for stability.

Speaker 2 And that's a kind of an interesting and

Speaker 2 important thing. Anyway, I'll probably get a million letters about this.
And

Speaker 2 this is just a sort of a just something that I was thinking about.

Speaker 2 But like the other thing that we learned from the dismissal too is something so important about our democratic system and our constitution.

Speaker 2 Mate, there's holes in it that you could drive a truck through.

Speaker 2 A lot of our governing patterns rely on convention.

Speaker 1 Convention, absolutely.

Speaker 2 And you know, we have an Australian Electoral Commission that is neutral and that is independent and that's great, but it responds to the Australian Electoral Act which is an act of parliament so theoretically if you had a government that had control of both houses they could whack through yes I mean they could say okay nobody votes without photo ID yeah the Morrison government tried that they tried that's right to make it harder and

Speaker 1 the fact that it didn't happen though says a lot about I think our political system too, right? That it had to be dropped, that the resistance

Speaker 1 because our instincts are good ones.

Speaker 2 yeah so I mean could the dismissal happen today yeah it could because a governor general could make that call you know I think convention is a powerful force but it can be overturned right and we know that from the dismissal in Australia but if you look at America I mean there's a convention being overturned every single day there right like you

Speaker 2 as a people have faith that a prime minister will not behave in a certain way or that that ministers will be ethical in the way they go about their business, that the Parliament will engage

Speaker 2 seriously, judiciously and industriously in problems and work in the best interests of solving them.

Speaker 2 I think that doesn't always happen. I think that there are cases in which issues that cause

Speaker 2 internal party strife are ignored.

Speaker 2 There are cases where both parties take the same approach to a difficult issue, which is to ignore it. Or, you know, I mean, look at our housing system in Australia.

Speaker 2 It is absolutely, our housing crisis is the result of both sides of politics deciding that it's too hard electorally to do something about it.

Speaker 2 So, yeah, look, there's heaps of heaps and heaps and heaps of points at which our democracy disappoints us.

Speaker 1 Look, I just can't help but get the thoughts of you and about Crab on what we're seeing unfold in the Liberal Party at the moment.

Speaker 1 There is a democracy shit show unfolding as we speak. The Liberal Party room is meeting tomorrow on net zero.
You've seen these party room meetings, as have I, a gazillion times. And that's not...

Speaker 1 Well, it is an exaggeration, but it's not much of one. Like it's happened a lot to try and resolve some massive impasse on a bitter issue.

Speaker 1 And now Susan Lee's leadership, she's the only female liberal leader ever is under threat in a pretty

Speaker 2 kind of

Speaker 1 yeah and they're just not even trying to be polite about it some of them like they're like oh yeah for now like I mean seriously like they're not even

Speaker 2 trying like it's it's interesting to me too that there's just this really subtly gendered language as well.

Speaker 2 She's like, you know, she's just Malcolm Turnbull in a skirt, which is what they also said about Julie Bishop. And just this sort of like, she's not really a heavyweight.

Speaker 2 That's often used in parliamentary commentary. Oh, she's not really a heavyweight.

Speaker 2 Usually means she's got boobs, like, you know, honestly. And there's a lot of, you know, well, who's really the boss? Is Alex Hawkes running things and all this sort of stuff?

Speaker 2 I mean, you see it when women become leaders all the time. That's not to say that this is principally a gender issue because it, because it's not.

Speaker 1 But it is one of the elements, though.

Speaker 2 It is. And the fact that liberal female MPs in the lower house can now

Speaker 2 get to work in an SUV

Speaker 2 is kind of significant as well.

Speaker 2 So they've got a problem there. They've got a problem on what is now just sort of the generational

Speaker 2 cultural question for the Liberal Party, which is started off being, is climate change real?

Speaker 2 And now it's sort of,

Speaker 2 yes, climate change is real, but are we idiots to torch our economy trying to get to a 2050 net zero target that's illusory and that the world's not coming along on, et cetera, et cetera.

Speaker 2 Now, it seems, I don't know, like they seem to be always getting back to these sort of abstract questions about, you know, net zero by 2050, which is like the now, now, now question is,

Speaker 2 I reckon, like in energy terms, well, we've got this sort of history of cheap power that comes from coal-fired power generators, which has I mean, fossil fuels have always been subsidized by the federal government, whether it's diesel rebates or, you know, the works.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 now

Speaker 2 those the lifespan of those generators is coming to an end. How do we what does our power of the future look like?

Speaker 2 And it's sort of weird because no one's really putting up their hands to build another coal-fired power

Speaker 2 station.

Speaker 2 Peter Dutton was advocating nuclear to sort of come in at an unspecified time in the future. What we are kind of rolling out now is renewables.

Speaker 2 And there is a really significant driver of division between regional and urban opinion here. And that is

Speaker 2 an evolutionary question for this country that's got to be tangled with it. It's a real flesh and blood question.
It's not an abstract one.

Speaker 2 It just confuses me that the argument is about some sort of target in the future rather than, okay,

Speaker 2 what do we do now

Speaker 2 to make power?

Speaker 1 Yeah, like, good question.

Speaker 1 But Lee won't survive, will she, though? Like, there's no, I can't, I'll say what I really think, Annabel. Okay, you go.
She might survive this year. Yeah.
Maybe. Maybe.

Speaker 1 I'm still not sure of it, by the way, but maybe. But she will not survive till the next election.
I'm sure of that now.

Speaker 1 I think these guys have made a decision and it's just ultimately a matter of timing now.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I think that that is probably right. And look, that's not even that unusual.

Speaker 2 I mean, what is unusual is for an opposition leader who takes up the leadership of a party that's just been absolutely smashed to survive to the next election. I mean, that is kind of rare.

Speaker 2 And Peter Dutton did. And so, in a sense, I think, and he had a lot of,

Speaker 2 I think he had a lot of unity and support from even from people in the caucus who, the caucus and party room, who disagree with him on a lot of stuff.

Speaker 2 But it's interesting that Susan Lee isn't really being extended the same courtesy. And as a result, she is now,

Speaker 2 I think, in an escalated sense, absorbing the sort of

Speaker 2 division and conflict and chaos that usually happens in the first term after a big defeat.

Speaker 1 Yeah, they basically delayed the problem.

Speaker 2 Yeah, until a lady can take care of it. Yeah.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 So why would she not be moved on this year? I think because

Speaker 2 the most powerful reason is nobody really wants that job at the minute, right?

Speaker 1 No. And you know, people like to get through summer, put your feet up, a couple of cocktails, then maybe work it out next year.

Speaker 2 Andrew Hastiel, have a summer with the kids and then have a think, you reckon?

Speaker 1 I think that's a motivator. Like, and I don't know that.
Sorry, I just want to be really clear.

Speaker 2 I'm not dreaming.

Speaker 1 Yeah, no, because it's important. It's not as source as said, but I think there is a psychological element too.
It's a long haul, this opposition. They're a long way back.
Why rush into it, right?

Speaker 2 There's less of a queue at the moment. I mean, which is interesting.

Speaker 1 There's less of them.

Speaker 2 Oh, that's right. And look, that is, I mean, it's not just a problem for the Liberal Party.
It's actually a problem for the country. It is not healthy for a government to face a weak opposition.

Speaker 2 Like our

Speaker 2 system,

Speaker 2 even though it's conflict-ridden, even though when you take school kids to parliament, they're often horrified at the behaviour.

Speaker 2 Actually, in the episode three of our show, I go and visit the Danish parliament and like they've got 12 parties and nobody is like no party has held majority government single like single-handedly.

Speaker 1 And I think that's totally normal.

Speaker 2 Yeah, they haven't like had a party and majority government single-handedly for more than a century.

Speaker 2 I showed the speaker of the Danish parliament just a little clip of Australia in question time and his eyes were just popping out of his head. He's just like, that would just never happen here.

Speaker 2 Anyway, it is important to have a robust opposition because otherwise you get governments that are too

Speaker 2 sure of themselves and who aren't being challenged and who aren't being held to account properly. And that is the great risk to the country of having a weak opposition.

Speaker 1 Annabelle Crabb, look, it's basically an elaborate reason to hang out with you.

Speaker 1 Really? I've constructed it all around, you know, tricked you with democracy, but really just to hang out. Thank you so much for joining me.

Speaker 2 Thank you. It's always fun to talk to you.
Thanks.

Speaker 1 All on IView, of course. Everyone's probably worked that out listening to this pod because you're political junkies.

Speaker 1 But all on IV, but also if you want to do appointment, which I don't mind, I still like a bit of an appointment. Monday's 8.30, yeah?

Speaker 2 Yeah, Monday's 8.30. Episode 2, you'll like because it's got an account of one of the great

Speaker 2 journo V politician clashes of our time. We get both sides of the Mark Riley-Tony Abbott stare-off.

Speaker 2 Oh, really?

Speaker 1 Little treat for you. Oh, that is an absolute treat.

Speaker 1 If anyone doesn't remember that moment, just Google it immediately and watch that next episode. That's it for politics now today.

Speaker 1 Tomorrow, I'll be joined by David Spears right after the Liberal Party Room meeting. So let's see if we get any early leaks.

Speaker 2 I'll be listening to that.

Speaker 1 We'll certainly find out if they're keeping net zero, if they're dumping net zero. Maybe they won't do either.

Speaker 2 I'll be listening the hell out of them.

Speaker 1 We're going to answer those questions for you tomorrow. Also, you can send questions to the party room at abc.net.au.
Mel and I will endeavour to answer them on Thursday. I'll see you tomorrow.

Speaker 1 See ya.