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Letter published in The Age,
Page 12, on 9th February 1999 (cited at Footnote
50 on Commonwealth Parliament
website) A matter of thresholds MPs
such as Helen Coonan (Opinion 4/2), campaigning to
have the Senate electoral system impose thresholds for election
- a proviso additional to the existing quotas -
speak of ‘thresholds’, misleadingly linking
‘thresholds’ to the thresholds used in
proportional representation systems overseas. They
omit the fact that those thresholds operate quite
differently. The “party
list” proportional representation systems in
Europe, Asia, South America, South Africa and New
Zealand concentrate on voters’ choice of party.
They lack the transferable preferences that are
available in the more voter-empowering systems and
that allow direct election of candidates for
Australia’s Senate, Eire or Malta. They
have much larger electorates, with more vacancies
and much lower quotas than ours. The purpose of
“party list” threshold provisos is to discourage
party fragmentation and splitting of the vote,
which low quotas with lack of transferable votes
encourage. Our
high quotas with preferential
voting make thresholds unnecessary. “Party
list” thresholds for election are a much larger
percentage than the quota, which is the minimum
vote percentage to elect each candidate. They
relate to a party’s entire percentage of the vote. In
contrast the Australian campaign seeks threshold
provisos, much lower than the quota, relating to
first preference votes only, not total votes.
Their purpose is to skew the system in favour of
candidates from larger parties. Larger
parties always elect more senators than the
smaller parties, but not disproportionately more -
yet. This campaign misuses
thresholds, and seeks less proportionality. Geoffrey Goode, vice-president, Proportional
Representation Society of Australia, Beaumaris |
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