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Proportional
Representation Society of Australia Inc. |
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+61429176725 |
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DEFINITION:
District magnitude is the number of
representatives that voters in a particular
electoral district are entitled to elect. In
systems that use single-member electoral
districts, such as Australia's House of
Representatives, the district
magnitude is 1. At the other extreme are
party list
systems. PRSA Inc. opposes party list systems,
because they do not allow voters to elect MPs
directly. In
Israel's
120-member Knesset, and in the 150-member
House of Representatives of The
Netherlands - where the whole nation
forms one single lower house electoral
district - the district magnitude is equal to
the number of MPs in the house.
SIZE
OF THE DISTRICT MAGNITUDE: The
larger the district magnitude, the smaller is
the percentage quota required for election,
although the actual number of votes that forms
the quota becomes larger. Also larger is the
expected number of candidates (all other
things being equal), with a
correspondingly larger and more unwieldy
ballot paper, and a larger geographical area
and number of electors to interact with.
New South Wales MLCs are elected from the
whole State of NSW, but unlike Victoria, whose
MLCs do not have a whole State as an electoral
district, their
office addresses are nearly all in their
capital city (that is evident from
their listed landline telephone numbers
nearly all starting with '9230'). Any
proportional representation system is ultimately only
approximate. A law of diminishing
returns points to 9 being a reasonable upper
value for district magnitude, so PR-STV is
most workable when it uses an odd number from 5
to 9, but it could be just outside that range
if a particular case, such as those just
below, justified it.
Large district magnitudes tend to result in
indirect party
list
or quasi-party-list systems being used. Small
district magnitudes above 1 are where direct
election of candidates by proportional
representation using the
single transferable vote (PR-STV)
is more usually found.
AUSTRALIAN
FEDERAL PARLIAMENT: Sections 7,
24,
and 29
of the Australian Constitution prevent either
Senate or House of Representatives electoral
districts being formed out of parts of
different States, so the largest electoral
district in a State for either house cannot
exceed the area of the State. Arrangements for
coping with that particular requirement - as
Section 128
makes a
change most unlikely - have been considered
in a PRSA letter
to a former Australian Democrats officer.
See examples of
how electoral districts could be configured
for the House of Representatives.
STATE
AND TERRITORY LEGISLATURES: These
legislatures lack the above constraints on
how their electoral districts are arranged.
Since they adopted the Hare-Clark system for
electing all their MPs, the Tasmanian
and ACT
Assemblies have never used a multi-member
district magnitude greater than 7 or less
than 5. However, the first State Upper
Houses to use PR-STV, South Australia
and New
South Wales, set the whole State as a
single electoral district, but have MLCs
elected so they serve staggered
terms, resulting in district
magnitudes of 11 and 21 respectively,
With the later adoption of PR-STV in Victoria
all elections of MLCs were general
elections, with much smaller district
magnitudes, of 5 MLCs per Region, resulting
in MLCs tending to blend their political
stance with a greater focus on
identification with their region compared
with SA and NSW. Western
Australia elects all its 37 MLCs from
the whole State as a single electoral
district, so it has the largest district
magnitude, and the lowest percentage quota
in any Australian public election.
MUNICIPAL DISTRICT
MAGNITUDES: These vary across Australia,
with those in both Victoria and Tasmania
being no greater than 12. Single-councillor
wards, except in Queensland for urban
municipalities, and in Victoria earlier in
the 21st Century, were exceptions, but not
as much since Victoria's Labor Government,
in 2020, regrettably reversed
its previous support for
multi-councillor wards in urban areas.
Earlier in the 2st century, only a minority of
municipalities in Victoria had a
district magnitude as low as 1, and for the
majority it was no lower than 3. PRSA Inc.
advocates replacing single-councillor wards
with multi-councillor wards.
HARE-CLARK:
Proportional representation using
the single transferable vote (PR-STV)
is the only form of PR where the
person elected is directly
elected by the voters.
Therefore the voters have
ultimate control over who is
elected, as in the Tasmanian and
Australian Capital Territory
Assemblies, which each use the
superior Hare-Clark
electoral system.
In Australia's upper houses,
however, the
governing political parties
have never instituted the
Hare-Clark system so those
parties' self-serving overlays
of stage management and
regimented voting arrangements
have been imposed. That has
been very effective in
discouraging voters from
choosing the particular
candidates that represent
them, and has instead
persuaded most voters to just
accept the order of preference
that the party organization
recommends.