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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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2014-12-10 |
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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. |
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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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