 Newsletter of
the Proportional Representation Society
of March 1999 QN1999A www.prsa.org.au The
Campaign to Discriminate Against
Independent and Minor Party Voters In late1998, NSW Liberal Senator Helen Coonan, the Government Deputy Whip in the Senate, gained publicity for questioning the way the Senate was operating, initiating debate over the role it should play, and canvassing possible options for changing the way it is elected. Her widely-reported speech to The Sydney Institute on 3rd February was said to strongly reflect the Prime Minister's views. Senator Coonan asserted that in recent years minor parties in the Senate have re-interpreted a balance of power role as giving licence to re-arrange the policies presented by any government with a substantial House of Representatives majority, and to engage in the ‘culture of confrontation’ rather than ‘keeping the bastards honest’. She suggested, ‘to enhance the strength and stability of government’, that there should be a threshold of first preference votes for parties and independents, below which candidates would be excluded at the outset of Senate scrutinies and their votes transferred to those who had jumped that hurdle. She did not specify a preferred level for the threshold, but her paper, The Senate: Safeguard or Handbrake on Democracy?, listed consequences at recent elections of using one of four examples: a threshold of 5 or 10% of first preferences, or 50 or 80% of a quota, respectively. In her haste to threaten to reduce the number of independent and minor party senators, she did not analyse the predictable consequences of such a scheme. She said ‘obviously expert advice would be necessary to conduct a thorough analysis of the impact of a threshold system, but conceptually it offers the possibility of a solution to the rule of minorities that has so characterized the Senate in recent years’. The rudiments of an informed answer are to be found in her paper, but she did not consider whether such a distortion of voters' wishes was at all likely to produce a government majority in some State as she intended. Her paper notes that with six vacancies at a time, a party will normally require over 57% of the vote after preferences to secure four places. Senator Coonan appears not to have contemplated long over whether knocking out various candidates at the outset makes this more likely at times than the other major party getting to 43% of the vote and taking three places. A moment's careful thought about historical voting patterns shows that, to adopt her terminology, ‘for practical purposes effective power’ would almost certainly be ‘concentrated in the hands’ of even fewer people, or alternatively government and opposition numbers might be equal, with neither grouping being able to pass contentious motions in the Senate, as votes are lost unless a majority of senators support them. The intense promotion of such an obviously self-defeating scheme therefore raises questions about whether the impact most desired from it might be to influence voting behaviour in the Senate in the short term. The PRSA’s
submission to the Joint Standing Committee
on Electoral Matters after the 1996
federal election indicated that thresholds
were incompatible with the principles
behind quota-preferential systems, and
pointed out that, had there been a
threshold at 80% of a quota, ‘Labor would
have had an additional third senator
elected’ in the 4 States where a
successful Australian Democrat or
Tasmanian Greens team began with fewer
than the ‘required’ first preferences. It
also noted that in As the 1996 results showed, Australian experience is that a 3-3 outcome will almost certainly occur in any State when an up-front distortion of voters' wishes arbitrarily excludes all independents and minor parties. In those circumstances, the odds of one or two senators (who achieve a quota in their own right or come very close) sitting between two blocs that will often simply oppose each other for tactical advantage, or alternatively of a Senate evenly-divided, and thus at a standstill, increase dramatically. At the 1998
general elections, there were three
instances - Labor (in NSW and Furthermore,
the Australian Democrats were within 3,000
votes of a 10% threshold in Despite her conclusions being utterly flawed and more likely to produce situations of which she complains, and her avoidance of discussing the events of 1973-75 or previous occasions on which the two Houses were extensively in conflict, it is important to note that Senator Coonan recognized that there were other ways of seeking to achieve her stated goals, but discarded them as unachievable or undesirable. For instance, she observed that ‘part of the problem lies in the intense political brinkmanship that characterizes modern political parties. It provides a Senate Opposition, implacably opposed to a Government's agenda, that effectively hands the casting vote on national legislation of immense importance to the minor parties and independents.’ She touched on knee-jerk Opposition behaviour elsewhere, but the theme was not developed. She said that the 1959 Joint Committee on Constitutional Review, in reporting ways of resolving deadlocks between the Houses, had urged removal of the nexus between their sizes, and proposed different procedures for money Bills from those for other Bills. In her eyes, earlier failure to achieve constitutional change made the prospect ‘remote’ of ‘any far-reaching constitutional reform to the Senate's powers’, but even if it could be done, ‘it would not address the fundamental problem of disproportionate power concentrated in the hands of a few’. The paper notes that reverting to the pre-1983 size of the Senate would lift the quota (and more significantly, make 50% plus one vote, rather than 57% of the votes, the target for winning a majority of places in any State). However, Senator Coonan indicated the political reality is that ‘politicians are not going to willingly vote themselves out of existence any time soon’ and that with the combined Senate vote for Labor and the Coalition being around 75% in 1998, ‘it is by no means certain that a government would obtain a majority in this event’. The possibility of increasing the size of the Parliament to achieve an odd number of vacancies ordinarily in each State, requiring another series of major House of Representatives redistributions, was dismissed as ‘hardly a palatable proposition for voters in the current climate’. She then
rejected the proposals by former Liberal
Party Federal Director Andrew Robb for
regional single-member electorates (as in
This series of assessments led Senator Coonan to the observation that many European systems of proportional representation have threshold requirements for election. She seemed completely unaware that those systems are non-preferential and pay no heed to the extent of overall vote wastage with their particular variation of allocation formulae based conceptually on average numbers of votes, usually moulded by anomalies experienced in practice.
In her view, ‘no voter would be disenfranchised by the imposition of a formal threshold’ as ballot-papers for candidates with insufficient votes would immediately be re-examined and re-allocated to the first available preference for candidates deemed to have climbed above the threshold. Most impartial observers would see a heavy onus falling on any proponent of setting aside voters' expressed wishes to justify such patronizing behaviour smacking of the most authoritarian aspects of ‘guided democracy’. The PRSA's
1996 submission pointed out the appalling
experiences with thresholds in Deliberately distorting voters' wishes by electoral artifice simply cannot produce fairer electoral outcomes. At the time when Senator Coonan's proposals were aired, PRSA President Bogey Musidlak wrote to metropolitan newspapers and magazines indicating that, apart from the proposals’ lack of moral legitimacy, they had no prospect of achieving the State Senate majorities being sought. Instead, real Senate electoral reform could only come by ordinarily having odd numbers of vacancies, by introducing Robson Rotation to spread the vote for larger parties and to avoid premature exclusion of some of their candidates, and by parties focusing on articulating better policies and endorsing candidates with whom voters could identify. The Senate Opposition Leader, Senator Faulkner, said that the Liberals came to the debate ‘with blood on their hands’ after their obstructive behaviour during the Hawke and Keating Governments, and the way in which they brought down the Whitlam Government. Senator Coonan's proposals would ‘pollute’ proportional representational voting, and re-inforce that unrepresentative aspect of the Senate produced by its having equal numbers of senators from each State. While the Labor Party would not be supporting any such scheme, it was however prepared to enter any serious debate about the powers of the Senate. Australian Democrats spokesman on electoral matters, Senator Andrew Bartlett, attacked the proposal as an attempt to ‘chloroform Parliament’. He said, ‘at the centre of Senator Coonan's call for a threshold vote in the Senate is the abhorrent notion that citizens can be discriminated against because of their political beliefs’. He viewed as ‘offensive’ the idea that ‘over two million people who did not vote Liberal or Labor in October should have lesser rights to representation than other Australians’. Prior to the 1998 general elections, the PRSA’s Victorian, NSW and SA Branches canvassed issues related to the Senate voting system with Senate and certain Lower House candidates. No respondents indicated any planned changes. Liberals Barry Wakelin (Grey) and Neil Andrew (now Speaker) each indicated that they knew of no plans to change the system, and the Labor Party also indicated it did not foresee change. It is important to demonstrate that ‘threshold’ ideas are completely without merit, and have already been proven so in Australian experience, each time such ideas are floated. The
1999 NSW Upper House Poll The March
polls for the vacant half of the seats
in the New South Wales Legislative
Council again resulted in neither
Government nor Opposition parties
gaining an absolute majority of those
21 seats. A record 264 candidates
stood. As the whole State is a single
electoral district, the quota for
election is just under 4.55% (161,717
votes). The record number of parties
or groups, 80, resulted in a large
ballot-paper, dubbed ‘a tablecloth’, being the
largest ever used in The Liberal-National
Coalition’s share of the
state-wide vote (27.39%) was only
77.5% of the combined 35.35% vote of
all those voters (more than one in
every three) that had voted for
neither the Government nor the
Coalition. The parties that are
‘serious’ contenders for government
gained together 64.65% of the vote,
and two-thirds of the seats. The table
below shows that more than one third
of the voters that spurned those
‘serious’ contenders gave one third of
the seats to candidates of other
parties.
These 69
parties and 6 independents each had
1.3% of the vote or less. Only 3 candidates gained a quota of first preferences. ALP and Coalition candidates alternated for the next 10 seats then 2 ALP candidates were elected. The order for the last 6 was: Malcolm Jones (Outdoor Recreation Party), Arthur Chesterfield-Evans (Australian Democrats), Lee Rhiannon (Greens), Peter Wong (Unity), Peter Breen (Reform the Legal System), and Fred Nile (Christian Democrats). The number
of cross-bench MLCs went from 9 to 13.
There are now as many cross-bench MLCs
in the full Legislative Council as there
are Coalition Opposition MLCs.
The ALP Government has only 16
of the 42 MLCs By contrast, in the
larger Upper House in Despite that contrast, commentators expect the Carr Government’s legislation to be carefully reviewed, but not greatly blocked or distorted. The cross-bench MLCs in the new House will probably be less likely to oppose ALP legislation than they were in the previous House, which scrutinized it thoroughly but rarely rejected it. The Government will only need the votes of 6 of the 13, an increase of only one over the 5 of 9 that it needed before March, and it has four more to choose from. Alan Corbett's surprise election in 1995 to represent ‘A Better Future For Our Children’ appears to have spawned a plethora of parties registering catchy names at the last moment and agreeing to put similar parties ahead of larger longer-established ones on their registered voting tickets. Glenn Druery of Republic 2001/People First Party cheerfully admitted to bringing together over 40 such groups for agreements about preferences. Commentators that said his election was almost certain were proved wrong. The effect of the lodged tickets, once the ALP and Coalition had run out of surpluses, was to elect Malcolm Jones. His Outdoor Recreation Party gained only 7264 first preference votes. David Oldfield of the One Nation Party, whose surplus of 63,275 first preference votes was transferred to other candidates and eventually helped elect Peter Breen, was not the only critic of the election of Malcolm Jones. Mr Oldfield said he would ‘definitely’ vote for change to the system of voting for the Upper House to ensure that parties or candidates that do not win, say, 3% of the first preference vote are immediately excluded from the count – i.e. he favours a threshold. Mr Oldfield did not deal with the fact that the 95.5% of a quota that helped Malcolm Jones to be elected was made up of transferred votes preferring Malcolm Jones to any of the remaining One Nation Party candidates. It would have suited Mr Oldfield if those voters’ preference for Malcolm Jones over any remaining One Nation candidates could be overridden or set aside, but it is by no means clear that it would have suited any of those 154,453 voters, otherwise they would have marked their ballots differently. Yet, put bluntly, that is what a ‘threshold’ means - arbitrary deprivation of voters’ choice and voting power, on a large scale! Other critics of the election of anybody from a party whose total of first preference votes was so small also tended to support a more widespread view that the very large number of parties almost certainly meant that most of them were little more than titles, and that very few voters would have had much idea of what lay behind the titles. There are now strong views, within the larger parties that had candidates elected, that changes are needed to deal with these perceptions. As Andrew
Gunter, a Vice-President of the PRSA’s
NSW Branch, was reported as saying in
the Sydney Morning Herald before
polling day, the simplest and most
desirable reform would be the
discontinuance of the system of Group
Voting Tickets and the associated
above-the-line voting. Dean
Jaensch, Professor of Politics at It appears, not surprisingly, that the masterminds of many small parties have negotiated deals for registering their preference orders, with the aim of accumulating a quota for one of them. Which of such tiny co-operating parties might be elected is difficult to predict, and is probably very much a matter of fortune. Without Group Voting Tickets, such deals would be of little value, as it is fairly unlikely that many voters would include unknown entities among their marked preferences when the very reasonable formality provisions entrenched in the NSW Constitution Act 1902 require that only 15 consecutive preferences need to be marked for a ballot-paper to be formal. Using the Robson Rotation, as applies in Tasmanian and ACT polls, would also remove distortions due to ‘donkey voting’, and voters mindlessly following how-to-vote cards. Unfortunately the main reform sections of the Coalition and One Nation are mentioning is imposing thresholds, as discussed in our article on Senator Coonan’s campaign, which would be blatantly discriminatory against the voting order marked by many voters for small parties. Current MLCs Breen, Corbett, Wong, M. Jones and Rhiannon would not have been elected with such a provision in force. Another possible reform, suggested by psephologist Malcolm Mackerras, is to reduce what he terms ‘district magnitude’ - the number of vacancies per electoral district. That is not inherently unfair provided that the number is not made unnecessarily or artificially low. As there are currently 21 vacancies at each poll now, the simplest such change would be to divide NSW into three 7-member Upper House provinces, but there is no need to do that until the more pressing and sounder reform of discontinuing Group Voting Tickets has occurred. It may well be found that that reform is enough, and that there is no justification for reducing voters’ choice by reducing the ‘district magnitude’, although the introduction of some geographic relationship with particular voters, and the discouragement of groups with excessively narrowly-focussed ideology might give the 7-member model some broad appeal. Former Democrat and now Green Independent Hon. Richard Jones MLC has offered to chair a committee to review the electoral legislation for the Upper House. Fortunately the key electoral provisions are contained in Schedule 6 of the Constitution Act 1902, and that Schedule cannot be changed without a referendum. Unfair
House of Representatives outcomes, so
Australian Democrats float a Top-up
Scheme The
Australian Democrats have long had a
policy that elections to the House of
Representatives and legislatures in
the states and territories should be
counted by the quota-preferential form
of proportional representation. The Hare-Clark system of
proportional representation used by That policy
has been democratically adopted within
the party by postal ballot of its
national membership. There are
mentions in the Senate Hansard over a
number of years, by various AD
senators, of the party’s policy in
favour of that specific form of
proportional representation. Some of
those statements are shown in full on
the PRSA’s Web site. Such memorable
former Democrat senators as Michael
Macklin, David Vigor, John Siddons,
John Coulter, Janet Powell and Cheryl
Kernot, three of whom are former
leaders of the party, have made
publicly reported statements
championing the official Australian
Democrats policy. In her speech
to the National Conference on 23rd
January, Australian Democrats Leader
Senator Meg Lees pointed out that in
1998, just as in four of the previous
19 elections, the "wrong" party - the
one receiving a minority of the vote
after distribution of preferences -
was declared the winner in the House
of Representatives. She added that in
each instance the winner was the
incumbent government and asked 'How
much longer should we have to tolerate
an electoral system that allows an
incumbent government effectively to
deny power to a more popular
opposition?' She said 'It
is time to make both houses of the
parliament truly representative of the
people's wishes. Optimally, I would
like to see the House of
Representatives selected on a
proportional basis, the voting system
of choice, in one form or another, of
most western democracies. This system
ensures that the parliament truly
reflects the views of the electorate
at large. But, I am realistic enough
to know that the major parties would
never accept this.’ Senator Lees
declared that the mixed electoral
system recommended by the Jenkins
Commission in the Such
proposals do nothing about the
problems of safe seats and the
concentration by parties aspiring to
government on a handful of marginal
seats at each election. They also do
nothing to improve voters' effective
participation in determining the
composition of the Parliament. Such
top-up systems would also run the risk
of a constitutional challenge under
Section 24 of the Constitution, as all
MHRs must be ‘chosen directly by the
people’. Fortunately
the proposals by Senator Lees do not
seem to have been taken up by anybody.
©
Copyright 1999 Proportional
Representation Society of National President: Bogey Musidlak 14 Strzelecki Cr. NARRABUNDAH 2604 National Secretary: Deane Crabb 11 Yapinga St. PLYMPTON 5038 Telephone: (08) 8297 6441, (02) 6295 8137 info@prsa.org.au Printed by Prestige Copying & Printing, 97 Pirie Street ADELAIDE SA 5000 |