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QUOTA
QN2020A March 2020 www.prsa.org.au
Victoria's Local
Government Act 2020
Debate
in the Legislative Council, in the Committee
stage of the 2019 Bill for the above Act,
fortunately resulted in the Minister for Local
Government, Hon Adem Somyurek MLC, moving
certain amendments, supported by the
Opposition, that produced some modification of
the original Bill’s draconian provisions. The
Legislative Council passed the amended Bill,
which was later passed by the Legislative
Assembly on 17 March 2020. It was enacted on receiving Royal assent on
24 March 2020. The main
concern the
PRSA(Victoria-Tasmania) put to the Minister
and all MPs about the original
Bill was
its Clause 13, which would have removed
multi-member wards as an option for Victorian
councils. Substantial arguments by most
cross-bench MLCs strongly supported that
concern. The Minister, as did the Opposition,
made clear their preference for the original
proposal but, in the Committee stage, he
successfully moved an unopposed amendment (No.
10 on Page 712 of
Hansard) to
insert in Clause 13 a Sub-clause (4)(c), to
include a uniform multi-member wards option. The Minister also pointedly moved
(Amendment No. 11 on Page 716),
to insert in Clause 13 a new Sub-clause 5A
to prevent multi-member wards unless they
are specified by the Minister. That motion
was carried 31 to 6. The six Noes were Dr
Cumming, Mr Hayes, Mr Limbrick, Ms Patten,
Mr Quilty and Dr Ratnam. The remaining five
cross-bench MLCs voted with the ALP and
Coalition members. The Council’s
Opposition Leader, Hon David Davis, moved a
surprise amendment (Page 717),
for 37 named municipalities - mainly rural -
to continue as under the 1989 Act. The
Government opposed that amendment, which was
lost 17 to 20 (Page 722),
but it would have succeeded if Mr Jeffrey
Bourman of the Shooters, Fishers and Farmers
Party, and Dr Catherine Cumming, Independent,
had voted for it. The 2020 Act will not affect the 2020 general elections, to be held for all of Victoria’s 79 municipal councils, except those recently dismissed by Acts of Parliament, for which elections will again be held, in South Gippsland Shire in 2021, and in Casey City Council and in Whittlesea City Council in 2024.
For
Victoria’s 2024 general elections, it had
seemed that Mr Somyurek would act to convert
all existing multi-councillor wards to
single-councillor wards, but his Amendment No.
10 above does not require that, and it is
possible that he - or his successor as the
Minister - might reconsider making such
changes. One good
feature of the new 2020 Act, which the PRSAV-T
submission advocated - for parity - is
the new requirement that all the wards for any
given council must elect the same number of
councillors. For no good
reason countback,
as long used in Tasmania and the ACT, has
been replaced for filling causal vacancies
by the inferior
recount method used for Western
Australia's Legislative Council. Lower House
election in Eire: 2020 At the general
election for the Lower House (Dail
Eireann) of the Republic of Ireland on
08 February 2020, candidates of the party
that had last won government, Fine Gael,
gained fewer of the 159 seats being
contested than did candidates of either of
the other two biggest parties, Sinn Fein and
Fianna Fail. Each of those three parties
found that their candidates gained a total
first preference vote of below 25%.
* Sinn Fein might have had a
higher percentage of its candidates elected
if it had stood more candidates in certain
districts. Table 1: Percentages of Eire Lower House votes and seats gained by candidates of the parties shown
As can be seen from Table 1 above
- which shows the candidates of the three
largest parties gaining only 67.6% of the
overall vote - that low vote left the
nation-wide total for the remaining smaller
parties and independents at a substantial
32.4%. The turnout was 62.9%, compared with
65.1% in 2017. See full details here. Eire’s Constitution requires
PR-STV in electoral districts with a minimum district
magnitude of three. They presently range
from three to five, so MPs are elected with at
least 16.7% of the vote. The nineteen
Independents elected thus obtained a very much
higher percentage of the vote in their
district than many MPs achieve in party list
systems. In Kerry, two Independents – brothers
that had been MPs for most of the 21st
Century - each won a separate 16.7% quota,
leaving a candidate of each of the three
main parties also each gaining such a quota. At all the elections since the
separation in 1922 from the United Kingdom of
Great Britain and Ireland of what is now the Republic of Ireland, both
houses of the parliament of that new nation
have - in accordance with its
Constitution - been counted using
proportional representation with the single
transferable vote (PR-STV). It is however only its lower
house – like those in the UK, Canada, India,
and Malaysia - that is directly
elected by the people, but those others
differ from it in that they still use plurality counting.
It has never used Robson Rotation, so a
donkey vote effect is evident from the rather
high incidence of MPs’ surnames early in the
alphabet. That used to be a flaw in Tasmania’s
system until it was discontinued in
1973. The choice of candidates within
each party is not as great as in Tasmania or
the ACT, where each party normally stands
extra candidates, as casual vacancies are
normally filled by countback. Until the 2020 election, Prime
Ministers of Eire have been a member of either
the Fianna Fail party or the Fine Gael party,
as they have always been the two largest
parties in the Lower House. At the 2020
election, the Sinn Fein party replaced Fine
Gael as one of the two parties with the most
MPs, the other being Fianna Fail.
Table 2 below
shows that Sinn Fein might have won at least
another six seats - at the expense of
smaller parties and independents - if it had
stood one extra candidate in each of those
seats, as it gained a surplus above 0.5
quotas in each of the six districts shown,
which because of that it could not translate
into seats.
Table 2:
Districts where no. of Sinn Fein quotas was
above the no. of its candidates by above 0.5
quotas Government: The
Prime Minister (Taoiseach), Leo
Varadkar, at the time of the election was
a member of Fine Gael, and he and his
Government continues, under Eire’s Constitution, to remain in that position
until he vacates it, or the Lower House
resolves that another named Lower House member
should replace him, in which case the
President (Uachtaran)
is required to appoint that member as the new
PM. The Government would have changed
quickly if an absolute majority of the Irish
voters had given their first preference votes
to candidates of one particular party, but
they did not, so the status
quo reasonably prevails until the Lower
House decides which one of its members it will
resolve to recommend be appointed as the new
Prime Minister. Because of the unprecedented
outcome of the election, negotiations to
determine who the Parliament might resolve to
become his successor have taken longer than
usual. In the meantime, Dr Varadkar remains
PM, along with his continuing cabinet. It is
his experienced team - which is gaining in
opinion polls - that is working with the civil
service to deal with the COVID-19 virus
pandemic. He has re-registered as a medico to answer the call
for more qualified helpers during the
pandemic. The PM has tendered his
resignation to the President, but that will
not be accepted until the Lower House has
resolved who shall succeed him, so the
President, Michael Higgins, can
then accept the resignation, and promptly
appoint the new PM. The onus is on the Lower House
to decide who it wants to succeed Dr
Varadkar. The 32.4% of voters that supported
candidates of other than the three largest
parties will very properly be represented by
31.4% of the MPs when the Lower House votes
to decide that. The fairness of Eire’s
representative PR-STV electoral system
contrasts with the UK’s recent election,
where the Conservative candidates won only
43.6% of the vote, but gained 56.2% of the
seats, leaving 56.4% of the voters represented
by only 43.8% of the MPs. Dr
Varadkar was Fine Gael’s first parliamentary
leader to be elected by his party by a new process, which he had earlier moved to
have instituted. It was the election by an
electoral college of Fine Gael MPs, MEPs,
senators, municipal councillors and ordinary
party members. Some
parties in the UK and Australia have
recently, with varying success, chosen
parliamentary leaders by variants of such an
electoral college. Dr Varadkar gained 2,772
ordinary party members’ votes versus 7,051
votes for his sole opponent, but those votes
had a weighting of only 25%, and did not
prevail over the other types of vote. Lower House election in Israel:
2020 Unlike Eire - whose 160 MPs are directly elected in 39
multi-member electoral districts with a district magnitude from 3
to 5 using proportional representation
with the single transferable vote (PR-STV) - the 120 members of the
Israeli Lower House are indirectly
elected using a closed list
d’Hondt form Party
List PR with the whole country as a
single electoral district. Israel has an exclusionary threshold
of 3.5%, although it was once down at 1%.
Israel's
high district
magnitude (120) means that each
individual MP, indirectly elected,
represents 0.8% of the voters, gathered
nation-wide, with the vote for the party
of some MPs close to that threshold of
3.5% of the national vote, even if that
3.5% is spread across the entire nation.
In Eire however, each MP must gain 16.7%
of the vote within one of Eire's 39
multi-member electoral districts, and is directly elected.
Both Eire and Israel have had, in 2020, elections where on single party gained an absolute majority of seats or votes, leading in each case to delays in forming a government. As in most parliamentary republics, the outgoing Prime Minister, with his cabinet, remains in office until a replacement is appointed, so government continues. Israel’s voters are restricted
to marking a vote for a single closed party
list rather than the ability Eire’s voters
have to mark a first preference, and mark as
many or as few later preferences that they
choose, among all the individual candidates
standing in their electoral district.
Israel’s use of the whole nation as the only
electorate makes such a power impracticable
for voters, and leaves individual MPs
responsible just to their party rather than
to their voters.
Table 3:
Percentages of Israeli Lower House votes and
seats gained by candidates of the parties
shown With Eire’s 39 small electoral
districts, successful candidates are very
likely to live in the district. They are, and
need to be, much more accessible to electors
than their Israeli counterparts. The
preference order of Eire’s voters among the
candidates is also given effect to under
PR-STV rules, whereas Israel’s closed party
list system of proportional representation
does not give its voters any of that power. Government: Israel’s
district magnitude of 120 is one of the
highest in the world. Coupled with its closed
party list system, that aspect produces a very
fragmented spectrum with many parties
representing many small but distinctly
different religious and non-religious shades
of opinion. As its electoral system provides
no power for voters to indicate later
preferences for possible transfer if
necessary, there is less incentive for parties
to work together. Those flaws in Israel’s electoral
system resulted in an inconclusive election on
9 April 2019. That was followed by a snap
election on 17 September 2019,
which again was inconclusive in regard to the
formation of a government, so a third election was held on 2 March 2020. Well
after that most recent election, the President
of Israel had not managed to identify an MP
that he can appoint as the Prime Minister, who
will not be likely to lose a vote of
confidence in the Lower House, the Knesset. The adage, “The
definition of insanity is doing the same
thing over and over again, and expecting
different results”, comes to mind. A Hare-Clark
system like that of Tasmania and the ACT
would be more decisive, and certainly more
direct.
The Palaszczuk Labor Government
had announced, well before the March 2020
general municipal elections, that it intended
to replace the multiple plurality system -
used to elect the councillors in those of
its municipalities that are not divided into
wards - with a proportional representation
system using the single transferable vote (PR-STV). However, in view of considerable
strong opposition, including from the Local Government Association of
Queensland, and
dissent from Queensland’s
Liberal-National Party, it chose to defer
making the change until after those elections,
so that PR-STV would not apply until the 2024
polls. If PR-STV eventuates, it will be its
first use in public polls in Queensland, which
is Australia’s last state to have never used
it.
The outcome of the election on 23
February 2020 in Germany’s State
of Hamburg is in Table 4 below:
Table 4:
Percentages of Hamburg Lower House
votes and seats gained by candidates
of the parties shown
The Free Democratic Party
(FDP) won a seat despite falling below
the ‘exclusionary
threshold’ of 5% that applies in
German elections. That was able to
occur because the Mixed
Member
Proportional system (MMP) as applied
in Hamburg operates under different
rules from a German federal election. The local
constituencies (direct mandates)
are not single-member districts, as
in a German federal election or in
elections for New Zealand’s
Parliament, but are multi-member
districts. The Free Democratic Party
is represented in the Hamburg
parliament because it won a single
member in one of those multi-member
districts (but none in the State
lists because of failing to reach
the ‘threshold’). Wikipedia
describes
Hamburg’s system as follows: “The elections were
conducted under a list
proportional system ... 71 seats were
awarded directly in the 17
multi-mandate constituencies (of
between 3-5 seats each) via open
constituency lists, and the
remaining 50 via at-large open state lists ... based on
percentage of the overall vote with
a 5% electoral
threshold. Each voter had a total
of ten votes: five constituency
votes for the direct candidates in
the constituency, and five at-large
votes for candidates on the state
lists ... The five votes could be
amassed all on one person, party, or
list (accumulation) or could be
distributed/split between different
candidates, parties, or lists as
desired (panachage).” The Wikipedia
site on this election has a map of the ‘results for the
direct mandates’. It would appear that voters still have
five constituency (direct mandate)
votes even where there are only three
persons to be elected. The system,
although more proportional than most
MMP systems, still contains the ‘party
list feature’ with indirect election
of those candidates. Recent Municipal Representation Reviews The PRSA website shows
PRSAV-T’s preliminary and response submissions
to the Victorian Electoral Commission for its
recently ended 2019-20 reviews of electoral
arrangements for Victoria’s Councils. It gives
access to those submissions, and also shows a
final format for the 29 Councils for which the
VEC submitted a recommendation to the Minister
before the process was concluded, owing to
passage of the new consolidated Local
Government Act 2020. The
Branch rated 7 Councils to be better
constituted, 4 to be worse, and 18
unchanged. The Minister might choose other
formats, possibly replacing all multi-member
wards with single-councillor wards, as he
said he favoured before Victoria’s new,
consolidated Local Government Act 2020 was
finally passed.
© 2020
Proportional Representation Society of Australia National President: Dr Jeremy
Lawrence npres@prsa.org.au
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