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PROPORTIONAL
REPRESENTATION SOCIETY OF AUSTRALIA |
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Tel
+613 9589 1802 |
Tel
+61429176725 |
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BEAUMARIS
VIC 3193 |
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2014-04-02 |
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Direct Election of
Candidates |
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Voters
in an election have the maximum opportunity to
ensure that their vote is reflected in the
outcome of the election - for a given system
of counting votes - when, along with the use
of proportional representation, all the
representatives to be elected are directly
elected by the voters.
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Electoral
systems that use, in whole or part, a Party List form
of proportional representation, such as all
the PR systems in Europe, Africa and Latin
America, and the recently adopted "Mixed
Member Proportional" system in New Zealand,
are not fully direct systems of election,
whereas most countries, such as Australia, UK,
Eire, Canada, USA, and India, with
single-member districts, or multi-member
electoral districts with the Single
Transferable Vote (quota-preferential) have at
least a fully direct system of election. |
| Federal
Elections: Australia
has limited constitutional protection for direct
election. Section 7 of
the Australian Constitution requires that State
senators be "directly chosen by the people of
the State", but Section 122,
which empowers the Federal Parliament to provide
for senators for the territories, has no
requirement for direct election. |
| A significant extra
word appears in both of the following two
sections of the Australian Constitution,
compared to the wording of the United States
Constitution that they were modelled on, whereby
members of both houses of our Federal Parliament
are required not just to be "chosen by the
people" - as in the U.S. - but to be "directly chosen by the
people". The Australian Constitution's Section 7, which refers to choosing senators for the Australian States, was modelled on the U.S. Constitution's corresponding wording at the time, but with a prescient anticipation, by 13 years, of Clause 1 of its 17th Amendment. The Australian Constitution's Section 24, which refers to choosing members of Australia's House of Representatives, was modelled on the corresponding wording of the U.S. Constitution's Article1 Section 2. That extra word, "directly", appeared in Section 9 of the draft Constitution adopted by the 1891 National Australasian Convention, based largely on the draft by the one person that took the trouble to circulate a suggested draft constitution, one of its Tasmanian members, Andrew Inglis Clark, who was also the instigator of Tasmania's celebrated Hare-Clark electoral system, which is a quota-preferential (Single Transferable Vote) form of proportional representation. Its continuation in Section 7 and extension to Section 24 of our present Constitution has fortunately prevented our Federal Parliament from being empowered to adopt a party list form of PR for either of its houses, but it has not prevented the use of Group Voting Tickets, which corrupt the Senate's PR system, nor has it required the use of countback to fill casual vacancies, as that is controlled by a different section of the Constitution, Section 15. Nevertheless, only one State, Western Australia, has a similar constitutional prohibition. Party list systems have been proposed, and have operated briefly, in some of our States and Territories, but such systems are fortunately no longer operating in Australia. |
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Group
Voting Tickets: Australia's
unfortunate introduction in 1983 of Group Voting Tickets
for its Senate elections has greatly increased
the tendency for voters to follow their
party's recommended order of preference for
candidates, as it has made it as easy as
possible to vote "above-the-line",
while still maintaining unjustifiably onerous
requirements for a valid vote for
independently-minded voters voting "below-the-line"
to mark preferences for nearly all of what is
often scores of candidates.
The
single judge, the then Chief Justice, Sir
Harry Gibbs, wrote in his determination, "In
my opinion, it cannot be said that any
disadvantage caused by the sections of the
Act now in question to candidates who are
not members of parties or groups so offends
democratic principles as to render the
sections beyond the power of the Parliament
to enact." He thus determined that
whether any perceived discrimination, or
discrepancy between the effort, and risk of
error and invalidation of a person's vote
involved in those two different procedures was
to be dealt with was a matter for the Federal
Parliament, rather than the High Court. |
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Entrenchment
of Direct Elections: In addition to the limited
entrenchment of direct election in the Australian
Constitution, Western Australia
is the only State with a requirement for
direct election of its members of Parliament
entrenched in its constitution, so that the
requirement cannot be repealed without a
referendum. See this 1978 provision in Section
73 of Western Australia's Constitution Act 1889 [Section 73(2)(c)].
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Party
List Systems All Rejected To Date:
Australia has, fortunately, rejected the four major attempts
at introducing or maintaining a Party List
form of proportional representation, as
opposed to STV, ever to emerge here, which
were:
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Filling
Casual Vacancies by Direct Election: It
should be noted that the only direct way of
proportionally filling casual vacancies after
a PR election is by a re-examination of
the ballots cast at that election. The countback
system used in Tasmania and the Australian
Capital Territory, which preserves the
intention of the majority of voters who
contributed to the quota that elected the
vacating candidate, and minimizes the work
involved in a manual count, is recommended for
this purpose.
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