|
QUOTA Newsletter
of the Proportional Representation Society of
Australia QN1998B
June 1998
www.prsa.org.au ·
Analysis of the
1998 Queensland Assembly Elections ·
Division into Two
Classes of Senators after a Double Dissolution ·
Northern
Territory Statehood Convention ·
European
Parliamentary Elections Bill ·
Vale David Bernard Vigor, former Senator
for South Australia ·
A.C.T. Polls: New
MLAs, but Stability in Party Numbers ·
List of issues of Quota
Notes The above slogan
began to appear on car number plates issued in the
State of Municipal
Elections This period has
seen, for the first time in Victorian history, the
gradual appearance, in several stages, for some
areas of local government, of legislation providing
for some quota-preferential proportional
representation at municipal polls. To be fair it must
be recognized that the Bill introduced by the then
Australian Labor Party
Government, to repeal the Local Government Act
1958 and replace it with the present Local
Government Act 1989,
would have allowed councils to choose a PR electoral
system. The Legislative Assembly passed that Bill
effectively intact, but the Legislative Council,
where the ALP lacked a majority, deleted the PR
provisions in the Bill by the combined vote of the
non-ALP parties. Those parties included the
Opposition Liberal Party, which was being led by Mr
Kennett. The gradual move
towards the first appearance of quota-preferential
proportional representation in a Victorian statute
was helped by a call from Ms Elizabeth Proust, the
then Chief Executive Officer of the Melbourne City
Council, for legislation for PR for her city (QN63).
The Council followed with public hearings by a
Council committee, at which a submission and
appearance by the then PRSA President, Geoffrey
Goode, was well received, and remarked upon
favourably in a subsequent 1993 published report
recommending PR for the city (QN69). Section 10(4) of
Victoria's Local Government Act 1989
achieved its present form, which requires
quota-preferential proportional representation for
five of the nine members of Melbourne City Council,
in 1995 (QN78).
Unfortunately countback
was not enacted for filling casual vacancies. That
resulted in the filling, in early 1998, of a single
casual vacancy by a poll of the whole municipality.
That cost nearly as much as the original general
election for five members, and unnecessarily
inconvenienced citizens. From 1997 (QN1997D),
Section 10(6) of the Local Government Act 1989
stated that an Order-in-Council could require that
proportional representation must apply to other
specified councils, in whole or in part, although
that power has not yet been exercised The final, and a
most welcome, move to date has been the introduction
by the Government of a current bill that would
provide that casual vacancies from PR municipal
polls shall be filled by countback.
If that bill is passed as expected, Legislative
Council Elections The ALP Government
had also tried, in accord with its recently adopted
party policy, to legislate for PR for the
Legislative Council rather than maintaining its
earlier goal of abolishing that chamber, but its
bills for PR there were also rejected by the Upper
House. Those PR bills for Upper House polls
unfortunately not only incorporated all the
undesirable features that make the stage-managed
Senate-style PR much inferior to Hare-Clark PR from
the voters' point of view, but also added a more
serious defect, whereby it was proposed that casual
vacancies should be explicitly filled by party
nomination. At the well-attended
1998 Annual General Meeting of PRSA's Victorian
Branch in April the Guest Speaker, the ALP
Frontbencher, Mr Peter Batchelor,
gave an informative account of the Party's policy
for the electoral system for the Legislative
Council. The policy is for each house to have a
General Election on the same day, and for each to
have fewer MPs - a reduction from 44 to 35 for the
Upper House, and from 88 to 85 for the Lower House.
The 35 Upper House members would be elected from
five 7-member provinces, and the 85 Lower House
members would be elected from 85 single-member
electoral districts. The principle of the present
feature of Analysis
of the 1998 The results of the
General Election on 13th June 1998 for all 89 seats
in Queensland's Legislative Assembly have
understandably produced strong reactions, some of
approval and some of disapproval, to the surprising
success of Mrs Pauline Hanson's One Nation Party.
That the party has made Australian history by being
the first party founded by a woman to win seats in
an Australian Parliament, and furthermore that it
has done so on a scale of some significance, in a
Lower House with a winner-take-all electoral system,
is an aspect that has been lost in the general
all-round shock. Although it had no
candidates in 11 of the Assembly's 89 seats, the One
Nation Party gained some 23% of the first preference
votes State-wide. The single-member
'winner-take-all' electoral system translated that
level of voter support into a share of the seats of
some 12.4%. The State-wide minority of One Nation
voters is represented by a disproportionately small
minority of MPs. Many voters for larger parties
favour that penalty for small parties, but the price
paid can be dangerously high as explained below. If the party had
stood a candidate in every seat, the fraction of the
vote it gained would have come even closer to the
highly significant level of 25% State-wide. That
level is significant in a single-member system, as a
25% State-wide vote is the threshold value above
which it is rapidly becomes possible, as the vote
level increases, for a single party whose supporters
are regionally concentrated to win an absolute
majority of seats even though it gains well short of
an absolute majority of first preference votes
State-wide, and even though it may be put last in
preference by all other parties and voters. This is possible in
single-member systems as only half of the votes
(plus one vote) is needed to elect each MP in each
seat. Thus if One Nation polled from 51-55% in 50
Queensland seats and in the 39 other seats variously
polled very low, or did not stand, it, or any other
party that polled that way in its place, would win
more than 50% of the Assembly seats, with less than
30% of the State-wide vote, despite every other
candidate and party putting them last in their order
of preference. This is a
serious and unavoidable consequence of
single-member electorate systems, and applies even
when the traditional faults of such systems, malapportionment and
gerrymanders, are absent. It is made even
worse where first-past-the-post counting applies. In sharp contrast a
major quality of proportional representation
electoral systems is that minority parties are
restricted to minority representation. Of course the
'price', as some would term it, for that important
democratic safeguard is that minorities are not
denied representation in proportion to their
electoral strength. The single-member system only
blunts the strength of minorities - it does not
necessarily prevent all representation, as One
Nation has shown, but its
far more serious and potentially tragic failing is
that, unlike PR, it can, because it gives
effectiveness to so few votes, allow a distinct
minority to gain an absolute majority of seats in
its own right. Canada's Reform
Party, which has much in common with Australia's One
Nation Party, became in 1997 (QN1997B)
the Official Opposition in the Canadian House of
Commons with just a 19.4% overall vote. Experience
as the Official Opposition can lead a party to
moving on to Government. The analysis of the
1998 polls on Pages 4 and 5 (online version here)
shows that under a Hare-Clark PR system there would
have been some 21% of the Assembly elected as One
Nation MLAs, given the 23% vote for that party,
compared to the 12% elected under the present
system. A feature of the
analysis is the extreme over-representation of the
ALP in the The shaded boxes in
the analysis table mark the 71 of Division
into Two Classes of Senators after a Double
Dissolution The Senate
Hansard of Monday, 29th June 1998, records
that the Senate has acted positively in supporting a
sounder basis than the customary rule for deciding
how State senators elected after a double
dissolution will be divided into long-term (6 year)
senators and short-term (3 year) senators. Section
13 of the Constitution requires that division to be
decided by a resolution of the Senate after its
first meeting following a
dissolution of both houses, but it is
silent on the basis to be used. Since Federation the
custom has been to use the order in which senators
in each State are elected as the basis - the first
half elected became long-term senators, and the
others short-term senators. The order of
election as a basis of dividing senators into two
classes was credible enough under the Senate's two
previous electoral systems, first-past-the-post
block vote till 1919, and multiple
majority-preferential until 1948, but not under
proportional representation, where the mere order in
which candidates are elected is not necessarily
related to the relative degree of support they
received at the poll. Happily, a well-founded
rational basis has been recognized. This year, 1998,
marks the fiftieth anniversary of the present Senate
electoral system - quota-preferential proportional
representation - which has now survived longer than
the combined life of the two previous systems. The
new basis is in Section 282
of the Commonwealth Electoral Act 1918,
introduced in 1984 as a facilitator for use by the
Senate in allocating long-term positions. Section
282 requires the Australian Electoral Commission to
conduct a further count of ballots cast at an
election for the whole Senate, in which the aim is
to show which candidates would have been elected if
only half the full number of senators had to be
elected. It is easily seen as an obvious and precise
indication, for each State, of its voters'
priorities in regard to which half of the senators
elected should have the highest priority to be made
long-term senators. Coalition and ALP
senators, and the Greens Senator Bob Brown voted for
the successful motion below, but the Australian
Democrats repeated their stance of the 1980s by
opposing the motion. Their opposition to the fairer
basis is consistent with the fact that it would
yield them fewer long-term senators, whereas it
would benefit the major parties. The Senate
Hansard record on 29th June is as follows:
Motion (by Senator Faulkner) agreed to: That the
Senate is of the view that, in the event of a
simultaneous dissolution of both Houses under section 57 of
the Constitution, the division of
senators into two classes for the purposes of
rotation should be in accordance with the results
of a re-count of the Senate vote under section 282
of the Commonwealth Electoral Act 1918 to
determine the order of election of senators in
each State. Senator BARTLETT ( Senator BARTLETT - I
just wish to indicate on behalf of the Democrats
that we opposed this motion because we believe it is
inappropriate for this Senate to be expressing
opinions to a future Senate which, as has been
widely noted, may be of a vastly different
composition from the one that currently sits here.
If we are going to start doing that on issues such
as this, we may as well start doing it on issues
such as how to appoint the President or the Deputy
President after the next election. For that reason,
we feel it is inappropriate to support a motion
which expresses an opinion so different from that
which has been expressed by the Senate on every
previous occasion this century. Senator BROWN ( The history of the
debate on which option should be taken here is one
that is a studied effort in political advantage.
When it comes down to it, it is very slim, but there
is at the margins the possibility that one senator
who would have got a three-year term under the
alternative means of counting will end up with a
six-year term. I think there is fairly wide
agreement, including from people like Malcolm
Mackerras, that the half Senate counting form should
be adopted throughout and that it is the most
democratic form. I notice that the Proportional
Representation Society of Australia agrees with
that. Therefore, on the
advice of that society, I support this motion, but I
think we ought not leave
open the option of twiddling it -- of having the
next election according to the interests of various
parties. If this is the most democratic way of
determining which senators become six-year senators
and which senators become three-year senators after
a double dissolution election, then we should reach
for a means of making that a standard way of
behaviour. Senator Robert Ray -
Change the constitution. Senator BROWN - No,
not change the
constitution, Senator Ray, but at least legislate so
there has to be great deliberation and an obvious
act of political self-investment before the country
can overturn it. I agree that changing the
constitution would be very difficult for a minor
matter like this. Most people in here do not
understand the matter, so how would you convey it to
the wider electorate? They simply want to know that
there is a fair formula which is agreed on and which
is permanent, and that is what we should be aiming
for. Northern
Territory Statehood Convention A Statehood
Convention was held at Parliament House in In December 1996, a
Final Draft Constitution for the The PRSA President,
Bogey Musidlak, assisted Territorians that wanted to
update and circulate material about proportional
representation. This included simulated
quota-preferential elections based on the 1997 poll
(QN 1997C), which left the Country Liberal Party
with 18 of the 25 Assembly seats. Distributions into
five five-member electorates, or mixtures containing
one or two seven-member electorates in the wider
Darwin-Palmerston area, resulted in the CLP winning
14 or 15 seats: there was no longer a major
distortion between votes and seats around Darwin,
and both Labor and the
CLP would have obtained representation in all parts
of the Territory, although the delegate Margaret
Clinch presented an excellent case for five
five-member electorates, the majority of delegates
remaining after a partial walkout over some
aboriginal rights issues on 8th April 1998 voted
that single-member electorates be specified in any
Constitution. As the body of
resolutions passed by the appointed Convention
included many items over which there was strong
disagreement, it is quite uncertain whether anything
will come of them. Former Labor
Senator Bob Collins warned delegates at the outset
that passage of enabling legislation through the
Senate would be unlikely unless a spirit of
reasonable compromise and consensus prevailed
throughout. European
Parliamentary Elections Bill On 12th December
1997 the UK Home Secretary, Rt. Hon. Jack Straw,
delivered his Second Reading Speech on the above
Bill, which provides for the retention of STV (quota-preferential
PR) for Northern Ireland seats in the European
Parliament, but the substitution of a closed d'Hondt party list form of
PR for the remaining UK seats, which have been
filled by first-past-the-post
counting until now.
The House of Commons
passed the Bill in March. It is now being debated in
the House of Lords. Members of the Electoral Reform
Society there moved an amendment (No.
12) to substitute STV for the closed d'Hondt party list proposed,
but the Government appears unmoved. A closed party
list is the most restrictive PR, where voters are
only allowed to mark a vote for one party, with no
option to indicate their preferences between parties
or any of the candidates within any party. Debate on
24th June 1998 included the following speeches by
ERS members. Earl Russell: '... I am most
grateful to the noble Lord, Lord
Alton of STV is also the
policy of my party. It has most recently been
reaffirmed at the Southport Conference last March.
The arrangement we reached in The first thing we
do if we adopt STV is to introduce a uniform
electoral system for the United Kingdom of Great
Britain and Northern Ireland. As the noble Lord,
Lord Alton, said, STV has been in use for a long
time in At this juncture, it
would be most unwise of us to convey the impression
that in There are two
functions in an election: it should give victory to
the most popular party and to the most popular
candidate. It is the first which first-past-the-post is most often
reproached for not doing. The reproach is valid. It
does not always do that well in relation to the
other. ... ... Because so much
of the propaganda for proportional representation
has been in terms, perfectly justified terms, of
striking the right balance between the parties, we
have tended to lose sight of the real importance of
having individual candidates who are accountable to
the electorate and acceptable to them. Both of those
are responsibilitiesof
an electoral system. It is my contention
that STV is the only one that does both. It is also
the one which is most likely to be made acceptable
to the voters. That is not a negligible
consideration. At our party conference in Eastbourne
last September, one speaker said that before the
referendum - I know that is wide of the present Bill
but it is nevertheless of interest - we should
consider what is the most powerful argument that
might be used against proportional representation. I
think the most powerful argument by far will be the
one which I have heard and respected from the
Benches on my left; namely, the extent to which
other systems of proportional representation tend to
increase the power of party patronage. Mr. Andrew Rawnsley writing in The
Observer last Sunday reported that the Jenkins
Commission through its research had found an
overwhelming extent of public reaction against the
growth of party control of the electoral machinery.
I do not know whether that is true but it certainly
coincides with my own experience. ... ... The point about
STV is that it restores the choice of who the member
is to the voter. That is surely where in any
democratic system it belongs. ... The
Earl Kitchener: 'The main
difference between the two voting systems we are
considering is that STV gives power to the voters
rather than to the politicians and that nearly all
voters will have a link to one or more candidates
whom they have helped to elect. It also has the
merit of simplicity. With the proposed number of
MEPs per region being about 8, the proportionality
of party votes to members would be much the same as
that given by the system proposed in the Bill. STV has been used
for many years in the The only serious
objection that I can see to STV is that it may
encourage a sitting member to devote too much time
to his constituents at the expense of his wider
duties because he is vulnerable to being replaced by
a member of his own party who has cultivated the
voters. The remedy for that lies in the good sense
of the electors, who should give full weight to the
work the member is doing outside his constituency.
This objection has been raised mainly in the An objection has
been raised that STV is complicated, but it is not
complicated for the voter, and the effort involved
in the counting has been much reduced by
computerization. The Minister referred to the need
for the voter to express 50 choices. It is true that
in a very close contest any vote that does not
include at least all candidates except one may be
partly wasted. In practice it is the early
preferences which will count, unless they are for
very weak candidates. The Committee is in a
particularly strong position to put the interests of
the voters before those of the politicians. A vote
for this amendment would at least stimulate a
careful examination of the many virtues of the
single transferable vote.' Vale David
Bernard Vigor, former
Senator for South Australia An enthusiastic
initiator, always full of ideas, and never afraid to
question orthodoxy, David Vigor
played an important role in galvanizing Australian
political alternatives in the 1970s and 1980s.
Gregarious by nature, he nurtured long-term networks
of friends whom he invited to join him in changing
the world. His sudden death of a heart attack on 9th
April 1998 aged 58 is a major loss to supporters of
proportional representation. An only child, born
in Preselected to lead
the South Australian Democrat Senate team in 1984,
David's maiden speech emphasized new thinking for a
post-industrial economy. For two and a half years,
he worked prodigiously to develop a 'strong
self-reliant Australia, in technology, in trade, in
defence and in spirit', drawing up Private Member's
Bills on a wide variety of subjects, including
electoral reform, and becoming known for his
tenacious probing of government administration in
the Estimates Committees. In 1986's dark days
for the Special Broadcasting Service, he gave hope
and courage to those being misled into believing it
could be dismantled by 'administrative action'. He
protected liberal trading hours in the ACT and
quickened the advent of airline travel free from
tobacco smoke by introducing legislation that
embarrassed a tardy government. His insistence on
effective voting that could not produce lopsided
Assemblies in the ACT led to plans for
self-government being temporarily shelved in 1986.
It inspired the subsequent introduction and
entrenchment of the Hare-Clark system of
proportional representation after the abominable
experience with the 'Modified d'Hondt'
system that was imposed by the Federal Parliament
for the 1989 and 1992 elections. In the Senate, David
spoke regularly on the need for electoral reform
that empowered voters. His 1986 Private Member's
Bill for effective ACT self-government detailed the
operation of the Hare-Clark system, while another
sought to do away with House of Representatives
by-election polls through a system of countback.
During debate on electoral legislation in May 1987,
he unsuccessfully moved a raft of amendments
seeking to introduce the quota-preferential method
of proportional representation for the House of
Representatives. He also placed on
record deficiencies in the definition of the
transfer value adopted for Senate elections in 1983,
and criticized the Australian Electoral Commission
for responding with gobbledegook when asserting that
there was nothing untoward with the possibility of
transfer values increasing during the course of a
scrutiny. Caught up in ongoing
turmoil within the South Australian Democrats, David
joined John Siddons outside the party, but was
unsuccessful at the 1987 double dissolution poll. He
returned to computer consultancy and software
development, actively supporting proportional
representation by his continuing membership of the
Electoral Reform Society of South Australia that
included vice presidency between 1993 and 1995, and
by his holding office in the Association of Former
Members of the Parliament of Australia. He is survived by his widow Susan, seven children and seven grandchildren.
Voters
experienced a 50% increase in the number of
candidates nominating for the ACT's election on
21st February 1998, with 28 and 31 in the two
five-member electorates and 49 in Molonglo. Nearly
half of this increase arose because the Australian
Democrats (17 candidates) and ACT Greens (15)
decided to stand much larger teams, and a further
quarter came from ungrouped candidates (17) - once
again all unsuccessful. Of
the 91 unsuccessful candidates, 65 lost their
deposit, as they did not achieve one-fifth of a
quota at exclusion. They included 15 ungrouped
candidates, 14 Democrats, 11 Greens, 3 ALP team
members and 2 Liberals. Independent Paul Osborne
organized two-candidate teams in each electorate,
emerging with the third-largest ACT-wide voting
support. Colleague Dave Rugendyke
was comfortably elected in Ginninderra at the
expense of the ACT Greens after nearly 45% of the
last Democrat's votes became exhausted upon her
exclusion. This
was the first election at which distribution of
how-to-vote material was prohibited within 100
metres of any polling place during voting. Turnout
was up around 3% to 93%, and informal voting
dropped by one-third to about 4%, most of it
deliberate. Because of official material mailed to
voters before the 1992 plebiscite, ballot-papers
ask voters to mark at least as many preferences as
there are vacancies: nevertheless, voters are free
to choose how many preferences they mark. Liberal
leader Kate Carnell alone achieved a quota of
first preferences, polling over one-third of the
vote in Molonglo. Her Deputy, Gary Humphries, was
elected once her surplus was distributed. A series
of exclusions therefore dominated the early part
of each scrutiny, with a flurry of quotas achieved
right at their end.The
Liberal, and ALP, vote fell by some 4%, to 37.8%
and 27.6% respectively but, as shown below, the
Liberals retained 7 seats and the ALP 6. The
Osborne Group and ACT Greens each won 9.1%, taking
two seats and one respectively. Independent
Michael Moore retained his seat in Molonglo after
the Democrat vote fell sharply from the 10% shown
in some opinion polls during the campaign.
Despite
the surface stability in party numbers, the
Assembly will have five new MLAs. Liberal Brendan
Smyth (immediately appointed a Minister) nearly
obtained a quota of first preferences in
Brindabella, while Labor's
Jon Stanhope (now Leader of the Opposition), John
Hargreaves, and Ted Quinlan (Deputy Leader) ousted
incumbents. Green Lucy Horodny
did not contest the election. As
Labor's Left lost
parliamentary control after a long period of
factional dominance, campaign leader Wayne Berry
continually lashed out at the Hare-Clark system, demanding party
boxes so that affirmative-action programs would
put more women into the Assembly (only two were
successful in 1998, compared with five in 1995).
While party boxes are inconsistent with the
Hare-Clark principles entrenched in 1995, some
observers wryly noted that ALP representation
after this election would have fallen to four or
five under Senate-style arrangements. Higher
percentages of voters picked and chose
deliberately among candidates: typically 20-25% of
next available preferences from lesser-supported
candidates of smaller parties were outside that
column. Only about half of those voting for the
leading Democrat candidates continued to other
columns: the percentage going next to the ACT
Greens fell from 40% to 25% in the absence of the
1995 recommendation by both parties that
supporters place the other next in their numbering
of preferences. That high rate of vote exhaustion
might prompt parties to think about how many
candidates to endorse in each electorate to
maximize political effect. When
Labor and Liberal
candidates with relatively few votes were
excluded, there was still a notable advantage to
the colleague closest below when those excluded
appeared at the top of the column: this was
influential in Brindabella in the 45-vote defeat
of Louise Littlewood
by Liberal colleague Trevor Kaine
(who subsequently left the party and sought to
register the name Canberra Liberals) and in the
ouster of short-lived former ALP leader Andrew Whitecross by John
Hargreaves. Liberal candidates Vicki Dunne and
Jacqui Burke were both unsuccessful by several
hundred votes in circumstances where the combined
party-column vote from two exclusions was shared
quite evenly with the last of their colleagues to
be elected. The
scrutinies in Brindabella and Ginninderra were
both concluded within 3 days of the striking of
the quotas following expiry of the statutory 5-day
wait for postal votes (during which declaration
votes are also processed).In Molonglo, fewer than
400 votes initially separated five of the ALP
candidates, and their progress totals remained
close together throughout the scrutiny. Towards
the end of the scrutiny, Steve Garth was 3 votes
ahead of Marion Reilly, ready to be propelled past
Simon Corbell on her
exclusion to take the second ALP position: this
margin was adjusted to 5 votes when checking
revealed over 100 miss-sorted ballot-papers. However,
a full recount granted at Ms Reilly's request
placed her 3 votes in front of Dr Garth. After his
exclusion she remained 23 votes behind Ted Quinlan
and 87 behind Simon Corbell.
Over a week earlier, Mr Corbell
had conceded defeat, attacking the 'trench
warfare' of the ALP's factional system over the
previous six to ten years, and calling the
Hare-Clark system 'absurd' for his likely failure
despite starting with the most first preferences
in his team. The
closeness of several scrutinies and the
near-misses of several female candidates might be
reflected in greater attention to individual
marking of preferences on the third Saturday in
October 2001 (the January-February election period
created problems for parties and electoral
officials). A committee of the fourth Assembly is
expected to closely examine various aspects of
electoral arrangements: this process should
strengthen the ACT's position at the forefront of
world best practice. [Please
note: The balance of 'A Brief History of the
PRSA' promised in QN78 now appears on the
PRSA Web Site. - Editor] © 1998
Proportional Representation Society of National President:
Bogey Musidlak 14 Strzelecki Cr. NARRABUNDAH 2604 National Secretary: Deane Crabb 11 Yapinga Street PLYMPTON SA
5038 Tel:(08) 8297 6441
(02) 6295 813
info@prsa.org.au Printed
by Prestige Copying & Printing, 97 Pirie Street
ADELAIDE SA 5000 |
