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QUOTA  NOTES
Newsletter of the
Proportional Representation
Society of Australia
QN63
September 1991
www.prsa.org.au
Polls in Singapore's
City State Show How Badly a
Single-member
Electorate System Would Work in the
ACT
Parliamentary
elections in the City State of
Singapore
show how the fundamental inability
of single-member electoral systems
to give fair or reasonable
representation is highlighted in
compact voting populations that have
a fairly uniform geographic
distribution of voter attitudes.
The
People's Action Party has had a large
majority of Singapore MPs since 1959.
In 1980 the PAP gained 78% of the
vote, and won all seats. By 1988 the
party's share of the vote had fallen
to 63%, yet its MPs gained 80 of the
81 seats, even though there were
opposition candidates contesting each
of 70 electorates.
In
mid-August 1991 a snap poll, two years
earlier than required, was called for
31st August. When nominations closed
on 21st August opposition parties had
nominated for only 40 seats - less
than an absolute majority of the
seats. This was said to be so the 1.7
million voters could elect an
effective opposition without any fear
of the PAP losing its majority of
seats.
This
time the PAP vote fell to 61%, which
won it 77 seats. The remaining 4 seats
were won by two opposition parties,
which intend to form a coalition. Such
a skewed result, with the system
prompting parties to drastically
curtail the choice offered to voters,
would not have occurred with
multi-member districts and
quota-preferential PR.
At
the ACT Advisory Poll in February
1992 voters will choose a system,
either like Singapore's or like
Tasmania's, as the replacement for
the discredited Consolidated d'Hondt
procedure.
ACT Appeal
Reminder
We remind everybody that donations
to the PRSA's National Appeal for
Campaign Funds for the February
1992 ACT Advisory Poll (letting
all ACT voters choose between
Hare-Clark and single-member
electorates for the ACT) are still
needed.
The PRSA Treasurer, 3
Bohun Place
MOANA SA 5169, has so far gratefully
received 35 donations. At least $50
was received from each of:
PRSA Victorian Branch,
PRSA NSW Branch, Tax Reform
Australia, D.R. Davies, C. Aitken,
Lew Ellis, N.G. Ellis, G. Goode,
J.H. Mitchell, F.M. Pillinger, A.
Richter, R. Stapleton and H.
Southcott.
Nominations
for Election of National
Office-bearers for 1992-3
Under the PRSA Constitution, it is
the turn this year for the
Returning Officer for the above
PRSA elections to be the Secretary
of the Western Australian Branch,
Mr Norm Cox. Nominations, for
President, Vice-President,
Secretary and Treasurer, which
need to be signed by the candidate
only, as consent to nomination,
should be received by Mr Cox at PO
Box 512 CLAREMONT
WA
6010 by 31st October 1991.
Any candidate may
submit a statement of up to one
hundred words to the Returning
Officer, who shall submit it to voters
with the ballot-papers.
The two-year term of each
office begins on 1st January 1992.
If any poll is required,
ballot-papers will be posted on 7th
November 1991 and the poll will
close on 14th December 1991. Results
will appear in December's Quota
Notes.
National
Seminar of Independents and Balance
of Power
MPs
Australia's first
National Seminar of Independents
and Balance of Power MPs was held
in Adelaide
on 7th August 1991. It was
convened by the SA Democrat, Hon.
Ian Gilfillan MLC.
Discussed were common
concerns such as how such MPs are
working together in their own
parliaments to introduce legislation,
to participate in select committees,
to draft motions, and generally to
work towards realizing the principle
of parliamentary supremacy.
The only invited
speaker was Deane Crabb, Secretary of
the SA Branch of the Proportional
Representation Society of Australia.
He led the discussion on a fair
electoral system for all, and
spoke about the need to cater for both
elector and party representation and
how that can be achieved by using
Tasmania's Hare-Clark
system of proportional representation.
Although such a system does improve
the chances of independents and minor
parties being elected, that is not an
unfair advantage, but instead remedies
the glaring defects of winner-take-all
procedures so that all voters and
candidates are treated as equally as
possible.
As a group, those MPs
at the seminar (from NSW, WA, SA and Tasmania)
expressed support for proportional
representation in principle. Under PR
their main concern was not about
getting elected, but how to service a
large electorate. This is a particular
problem for outstanding, relatively
irreplaceable MPs, which many
independent and smaller party MPs
often have to be to rival the larger
parties. An example is the Green
Independent Dr Bob Brown who, as an
MHA for Denison, was elected in 1989
with just over 1.7 quotas of first
preference votes, compared with the
next most popular individual, the then
Deputy Liberal Leader, the Hon. Ray
Groom, who gained just over 1.4
quotas. Deane was asked to pursue this
issue, and would welcome suggestions
from PRSA members, who should write to
him at 11 Yapinga Street
PLYMPTON SA 5038.
The next National Seminar
of these MPs is to be in Tasmania.
Colin
Ball Retires
Tasmania's
Chief Electoral Officer, Mr
Colin Ball, has just retired. An
interview with him formed a
major feature article in The
Mercury of 6th September
1991.
The
article described Mr Ball as a
strong booster of Tasmania's
Hare-Clark
electoral system, who said it is one
of the fairest and most accurate for
expressing the community's will
through the ballot box.
He
believes a vital solution to Australia's
widespread ignorance and apathy on
electoral matters is to make
Australian politics a compulsory
subject in Years 10 to 12 of
secondary school. The article quoted
him as saying,
"You
may say a lot of things about
the American education system,
but they do know their politics,
because they are taught it in
school all the time. It is not
some optional system they can
duck. They have a more
sophisticated understanding of
the political process, even
though they have an unfair, and
far less sophisticated political
system. In Australia
we have one of the most
sophisticated and fair political
processes, yet most people have
a very unsophisticated
understanding of it, and most of
them couldn't care less."
Most
PRSA members would probably agree.
Mr
Ball's experience was tapped
internationally when his advice was
sought for New Zealand's
Royal Commission on the Electoral
System, and when he visited Namibia
to assist with the UN-supervised
elections there. Those elections
used proportional representation,
but unfortunately it was a party
list rather than a
quota-preferential system.
Colin
Ball has always been very helpful
when the PRSA has approached him for
his advice on technical aspects of
the Hare-Clark
system. When the PRSA National
President, who had been appointed to
the Synod Voting System
Sub-committee of the Anglican
Diocese of Melbourne, was recently
advocating the inclusion, in the Synod
Elections Bill being
examined, of the Tasmanian
Assembly method of
filling casual vacancies in the
House of Assembly, Colin responded
to a request for advice by very
persuasively describing the
rationale and merits of that
extremely sound and sensible method
of direct
election.
The
PRSA wishes Mr Ball well in his
retirement from official duties.
Perhaps he may emerge as a
campaigner for the merits of the
Hare-Clark system. He could do
that well, and would certainly be
listened to.
Local
Government
The biennial local government
elections were held throughout South
Australia
in May this year. Since 1985,
there has been a choice between
two electoral systems, both of
which are applied in
multi-member electoral
districts.
One
system is quota-preferential PR, and
more councils are adopting it. Some
50% of councils use PR now, whereas
only 25% used it in 1985. As most
councils have a fairly small number
of seats, they quite wisely often
abolish wards as well.
The
other system available is officially
called the optional
preferential method,
although that is really only a
description of the fact that only
the first preference is required to
be marked. This idiosyncratic system
appears to be peculiar to SA, and is
aptly described there as the bottoms-up
method.
In
counting the votes, the candidate
with the fewest first preference
votes is excluded, and those votes
are transferred to the continuing
candidates until the number of
candidates remaining in the count
equals the number of vacancies. The
procedure appears to be peculiar to
South Australia.
It is advocated by SA's Electoral
Office, and is used to elect SA's
Superannuation Board.
In the
UK the term single transferable
vote is taken to mean quota-preferential
PR, but
Australia's electoral tinkerers have
blurred that description by using,
in multi-member electorates (the
Senate 1919-48, and now the City of
Melbourne and some other Victorian
municipalities) an STV with election
by absolute majority only, and in
SA's bottoms up, using an
STV with election by relative
majority after distribution of
preferences. The latter is little
more than a poor palliative for first-past-the-post
multi-member systems,
which are disastrous.
Two
cheerful municipal notes were
sounded recently. Melbourne City
Council's Chief Executive Officer,
Ms Elizabeth Proust, proposed that
Parliament should allow the
municipality to be a single
electorate where all councillors are
elected as a group by
quota-preferential PR. Also the
Vice-President of the PRSA's
Queensland Branch, Alderman
John Campbell, was elected
Deputy Lord Mayor of Brisbane.
The
NSW Branch's NRMA Campaign May
Yet Bear Fruit
In 1988 members of the
PRSA's NSW Branch formally but
unsuccessfully moved at the Annual
General Meeting of the New South
Wales National Roads and Motorists
Association, having given due
notice, that PR should replace the
longstanding common law block
voting electoral system used to
fill periodic multiple vacancies
on the NRMA Council (See Quota
Notes Nos 52
& 53).
Since
then certain independent
councillors such as the media
personality, Jane Singleton, have
fortunately been elected and have
queried the electoral
system.
That and other concerns have
caused the NRMA to have
established a committee to review
such matters. Sir Laurence
Street,
the former Chief Justice of NSW,
has agreed to serve as Chairman of
the committee. The NRMA has
written to the PRSA's NSW Branch
inviting it to make a submission.
Query
by WA Readers
Quota Notes
has received queries from readers
in Western
Australia about the
statement in the last issue that
the Tasmanian Upper House is the
only one in Australia
that can reject supply without
any MLCs facing election
thereby. They argue that
all the WA MLCs now have a fixed
concurrent four year term, and
that the WA Constitution Act
allows the Legislative Council to
reject supply whenever it may be
submitted to it during the MLCs'
term. The justifications given are
correct - the Council is not
dissolved, but its members' terms
run from the 21st May on which
their terms began to the 21st May
four years later.
Nevertheless,
the situation differs from that in
Tasmania subtly but significantly
because, if a WA Lower House
election is held in the last
twelve months of the MLCs' term,
the Governor may cause an election
for all the Upper House seats to
be held on the same day, although
that election is not to fill the
seats of the current MLCs, but
instead the seats of those whose
terms will begin on the next 21st
May. By contrast, in Tasmania,
there are never more than 4 of the
19 Upper House seats subject to an
election in any year. Of the 19
seats, at least 9 always have
three years to run before their
term ends.
A
better wording in the article in Quota
Notes No. 62
on the Tasmanian Upper House would
have been
"...
despite the (Tasmanian) Upper
House being the only one in Australia
that can reject supply without any
election of Upper House members
possibly being occasioned
thereby."
Seventh
Senator Not "Directly Chosen
by the People"
The resignation of Senator
Paul McLean (AD, NSW) has led to
his replacement, under Section
15 of the Constitution,
by Senator Karin Sowada (AD, NSW),
a 29 year old archaeologist. She
was sworn in on 3rd September
1991. The party that Senator
McLean belonged to when elected
(the Australian Democrats), and
not the electors of NSW that
elected him, determined his
successor. Those electors are not
even officially advised, even by a
statutory newspaper advertisement
- no wonder the public is
apathetic. Under the Hare-Clark
PR system Senator McLean's
electors alone would have
determined his replacement
directly, at the previous poll.
The
76-member Senate now has 7
senators, over 9% of its members,
unelected by their nominal
constituencies. Victoria
and Tasmania
are the only States whose current
senators were all directly
elected.
Many
readers may be aware of the
requirements of the Commonwealth
Constitution that, at both general
and periodic elections, senators
and MHRs are to be directly
chosen by the people (Sections
7
and 24
respectively). These requirements
ought to, but do not yet, extend
to the filling of Senate casual
vacancies.
Although
the Constitution may appear to
have a clear meaning, it is the
power the High Court has been
given to interpret it (Section
76)
that ultimately matters. It is
therefore pleasing that the Court
has given its view on this matter
and that it has held that ...
the Constitution requires
electors at a Senate election to
vote for individual candidates
...
The
extract from the Australian Law
Reports shown on Page
4 explains the
Court's findings.
© 1991 Proportional
Representation Society of Australia
National
President: Geoffrey Goode 18 Anita
Street BEAUMARIS VIC 3193
National
Secretary: John Alexander 5 Bray
Street MOSMAN NSW 2088
Tel:
(03) 9589 1802, (02) 960 2193 info@prsa.org.au
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by Pink Panther Instant Printing
12 Pirie
Street ADELAIDE SA 5000
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