The Rise and Fall of Minor Political Parties in Australia

Abstract

This thesis contributes to the political science literature by exploring why minor parties arise and decline. This thesis explores the rise of Australian minor parties in Australia from the time of the Labor ‘Split’ in 1955 that led to the formation of the DLP through to the rise and continuing rise of the Australian Greens in the 1990s and beyond. In that time the Australian Democrats emerged in 1977 and in 1996 and 1997 Pauline Hanson’s One Nation first appeared. The thesis goes behind these parties to explore and analyses the underlying factors that caused these parties to be established in the first place and succeed electorally, before, in the case of three of the parties, meeting their decline. The Australian Greens have not declined to any significant degree and One Nation has experienced a political resurrection. The four parties considered in this thesis were the minor parties that were in the Federal parliament as at 1 January 2009 or had being in the Federal parliament and had lost all of their seats in parliament before that that date.