Steve Fielding - 2004 Election

2004 Election

Fielding was elected to represent Victoria in the Senate at the 2004 federal election. He is the first representative of the Family First Party to be elected to the Federal Parliament.

Fielding's election was not expected – Family First had only been founded two years prior to the election, and it was not expected to succeed in its first Federal election in the state of Victoria. Like many Senators he gained a quota under the Senate's proportional representation system by receiving preferences from other parties (see Australian electoral system). The Australian Democrats and the Australian Labor Party agreed to swap preferences with Family First. But Fielding benefited from the larger-than-expected surplus of Liberal preferences, and stayed in the count long enough to receive Democrat and Labor preferences, defeating the Australian Greens' candidate David Risstrom for the last Senate place in Victoria. As a result, Fielding was elected with just 2519 first preference votes (0.08%), and his party as a whole received just 56,376 votes (1.9%) for the Federal Senate in Victoria.

When first elected the Howard Government held a slim majority in the Senate, sufficient so that Fielding would only hold the balance of power if one of the government Senators chose to cross the floor. This changed after the 2007 Federal election (the changes of which took effect in 2008) when the balance of power in the Senate shifted to a combination of the five Australian Greens Senators, independent Nick Xenophon and Steve Fielding.