Before the new
senators were sworn in yesterday, I had started keeping a list of media
references to the government now having “a one-seat majority.” But I
finally gave up because there were just too many of them. A quick
selection of recent offenders includes The Australian, Channel Nine news, Dow Jones wire service, the Greens andThe Sydney Morning Herald.

It’s
all nonsense. In any body with an even number of members, it’s
impossible for anyone to have a one-seat majority, or any other odd
number. There are 76 senators. The Coalition now has 39, the other
parties combined have 37. 39 minus 37 equals a two-seat majority. (In
case someone mentions the president’s casting vote: there isn’t one.
The Senate president has a deliberative vote and no casting vote.)

It’s
true that only one Senator has to defect to defeat the government, but
that doesn’t make it a one-seat majority. If you win an election with
60,000 votes against 40,000 for your opponent, you’ve got a majority of
20,000, not 10,000. The government has 87 seats out of 150 in the House
of Reps, but no-one thinks that’s a majority of 12 – it’s a majority of
24.

Maybe what confuses people (apart from just mindless
repetition) is that when we talk about the closeness of seats, we refer
to the swing required to lose; so, a 54-46 result is “a 4 per cent
margin,” because 4% of voters need to switch in order to wipe out the
majority. But it’s not, strictly speaking, a 4% majority. And no-one
will ever have a one-seat majority in the Senate.