What’s in a name?

Ask the Liberal Party, and you could well be told the answer is several hundred thousand votes and a seat on the Senate crossbench.

Ever since David Leyonhjelm won a New South Wales Senate seat for the Liberal Democratic Party at the 2013 election — a success he was generally thought to owe to confusion over the party name, combined with a fortuitous position on the ballot paper — the Liberals have been on the warpath against the party for taking its name in vain, and also against the Australian Electoral Commission for allowing it to happen.

Any satisfaction Labor might have derived from watching this unfold will have been tempered of late by the emergence of an as-yet unregistered new concern called the Labour Coalition, which this week announced some notable union figures as candidates for the next election.

A report from Fairfax on Wednesday suggested the party’s name was “carefully chosen to try to replicate the success of the Liberal Democratic Party”.

Issues surrounding party names have been smouldering for some time, reflecting intrinsically subjective questions as to how entitled an established party should feel to ownership of the principles and interests it presumes to represent.

Few reasonable observers could dispute that it was altogether too cute of certain minor players in Britain to market themselves as “Conversative” or “Literal Democrats” in the 1990s, or that it was unreasonable for the parliament to introduce a regime of formal party registration to put a stop to the practice.

But it is all too tempting for major party legislators to take matters too far by claiming for themselves a monopoly on entire political philosophies, or prohibiting rival outfits from purporting to represent those who “labour”.

The Australian Labor Party has been familiar with such issues for a long time, having suffered splits in the 1930s and 1950s that variously threw up “Lang Labor”, the “Australian Labor Party (Anti-Communist)” and, most enduringly, the Democratic Labour Party, which persisted as a minor electoral thorn in Labor’s side up until its deregistration six months ago.

When party registration was introduced in Australia in 1984 — allowing, among other things, for candidates to be identified by party labels on ballot papers for the first time — the legislation required that a new party’s name must not so resemble that of an existing party as to be likely to cause confusion.

Such determinations are inevitably open to interpretation, so it is no surprise that the provision has provided fertile ground for litigation.

When the AEC rejected the application of a party hoping to register as “Liberals for Forests” in 2001, the decision was overturned on appeal by three judges of the Federal Court, allowing the party to contest the 2001 and 2004 elections.

The Howard government blamed the party for Nationals member Larry Anthony’s narrow defeat in his seat of Richmond in 2004, and used the Senate majority it gained in 2005 to pass legislation with a specific view to putting it out of business.

The Liberal Democratic Party was also advised by the AEC at this time that its existing name would not pass muster, and it accordingly contested the 2007 election as the Liberty and Democracy Party.

But when the party sought to have its old name restored the following year, the AEC approved the application, citing legal advice it had received that the Howard government’s legislative changes were essentially ineffective.

The Liberal Party missed the opportunity to appeal that decision in court, but it has more recently sunk its teeth into an application by the Liberal Democrats to make a minor change to the way its name appears on ballot papers.

This, too, was approved by the AEC, but the Liberal Party has been pursuing the matter through the Administrative Appeals Tribunal, in the hope of establishing a precedent requiring a broader reading of the existing legislation than that applied by the AEC.

The tribunal was due to hear the matter earlier this month, but first the Canning and now the North Sydney byelections have caused it to be put on hold.

Now that a potentially potent new “Labour” party is preparing to take the field, with the declared intention of representing a more assertive brand of unionism than that associated with Bill Shorten in his time at the Australian Workers Union, the ALP will be watching proceedings with renewed interest.