What does the swing against the Coalition in the Australian Senate mean?

Austraila's recent federal election produced the closest result in Australian history, with neither major party gaining a majority in the House of Representatives and both losing ground in the Senate to the Greens.


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_鈥?/a>





Why was there a swing towards the Coalition nationally in the House of Representatives, but against then nationally in the Senate?|||Partially, the fact that the Coalition lost so many senators was just an effect of the Australian system in which Senators are generally elected for a double (six year) term, and the 2004 election saw record numbers of Coalition senators. Indeed, they had a majority, which is very unusual in Australia given the Senate voting system.





However, this doesn't yet answer your question, which is about the swing away from the Coalition (as well as Labor) in the Senate when compared with 2007. I think the answer to this lies partially in a significant portion of the electorate highly dissatisfied with both major parties' responses to climate change. The ALP were heavily punished for ditching their ETS (Rudd lost his leadership and the ALP lost their majority, and possibly their right to govern). But the Coalition are also being punished by some voters for ditching Turnbull and their last vestiges of credibility on the issue. Even some conservatives actually care about conservation and think that the command and control policies advocated by Abbott belong in the playbook of the far left, not the centre-right. They remember that it was Reagan's administration that championed market-based solutions to climate and find it odd that the right have now abandoned such strategies.





Or maybe I'm just projecting. :-)|||It means there was an upset, something happened to the Coalitions' surprise, like:





The Coalition gained in Queensland, NSW and Tasmania which took the government to 38 seats - one seat away from a majority in the upper house, and the Democrats were decimated, losing all three sitting senators up for re-election in Queensland, Western Australia and NSW, cutting its numbers to four. And early figures showed the coalition winning three Senate seats in Western Australia and possibly a fourth which would give it control of the Senate.





But wait a minute, the Greens were set to boost their numbers to three in the Senate, with former state MP and environmentalist Christine Milne within reach of a full quota, yeah, and One Nation's Len Harris, independent Shayne Murphy and Australian Progressive Alliance leader Meg Lees looked highly likely to lose their seats, but to save the day, the Labor frontbencher Senator Stephen Conroy said the result would make the government less accountable and they won it.





Something like that anyways, and there's your punch or swing agains the Coalition.





A swing in this instance is when you think you've won it and something happens where you don't.