|
QUOTA Newsletter
of the Proportional Representation
Society of QN2004B
June
2004
www.prsa.org.au PM
Admits Lack of Public Support for
Change to Section 57 of the
Constitution The
Prime Minister, John Howard, tabled the
final report of his Consultative Group
on Constitutional Change (QN2004A)
in Federal Parliament on 1st June 2004.
The report, on proposals to alter Section 57 of the
Australian Constitution
relating to disagreements between the
two Houses of the Parliament, was
entitled, “Resolving Deadlocks”. The
PM said, “The introduction of
proportional representation in the
Senate, combined with the move in 1983
to 6 senators being elected from each
state at a half Senate election rather
than 5, has made it almost impossible
for any government to obtain a majority
in the Senate in its own right. A party
now needs 57.16%
(sic) of the vote in a state at a
half Senate election to win a majority
of seats in that state. … The
Consultative Group concluded there is
not ‘any substantial measure of support
for either of the two options presented
in the discussion paper’. As a result
the government is not proposing a
referendum on this issue at the next
election.” The
Consultative Group’s Report said that it
had conducted public meetings in State
and Territory centres, but that the
highest attendance was in Publication
just before Easter on the Web site of
the Department of Prime Minister and
Cabinet of a variety of Report
particulars, but without links to
mentioned documents, prompted the PRSA
President, Bogey Musidlak, to enquire
about the status of the new material,
which quickly vanished during April.
The Age ran an accurate story
about the original plan running out of
puff, and the recommendation of a
program of education and consultation
about Section 57 and other
constitutional issues more generally. The Group,
of three, included ex-ministers Neil
Brown and Michael Lavarch. The other
member, Professor Jack Richardson,
Secretary of the 1959 Joint
Parliamentary Committee on
Constitutional Reform, wrote of a WA
submission about the 22 minor party
and independent senators elected in
the last 4 Senate polls, with only 2
polling the “required 14.28% quota of
primary votes alone and six had less
than half a quota. In a double
dissolution election in 1987, when the
quota became virtually halved (7.69%),
one candidate was elected with only
2.5% of the primary vote, and that
such candidates owed their election to
the distribution of preferences.” He
also wrote, “It is my view that the
time is about ripe for the existing
system of electing senators to be
critically assessed as objectively as
possible and away from flamboyant
demonstrations in its favour. One
suggestion is that parliament should
examine its powers under Section
7 of the Constitution to divide
each state into separate Senate
electorates. Another suggestion is
that Senate candidates (sic) should
have to achieve a fixed threshold
vote, for example of the order of 10%,
before being eligible for election.
Various European electoral systems,
including federal Suggestions
about artificial barriers to election
are often based on a confusion between
non-preferential party list systems
where votes for sub-threshold parties
are simply wasted, and our direct
preferential voting for individual
candidates required by Section 7 of the
Constitution. In
Australian Senate polls, a quota is, and
should be, equally valid whether it
consists entirely of first preference
votes, or mostly of later preferences.
ACT experience with the discredited
d’Hondt system that included an election
threshold for groups or independents
illustrated how such systems can result
in a handful of votes determining
several vacancies. Law
Amended to Set Aside an Australian
Electoral Commission Redistribution The
2003 Final Northern Territory
Redistribution issued by the Australian
Electoral Commission was to reduce the
number of Lower House divisions from two
to one. The “latest available
statistics” the AEC used showed that the
NT’s population had not increased as
fast as David
Tollner, Country-Liberal Party MHR for
Solomon, reacted by introducing a Bill
to require a minimum of two NT seats.
The Joint Select Committee on Electoral
Matters examined his Bill in 2003. It
recommended, rather than his Bill, a
Bill to establish more precisely the
statistics to be used by the AEC in
redistributions generally. That Bill
focussed on statistical confidence
intervals for population counts, and on
the timing of the “availability” of
those statistics. The
Bill recommended by the JSCEM to amend
the Commonwealth Electoral
Act 1918 was not
opposed by any party in the Parliament
and was passed as the Commonwealth Electoral
Amendment (Representation in the
House of Representatives) Act 2004.
It received Royal Assent on 20th April
2004. Its long-term purpose is to
improve and clarify the single-member
redistribution process, which was
accepted by MPs that spoke on the Bill.
Those improvements relate to future
redistributions Australia-wide, and do
not by themselves affect the
determination for a single NT division
at the next poll, but a separate section
of the Act also implements the
short-term intention of many members by
specifically setting aside the AEC’s
2003 Northern Territory Redistribution
and requiring that the previous
Redistribution, which provided for two
NT divisions, will apply for the next
federal election. Peter
Andren, Independent MHR for Calare,
speaking on the section of the Bill
setting aside the 2003 NT
Redistribution, voiced what many might
have sensed when he reminded MHRs of the
bad practices of many earlier Australian
parliaments in arbitrarily legislating
to establish particular numbers of seats
in certain areas. That came to be
recognized as opportunistic
malapportionment that needed to be
prevented by devolving the entire
procedure to a permanent Electoral
Commission required to implement
regularly a prescribed widely-accepted
objective redistribution process for
particular electoral arrangements. Mr
Andren also told the House, “I am an
unwavering proponent of proportional
representation as the only way of
delivering proper and fair
representation to the electorate.” Improved
Transfer Value Proposed in WA After
the 2001 Legislative Council
elections, concerns over the method
used to transfer surplus votes of
elected candidates in the Mining and
Pastoral Region were raised in the
Western Australian Parliament. A
number of ballot-papers increased in
value when the unweighted Senate-based
formula set out in the legislation was
applied after one count. The
WA Electoral Commission subsequently
commissioned Dr
Narelle Miragliotta to prepare
a research paper on the five most
recognized methods for transferring
the surplus votes of elected
candidates. The Proportional
Representation Society of Australia
was contacted for its thoughts and
views prior to the release in July
2002 of the publication Determining
the Result: Transferring Surplus
Votes in the Western Australian
Legislative Council. Focussing
on whether all papers for an elected
candidate are transferred or just
some, whether some ballot-papers can
increase in value, and how readily a
particular approach could be applied
without computers, that report set out
the pros and cons of each approach.
Under consideration were random
selection (the old
Senate method still used in NSW Upper
House and municipal elections), the Gregory
transfer (limiting attention to
the last parcel of votes received by
an elected candidate), the current
unweighted Senate procedure
(dividing a surplus by the total
number of ballot papers received), a Weighted
Inclusive Gregory approach
(under which previous transfer
values are all scaled back to the same
degree) and the Meek
procedure (under which elected
candidates continue to receive further
votes and recalculations are
iterated). After
withdrawal of more extensive
legislation (QN2003D),
on 21st November 2003, WA’s
Attorney-General, Jim McGinty,
introduced the Electoral and
Constitution Amendment Bill 2003, for
four-year terms ending on the third
Saturday in February (Legislative
Council terms would end on 21st March
rather than 21st May). The Bill also
makes it easier to vote before polling
day, and changes the transfer value
definition from the current anomalous
one of dividing a surplus by the total
number of ballot-papers received to
one where previous transfer values are
all multiplied by a surplus fraction
arising from the election of a new
candidate. The
proposed Weighted Inclusive Gregory
method would prevent ballot-papers
increasing in value during a scrutiny.
Officially described as a “minor
revision of the counting method for the
Legislative Council”, this amendment
would be a welcome change, viewed by
the PRSA with a sense of optimism that
similar faulty definitions in other
jurisdictions and for Senate elections
will not persist much longer. Although
the Bill is not an immediate
legislative priority of the Gallop
Government, the importance of this
reform has been conveyed to WA
parliamentarians. Under A few
provincial cities, and only one
metropolitan council, chose to
be unsubdivided, so that each year a
third of the council was elected as a
group with the whole municipal area
being a single electorate. The
majority-preferential electoral system
applied, but in its multiple form,
which was the winner-take-all
system used to fill each State’s
multiple Senate positions from 1919 to
1948, before the introduction of the
present system of quota-preferential
proportional representation. Under
that winner-take-all system -
long ago discredited for the Senate -
a ticket with 51% support (possibly
much less on first preferences) wins
all seats. The Cain ALP
Government (QN43 & QN 65)
lacked a Legislative Council
majority. It thus could not achieve a
PR option in its Local Government
Act 1989, but it did introduce
triennial elections. These were
mandatory for the City of From 1993,
the Kennett Liberal Government began
wide-ranging changes. The 200-odd
municipalities were reduced to 80, and
councillors were replaced by three
Government commissioners in each
municipality that had by 1997 set,
within legislated limits, but on an ad
hoc basis, the number of wards,
and the number of councillors in each.
The result was a wide range of
different structures. Some councils
had 5, 7, 9, 10 or even 11
single-member wards, some had
combinations of 1, 2 and 3-member
wards, and some had no wards. Wherever
two or more councillors were elected
in a ward, the old multiple
majority-preferential system applied. The Kennett
Government, with a majority in each
House, surprised many people by its
1995 passage of In 2001 (QN2001B)
the Bracks ALP Government, although
lacking a majority in each House,
managed to amend the Local Government Act
1989 to have
Melbourne City Council unsubdivided.
The Lord Mayor and Deputy are now
elected jointly, and join the 7
ordinary councillors, who are elected
by PR, but with a NSW-style Group
Voting Ticket option that
fortunately does not apply to any
other Victorian council yet. Just before
the 2002 State election, the Bracks
Government introduced a Bill to allow
quota-preferential PR as an election
option. The other parties, in their
last months of having a majority in
the Upper House, rejected the Bill. During 2003,
the PRSA’s Victoria-Tasmania Branch
(PRSAV-T) lobbied the Government,
Opposition and Independent MPs for the
introduction of: · Consistent
electoral arrangements across the
State, namely quota-preferential PR
for all municipalities, with wards
represented by an odd number of
councillors, with a minimum of three, · The use of Robson
Rotation, and ·
Countback to fill
casual vacancies. Unfortunately,
the PRSAV-T was only partially
successful in arguing for consistency,
but at least provision for PR, and for
countback,
was made. Robson
Rotation was not
introduced. Early in the
new Parliament, in which the
re-elected Bracks Government had a
majority in each House, the Local Government Act
1989 was amended
to provide that, when two or more
seats are to be filled together,
proportional representation is the
only system to be used, and that
casual vacancies there are to be
filled by countback, unless
that is impracticable. It is
regrettable that the single-member
ward option persists, and that Robson
Rotation was not introduced. Rather than
introducing a consistent system of
quota-preferential PR for the whole
State, as both major parties have
accepted in · each
municipality must undergo an Electoral
Representation Review, at which
members of the public may submit their
views about how the system of election
should be conducted, ·
a government
Electoral Commission should then
develop a recommendation to the
Minister, and ·
the Minister
would, after considering that
recommendation, issue an order
determining the electoral system to be
used in that municipality. The reviews,
to be at intervals of eight years or
less, began with Surf Coast Shire.
Encouragingly, an unsubdivided
council, electing nine councillors by
proportional representation, was
recommended. The amended
act also now provides that, beginning
in 2008, all municipal elections will
be held concurrently, every four
years, on the last Saturday in
November. As In early
2004, there were reviews of 9 other
councils, encompassing urban,
provincial city and rural councils,
and the PRSAV-T made submissions at
each stage of the process.
Unfortunately the recommendations are
a mixture of single-member
electorates, unsubdivided councils
electing 7 or 9 members, 3-member
wards and some mixed systems. The most
bizarre recommendation is probably for
Moreland Council, in Melbourne’s
north, which will have two wards each
electing 4 members and one electing 3.
Even numbers
of councillors in a ward can, if a
majority viewpoint is fairly small,
give distorted results in which a
minority of the vote can gain the same
representation as an absolute majority
of the vote. The PRSAV-T
applauds the move to PR, and the end
of the winner-take-all system
for multi-member districts. It will
seek a consistent straightforward
system, with a council’s electoral
district(s) required to have the same
odd number of seats, being three or
more. The PRSAV-T will monitor the
results of the first elections under
the new system, in November 2004. Ending
WA Malapportionment by a Federal Law
Needs Further Work While the
attempted passage of State legislation
amending Western Australia’s current
weighting of enrolments was being
played out in the courts (see QN2003D),
Australian Democrat Senator Andrew
Murray’s State Elections (One
Vote, One Value) Bill 2001 [2002] was
referred to the Senate’s Legal and
Constitutional References Committee.
Based on a mid-90s WA Commission on
Government report, the Bill sought to
use Australia’s accession to the
International Covenant on Civil and
Political Rights, which confers the
right “to vote and be elected at
genuine periodic elections which shall
be by universal and equal suffrage”,
as the basis for overturning all such
arrangements. The PRSA and
its WA and SA Branches made brief
submissions in October 2003 showing
major flaws in the way the legislation
could work (www.aph.gov.au/hansard/senate/commttee/s-lc.htm).
The Australian and ACT Electoral
Commissions and Tasmanian Electoral
Office also raised some of these
matters, and voiced additional
concerns about the basis for making
population projections and their
timing, confusion or uncertainty over
various terms, and potential
consequences of judicial review in
some cases. The PRSA’s
WA Branch pointed out the “obvious
loophole” in the proposed legislation
enabling a malapportionment to be
generated by “having equal-sized
electorates with different numbers of
seats”. It suggested drafting that did
not assume the same number of members
being elected from each district. The PRSA’s
SA Branch stated that in both the ACT
Legislative Assembly and the WA
Legislative Council, the number of
members varies among electorates
whereas the Bill “presumes that all
electorates return the same number of
parliamentarians”. It noted the
failure in SA of single-member
electorates with equalized enrolments
to give a party with over 50% of the
two-party-preferred vote a majority of
seats. It said a term like “equal
number of voters” was more appropriate
than “one vote, one value” in the
title. The PRSA
submission also started with the
inappropriateness of such wording in
the light of single-member outcomes.
In 1996 the
Coalition parties turned a combined
46% of first preferences into 60% of
the WA Legislative Assembly seats,
while in 2001 Labor converted 37% of
first preferences into 56% of seats.
Imbalances
between votes and seats in
metropolitan and rural areas in 2001
were starker. For instance, Labor won
70% of the metropolitan Assembly seats
with 40% of first preferences (and,
more fairly, 47% of the metropolitan
Council seats with 41% of first
preferences). Liberals gained 32% of
first preferences and won 20% of
metropolitan Assembly seats, yet 29%
support in rural areas was enough for
39% of Assembly seats there. Nationals
won 22% of rural Assembly seats after
obtaining nearly 13% of first
preferences, whereas One Nation had
16% support there, but won no seats. The
key provision in the proposed Bill was
so poorly drafted that “it would
invalidate the ACT’s Hare-Clark system
while making it possible for quite
large levels of what is called vote
weightage to persist for The norm was
assumed to be four-year terms, despite
a 3-year limit in the ACT then, and in
The PRSA
concluded that the Bill’s “articulated
intentions can only be effected by
building the enrolment quota criteria
around a calculation that sets a
Statewide quota at total enrolments at
some point in time, divided by the
total number of MPs in a particular
chamber, and multiplies this by the
number of members to be returned in
each electorate” and referred to the
specifics of ACT legislation as a
model for doing so. Limited
public hearings were held in February
2004, allowing Australian and ACT
electoral officials to expand on how
problem areas in the proposed
legislation might be addressed, and
taking legal views on potential
constitutional obstacles to the
Commonwealth passing legislation
imposing electoral requirements on the
States, and how these might best be
avoided. In its
report tabled on 3rd March 2004 the
Legal and Constitutional References
Committee included extracts from the
submissions of the WA and SA Societies
and the PRSA. It endorsed the
principle the State Elections (One
Vote, One Value) Bill 2001 [2002]
sought to implement, but recommended
that the Bill not be agreed to because
of fundamental technical and
constitutional problems. The Committee
suggested consideration of the Bill
being redrafted to express the
enrolments equalization principle in
generality or of the principle being
included in broader Commonwealth
legislation enshrining human rights
under the International Covenant on
Civil and Political Rights. Senator Murray - a member
of the Committee for this Inquiry -
wrote that he agreed with the report
and its findings, and would rework
the Bill “not just to enshrine in
Australian law the most fundamental
of universal political rights and
principles”, but also “to try and
implement the recommendations of the
Western Australian Commission on
Government 1995-96”. The
2004 Lok Sabha Elections in The PRSA
National Secretary, Dr Stephen Morey,
was in First-past-the-post
counting applies, with press button
voting machines. Candidates’ party
affiliation is displayed by symbols,
such as a hand for the Congress Party,
and a lotus for the BJP Party. The result
was hailed as a great victory for
Congress, but even a cursory look at
the vote shows that Congress’s
percentage of votes decreased (from
28.3 to 26.2%), while their seats
increased from 114 to 145. Less than
50% the sitting Congress MPs retained
their seats (49), and most of the
seats now held by Congress are gains.
A similar pattern is true for the
defeated BJP, which had even fewer
votes than Congress in this, and in
the previous election. The new
Parliament contains 48 parties, most
of only one or two members, and most
on a regional, caste or tribal basis.
The election result was much
influenced by state factors and the
complex interplay between different
parties. Only a state-by-state,
region-by-region analysis of the
voting figures and comparison with
seats won would establish the extent
of distortion in the result. Nevertheless
this time, purely by chance, it
appears that the parties will be
represented in Parliament by numbers
of MPs that roughly correspond to
their support. It in no way justifies
the single-member electorate system
used, with its crude
first-past-the-post counting, but the
counting process was extremely
efficient and fast. Within ten minutes
of the opening of counting (held a
week after the close of the last round
of polling), the first results were
coming through. A trend was clear a
few minutes later, and the whole
result was apparent faster than any
other election I have ever followed.” Visit
to Electoral Reform Society in Former
National President of the PRSA,
Geoffrey Goode, visited the well
resourced headquarters of the Electoral
Reform Society in The ERS knows STV well, so
Mr Goode stressed our governments’
fondness for stage-managing
our PR, constrained, at least
for federal and WA polls, by the
constitutional requirements there
for direct
election of members. He warned
the ERS, whose members are not used
to the ballot-paper design ploys
that our governments have legislated
for, that how-to-vote
cards, our Group
Voting Tickets,
and the ordering of candidates’
names on the ballot-paper
work against voters, and for
parties, and that only the ACT and
Tasmania have laws for proper
measures in those areas. He
displayed a NSW “tablecloth” 1999
Upper House ballot-paper,
to general amazement. ©
2004 Proportional Representation
Society of National
President: Bogey Musidlak 14
Strzelecki Cr. NARRABUNDAH 2604 National
Secretary: Dr Stephen Morey 4 Sims
Street Tel: (02) 6295 8137, (03) 9598 1122 info@prsa.org.au Printed by Prestige Copying & Printing, 97 Pirie Street ADELAIDE SA 5000 |
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