PROPORTIONAL REPRESENTATION SOCIETY OF AUSTRALIA

Tel. (03) 9589 1802		18 Anita Street
Fax (03) 9589 1680		BEAUMARIS VIC 3193
Mobile 0409 176725		www.cs.mu.oz.au/~lee/prsa
ggd@netspace.net.au		5th October 1999

To the Candidates for Frankston East District of the Legislative Assembly:

QUESTIONNAIRE ON YOUR VIEWS ON PROPORTIONAL REPRESENTATION FOR THE LEGISLATIVE COUNCIL OF VICTORIA

As you will be aware, the issue of whether the electoral system for polls to elect members to the Legislative Council of Victoria should be changed to a proportional representation system is a factor in deciding the next Government of Victoria, as three key independent MLAs have indicated that PR for the Upper House is in the Charter of principles they want implemented by the next Government.

The Proportional Representation Society is therefore asking you, via the following questionnaire, to please give us your views on this important election issue so we can report the outcome to the media.

Brief Description of Why Victoria’s Upper House should have Proportional Representation:

Victoria is the only mainland Upper House that has never had, and still does not have, a proportional representation electoral system. Victoria still has a ‘winner-take-all’ electoral system in which polls are conducted with only one vacancy at a time so that all that is required to elect a member is a bare majority of votes (50% plus one vote) - in any Province. The other Upper Houses, the Senate, SA, NSW and WA, in that order have converted to a PR system over the last 50 years.

Their now superseded electoral systems were, except in NSW, which in 1978 went straight from a non-popularly-elected house to a PR house, all like Victoria’s, in that quite small majorities for one party tended to produce highly exaggerated majorities for it, leaving the Opposition grossly under-represented, and effectively excluding smaller parties and independents from election. These ill-effects were much more noticeable in the Upper Houses, because they had only half the number of members of the Lower House, and only half of those were elected at each Lower House election, leading to Provinces like Victoria’s, which are four times the size of those for the Assembly. PR gives a share in seats in proportion to the share of votes in each multi-member electorate, and has remedied those shortcomings, except in Victoria, where it has never applied.

Our questionnaire records your view on PR for the Upper House, and also on the particular features its PR system should have. These features are best developed in the Hare-Clark PR systems used in the Lower Houses of Tasmania and the ACT, and are most important in ensuring that the PR system not only lets voters determine the proportions of the members from each party and the proportion of independents, but also which particular candidates from each party, or which particular independents, are elected and which are not. Further details on ‘Countback’ for filling casual vacancies, and ‘Robson Rotation’ for the impartial printing of ballot-papers, are found on our Web site above under ‘A Brief History of the PRSA’ and ‘Parliament of Tasmania’.

Yours sincerely,
 

Geoffrey Goode, National Vice-President