The main complaint against the zonal system was that it did not produce an accurate match between the votes and the seats won by candidates of the major political parties; this complaint is usually demonstrated by pointing to inaccuracies in the electoral result. [7]
These inaccuracies were not merely an abstract or academic matter. Many argued that the system, by giving the governing party more than its fair share of seats, encouraged an attitude of divisiveness and arrogance, a style of "government by bulldozer." Even when "the government's impregnable majority in Parliament is conjured out of a minority of the votes, the natural arrogance of governments is fortified." [8]
Though the governing party never achieved more than 40 percent of the votes in its own right, it still interpreted its artificial majority of seats as an indication of complete and full-hearted consent by the voters to its laws and policies. Other countries, too, have suffered because of distorted election results. In Britain, for example, "the actions of an unrepresentative legislature may be irreversible... [In the 1930s, m]ost of the Labour and Liberal Opposition and many Conservatives viewed with increasing alarm the "National" government's policy of appeasement towards Hitler and Mussolini, and there was revolt against it by Churchill and a score of other Conservative MPs. The distinguished rebels, however, had no effect; for even if they had all crossed the floor, they could have made only a small dent in the government's majority of over 200 seats. If that majority had been only the 40 or so corresponding to the government's popular support in the 1935 election, the rebels could have forced a reconsideration of foreign policy before it was too late." [9]
We have a corresponding Queensland parallel in the irreversible demolition of the historic Bellevue in 1979, when a revolt against the government by 13 Liberal backbenchers who crossed the floor failed to make a difference on the government's large majority.
However, it was not only the National Party which rode roughshod over the opposition in Parliament; by all accounts, the preceding Labor government had done exactly the same thing in its turn. The blame for engaging in "government by bulldozer" cannot be attributed solely to the National Party, but to the system that gives a government - of whatever colour - bulldozer majorities. [10]
"a party receives only 43% of the votes cast, yet is rewarded with a number of seats sufficient to ensure that its will is imposed on the assembly, despite the fact that its policies are bitterly unpopular, even with many of its own members." [11]
As a recent example, the parties opposing the poll tax (Labour, Liberal, Social Democrat, Scottish Nationalist, and others) represent 55% of the voters; yet they are powerless to prevent the Thatcher Government from pushing the controversial new tax through Parliament (against the wishes of many of its own supporters). As a result, opponents of the tax have resorted to street-fighting in protest.
However, equal electorates alone will not produce accurate results - as many have publicly recognised:
"In his address, entitled "Balancing the Issues of Law and Order in the 1990s", Mr Fitzgerald said that there was obviously more to fair electorates than equal numbers of voters. He said; "it seems to be often assumed that, in a political process where most candidates represent a political party, the government formed by the party or parties with the Parliamentary majority will have the support of the majority of electors."Even if the number of voters in each electorate is identical with the number of voters in every other electorate, the percentage of seats which any party has in Parliament will not - except by coincidence - correspond with its percentage of the total vote." [12]
In New South Wales, in 1981, the Labor Party won 69 of 99 seats (70.4%) with only 55.7% of the primary votes - a distortion of 14.7%. By contrast, the distortion in Queensland's much-criticised 1983 election, when 39% of the primary vote gave the National Party 50% of the seats, was only 11%. [13]
Indeed, some have argued that it is actually fairer to have electorates with fewer voters in areas where political parties win large majorities. [14]
But even more unjust is a law or policy that is inflicted by a minority on a majority. And by this standard, the single-member system produces a good many unjust laws, from both sides of the political fence.
A recent example is the 1987 Federal election, held to resolve the Senate-House deadlock over the Australia Card Bill (at least, this was the constitutional grounds on which Prime Minister Hawke obtained a double dissolution). At this election, great care had been taken to ensure that electoral boundaries were equal and impartially drawn.
The three parties - Liberal, National, Democrat - opposed to the Australia Card Bill won 55% of the votes (and the Labor Party, with 45% of the votes, was itself deeply divided over the matter). Nevertheless, because Labor won an inflated majority - 56% of the seats - in the House of Representatives, [16] it was fully prepared to ram the Australia Card Bill through regardless of the fact that its "mandate" was weak or, more accurately, non-existent.
Nor is this minority rule the sole fault of Labor governments. In 1967, Prime Minister Harold Holt claimed in Honolulu that his government had a mandate from the Australian people to enter the Vietnam War. But at the previous election, the government parties received only a minority of primary votes - 2.3 million as against 2.9 million for the opposition parties. [17]
Any group that is in the minority in an electorate (whether a permanent minority. in a safe seat, or a temporary minority in a marginal seat) will find its votes wasted. On average, in single-member electorates around 45% of voters might as well not have taken the trouble of voting at all.
This objection is not merely abstract or academic. It means in practice that many voters will vote without ever helping to elect a single winning candidate in their whole adult life. It means that, despite all the effort put into winning votes for women, Aborigines, eighteen-year-olds and other formerly-excluded groups, large sections of the community are still effectively disenfranchised. It means that, despite our extensive procedures for compulsory enrolment and voting, and for postal and absentee votes, many people are still prevented from "having their say" on election day.
It also means that in any single-member electorate, up to half of the voters are nominally "represented" by an MP whom they do not want.
On the level of a whole country or state, it means that a party can win a large number of seats in Parliament with a much lower level of support. The extreme example is a party winning a majority of seats with as little as 25% of the votes (50% in each of half the electorates); while on the other hand, a party with 49% of the votes may win no seats at all if a party with 51% of the votes in every electorate achieves a clean sweep.
Now, certainly preferential voting - allowing the voters to indicate which candidates they favour if their vote cannot help elect their first choice - is the fairest system of casting votes.
But in convening those votes into seats, we should try if possible to satisfy each voter's highest preferences. No voter is happy to see his/her second or third choice elected if his/her first choice could have been elected instead.
It is a more democratic and more legitimate electoral result if the MPs who form the governing majority enjoy the positive support, not merely the lukewarm acquiescence, of a majority of voters.
There would be no great outcry if the winning party came close to a majority in its own right (as in the 1983 Federal election, where Labor won 49. 5% of primary votes), or the voters whose first choice cannot be elected are very few in number (as in the last few Queensland elections, where the Democrats and smaller parties have accounted for less then 1% of first-preference votes).
But when (as in the 1983 and 1986 Queensland elections, and the 1990 Federal election) the party with a majority of seats falls well short of a majority of votes, and when sizeable minorities are denied direct representation and can contribute to the result only by yielding up their preferences, the outcome is less legitimate.
Moreover, preferences may be given without any great enthusiasm, to another party which the voter may not agree with on all important issues. As the Leader of the Queensland Liberal Party recently said, in arguing against the claim that the National Party deserved a majority of seats in its own right because it had a majority of the two-party preferred votes: "Today Queensland does not have a two-party-preferred system, and the National and Liberal parties cannot be added together. They are different parties." [19]
It is preferable the government should have a majority of positive support, rather than to fall short by a long way on first preferences with "the scavenged leftovers of the preferential system making up the balance" [20] of its majority.
This minority victory was not accidental, [21] but deliberate. This does not mean malapportionment, for all electorates were virtually equal in voter numbers. Nor does this mean gerrymandering by the governing party, for the boundaries had been drawn five or six years earlier by an independent commission. (In fact, "mini-redistributions" in 1988-89 had actually abolished a government-held seat in Victoria and created a new notionally opposition seat in West Australia, and also allegedly "handed over" two West Australian government members' seats to the opposition). [22]
Instead, the government won by "concentrating their effort and resources on holding marginal seats and assuming that "safe" seats could absorb any swing." [23]
This is an unavoidable but unfortunate result of our single-member system. About twenty percent of electorates are marginal - winnable by either side. [24] The other eighty percent of voters live in "safe seats, where general elections pass them by." [25]
There is little that can be done to improve this situation as long as the system is based on single-member electorates:
"As for giving the 80% or so who live outside marginal electorates a real vote, perhaps the law should be changed to try to create as many marginal electorates as possible (a democracy-mander rather than a gerrymander). The only problem with that is that we could frequently have a lower house in which the government had 90 per cent of the seats, which would make for a very dull and uninformed opposition, and a Parliament which would have no chance of serving its proper democratic function." [26][* This is almost exactly what did happen in South Australia in 1993, due to the 1989 amendment to the State's Constitution Act requiring House of Assembly electorates to be drawn to ensure the party with 50% of the two-party preferred votes wins a majority of seats. - TJR, 10.11.99]
The Senate, before proportional representation was introduced in 1949, was a ludicrous example of this "windscreen-wiper effect", often reducing the opposition Senators to an "unworkably tiny bloc." [27]
Under Hare-Clark, one seat in each multi-member electorate would be marginal among the parties, so that an election "could be decided anywhere and everywhere"; [28] the remaining seats would be safe for the parties. But at the same time, with intra-party choice, there would be no seats safe for individual candidates.
As we have seen, the single-member system is basically flawed. Though some may argue that "any conclusions about the justice or otherwise of the single-member constituency system, must be postponed until every effort has been made to make the system work fairly" [29], the system has already been given every chance to work fairly. Voter numbers are almost exactly equal and boundaries are drawn by independent commissions. Yet the system still produces distorted results.
To produce a more accurate result, we must reduce the margin of error, the number of wasted votes, which can reach 50% in a single-member electorate. We must reform the system to allow like-minded voters to combine their votes over larger areas.
Less ambitious versions of this system aim simply to ensure that the party with a majority of votes does not end up with a minority of seats. [31] This, however, would do nothing to correct the far more frequent problem of "government by bulldozer" - of a government with an over-inflated majority of seats. For that, it is necessary to award additional members to opposition as well as government parties when they win less than their fair number of seats.
We do not support the West German system. Granted, it would ensure proportional representation of political parties, but this benefit is outweighed by its disadvantages.
There is the problem of selecting the additional members. If they are chosen from party lists (national, state, or regional), then they would not be directly accountable to any specific electorate. Instead, they would be elected "without doing the hard work that sinks roots in individual constituencies and results in election". [32] Voters would have no direct control over them.
An alternative, proposed by the British Hansard Society for Parliamentary Government in 1976, [33] is to select the "best losers" from among each party's candidates. This is claimed to give the voters some control over who fills the additional seats.
However, this control is entirely illusory, as the "best losers" will of course be the candidates who are endorsed for electorates where their party is strong. [34]
The selection of best losers could cause the geographical distribution of MPs to fluctuate randomly [35] - a serious disadvantage in Queensland where this issue is so contentious.
Under either version, candidates rejected by the voters could still end up in Parliament; [36] and some electorates would have two, maybe even three, candidates elected. [37] This seems to detract from the whole point of the system - that it preserves the traditional single-member electorate. [38]
If (as in Guyana) independent candidates are not allowed to stand, then large numbers of voters - such as the 52% in North Sydney who recently chose Ted Mack - would be disenfranchised. Yet if (as in Denmark in the 1920s) "dummy" candidates, secretly backed by the major parties, could stand as independents, the results could be deliberately manipulated. [39]
In any case, the "personalised" element of the system is of little weight anyway; the local candidates are "largely unknown to the electorate." [40]
But all party list systems (including those quota-preferential systems used for Australian Upper Houses which have been modified to work like list systems) [42] have one unavoidable defect; they all involve counting votes for a party.
At first sight this may seem unobjectionable, because most voters do vote with party considerations primarily in mind. [43] But even so, the list system can distort their wishes; at the time of voting, voters could not know which individuals they were actually voting for. [44]
If lists were used in Australia, a "wet" Liberal who votes for, say, Ian Macphee [45] on the Liberal Party list might not be pleased to see his vote - by increasing the Liberal Party's total of seats - help elect Wilson Tuckey. (Indeed, he could well prefer to elect a Democrat instead of Wilson Tuckey). [46] A Jewish voter, by supporting the Labor Party list because of Bob Hawke or Barry Cohen, could end up electing Bill Hartley.
These anomalies can cause considerable frustration among voters; but even more importantly, they have a divisive effect on the politicians and a fragmenting effect on the parties. If there is a Socialist Party, its right wing may break away to form a Social Democratic Party, and its left-wing may break away to form a Communist Party, so each can be sure that its supporters' votes will no longer benefit its factional opponents. Often, too, local "notables" who feel their parties have sold them short will form and run their own lists. [47]
This applies particularly when, as in Israel, the voters have no choice of candidates:
"The rigidity of the Israeli list system obliges a party rebel who finds himself in a minority in his party to leave it and, with his followers, found another party... this is not particularly difficult, since the threshold needed for a party or independent candidate to qualify for a seat is only 1% of the national vote. Thus, the system tends to the proliferation of parties." [48]
And even when, as in Finland, voters do have a choice of candidates:
"a vote for one candidate may help to elect another candidate of the same party of whom the voter may disapprove. This is a weakness of all list systems, especially where a party suffers from ideological divisions - since, if one faction wishes to prevent its party opponents from benefiting from votes cast for its own candidates, it may have no alternative but to leave the party and establish a separate list." [49]
Most Western democracies using party-list systems have a large number of parties. This has been alleged to cause serious instability in some cases. (However, we have several Federal ALP Territories Ministers on record praising the d'Hondt proportional representation systems of Western Europe for producing stable government). [50]
Two of the most-criticised examples of unstable government under proportional representation - Weimar Germany in the 1920s, and Israel today - use rigid list systems with very low quotas. In Israel, the threshold is only 1%; in Weimar Germany, the number of seats fluctuated with voting turnout from five to six hundred, so the quota was only 0.167 to 0.2%. It is no surprise then that many minor parties won seats, making it harder to form a majority government. [51]
It is not surprising that past attempts to introduce list systems have encountered strong opposition in Australia. In the words of a former New South Wales Opposition Leader:
"The list system is an insult to intelligent people. Many people in the community wish to vote for individual candidates... and not the rest of their party... But under the [list] system the voter is not allowed to exercise that choice... The Premier is saying to the electors, 'Do you think we will let you use the brains God gave you? No, we will tell you how you will vote. We will dragoon you into voting under the list system'. Although it will reduce the informal vote, it will be at the expense of reducing the electors generally to the level of sheep..." [52]
Nevertheless, Australia has had a few experiments with party lists. The most recent version - the "consolidated d'Hondt" system, "designed along comic-opera lines [and] foisted on the unhappy residents of Canberra" [53] has had the usual effects described above. The Proportional Representation Society, in fact, contacted the Minister for Territories strongly opposing the introduction of this d'Hondt system, predicting that it could create serious instability. This is exactly what happened in practice, because
(a) the use of a party-list system encouraged separate groupings (e. g, the three parties opposing self-government) to run their own teams of candidates: (b) the single Territory-wide electorate meant (even with an arbitrary threshold) a quota of only 5. 6%:(c) the allocation of seats through the d'Hondt highest-average method, not through the distribution of preferences, gave no incentive for different parties to cooperate at the electoral level;
(d) the difficulty of voters changing the party's order of candidates on the list allowed Assembly members to play the game of "revolving-door government" without fear of removal by the voters.
To limit party fragmentation, many countries resort to requiring a party to surmount some higher threshold of votes before it can win any seats. [54] However, this would waste the votes of those who support minor parties or candidates falling short of the threshold, and would thus unfairly discriminate in favour of the major parties: "The Government is saying, 'To hell with the rights of minorities'... [The proposed threshold would] make second-class citizens out of those people who are not willing to vote for a Labor, Liberal or Country Party candidate... If that is not discrimination, I do not know what is." [55]
In any case, party lists, with all their defects, are not necessary to secure proportional representation. The alternative which we recommend - the quota-preferential system - can ensure an accurate result more fairly and flexibly. The quota-preferential system is already used in Australia and in countries that share Australia's Westminster traditions. [56] To introduce a party list system (whether d'Hondt, the West German system, or any other type) in Australia would only lead to what the Australian Electoral Commission recently criticised as "an excessive proliferation of systems." [57]
The quota-preferential method has the fundamental advantage that votes are transferred among candidates, not pooled for parties as in a list system; the voters, then, retain direct control over which candidates their vote will elect.
This means that, under quota-preferential proportional representation, the right-wing of a political party can run on the same ticket as the left, confident that its supporters' votes will not help the left - at least, not while any right-wing candidates are still in the running for those votes to help. (Any right-wing voters who are discriminating enough to object to even this, need not give any preferences to the left). The different wings of a party do not have to run as separate party lists to get their fair shares of the seats.
However, most of the quota-preferential systems used in Australia have been modified to operate like party-list systems in practice. The disciplined use of how-to-vote cards (now reinforced by "party-box" ticket-voting) means that the election of candidates is not freely decided by the voters, but "stage-managed" by the parties.
However, this has not helped the major parties. If anything, it has encouraged the splintering of the party system.
For example, Labor voters who strongly oppose uranium mining would be put off the ALP ticket (be it a how-to-vote card or a party-box) if Senator XYZ, prominent supporter of uranium mining, has a high position on that ticket. These voters are probably unaware that they can still vote for the other Labor candidates but put Senator XYZ last. Even if they did know, they might not wish to spend half an hour numbering forty candidates. So, instead, they choose the Nuclear Disarmament Party's ticket.
This system also gives party machines an unhealthy power of patronage, and makes representatives less accountable to those who vote for them; Senators are safe for life if they retain the good grace of their State party executive, [58] and good relations with the party are more important than service to the electorate. [59] This inevitably detracts from the legislative role of these representatives: "in the party room, a disproportionate number of Parliamentarians approach any given problem under the influence of their place on the Senate ticket rather than the opinion of their electorate." [60]
Quota-preferential systems already exist; the trick is adapting them back to their original purpose of serving the voters as well as the political parties. For this purpose, we strongly recommend the features specified in paragraph 2 of the Summary of Recommendations and elaborated in Appendix I.
5. Issues Paper [to which this submission was a response], p 1. [Back to text]
6. Peter Charlton, "The Joh years" (Courier-Mail, 28 November 1987). [Back to text]
7. For example, see the table "Queensland State elections 1950-1983: Total State-wide primary votes and seats won by each political party" (Courier-Mail, 1 April 1989). [Back to text]
8. Holme, p 139. [Back to text]
9. Lakeman, p 10. [Back to text]
10. Peter Charlton, "The Joh years" (Courier-Mail, 28 November 1987); Scott et al, p 59. [Back to text]
11. Paul Hirst, Law, Socialism, and Democracy (1985), p 115. [Back to text]
12. Quoted in the Courier-Mail, 22 February 1990. [Back to text]
13. Jack Wright, "Queensland voters lose again" (Good Government, December 1983, p 2). [Back to text]
14. Flemming Hoeg, letter to The Bulletin (1 August 1989), p 11. [Back to text]
15. Letter from Birmingham Jail, paragraph 18. [Back to text]
16. Here the fact that the ALP had only its proportionate minority of seats in the Senate was not a sufficient safeguard against minority rule, became after a double dissolution the larger House of Representatives can usually outvote the Senate at a joint sitting. [Back to text]
17. F H Sharley, "Justice in Representation" (Good Government, August/September 1969), p 11. [Back to text]
18. Laurie Oakes, "Access makes the Lucky Country" (The Bulletin, 24 October 1989, p 31). [Back to text]
19. Angus Innes (Liberal, Sherwood), Hansard (Queensland Legislative Assembly, 14 August 1988, pp 4142). [Back to text]
20. Mark Stoneman (National, Burdekin), in Hansard (Queensland Legislative Assembly, 24 August 1988, pp 44-46). [Back to text]
21. Unlike South Africa's 1948 election, where - in a "straight fight" with roughly equal electorates - the opponents of apartheid won 55% of the votes but the supporters of apartheid won 55% of the seats. [Back to text]
22. Peter Logue, "Chaney has chance of Lower House seat" (The Australian, 22 November 1988). [Back to text]
23. Laurie Oakes, "The workers' revolt" (The Bulletin, 29 March 1988), p 23; c/f David Solomon, "Questions on Democracy" (Australian Society, September 1987), p 10. [Back to text]
24. Joan Rydon, "Electoral Reform and Parliament" (Legislative Studies Quarterly, Autumn 1988), p 34. [Back to text]
25. Mary Georghiou, letter to New Statesman and Society (27 October 1989), p 6. [Back to text]
26. David Solomon, "Questions on Democracy" (Australian Society, September 1987, pp 9-10). [Back to text]
27. Colin A Hughes, "Machinery of Government", in Australian Politics: A Fourth Reader (ed Henry Mayer and Helen Nelson; Melbourne, Longman Cheshire, 1977), p 375. [Back to text]
28. Ihlein, p 19. [Back to text]
29. Ray, p 143. [Back to text]
30. Also used in Guyana, Hungary, and Mexico, and (in the 1920s) Denmark. Regularly advocated for Australia [Don Aitkin, "A Blueprint for Electoral Reform" (National Times, 21-27 December 1980); Peter Cole-Adams, "Massacre at the polls a flaw in the system" (The Age, 22 December 1975); Madonna King, "End zone voting, academics urge" (Courier-Mail, 25 April 1990); Joan Rydon, "The Electoral System", in Australian Politics: A Fifth Reader (ed Henry Mayer and Helen Nelson; Melbourne, Longman Cheshire, 1980), p 384; Elaine Thompson, "Elections and Democracy", in Change the Rules: Towards a Democratic Constitution (1977), p 179; and for Canada [Gietzelt (July 1981), p 36; Irvine, pp 71 ff]. [Back to text]
31. Jeremy Gilling, letter to the National Times (21-27 December 1980), p 3. The Liberal Opposition in South Australia is now advocating such a system. [Back to text]
32. Former Canadian Prime Minister Joe Clark, 1980; quoted in Irvine, pp 71, 101. C/f Ormond Wilson, "Some Thoughts on the Report of the Royal Commission on the Electoral System" (Political Science, December 1987), p 156. [Back to text]
33. Bogdanor, p 225. [Back to text]
34. Bogdanor, p 226; Lakeman, p 42; Dawn Oliver, "Reform of the Electoral System" (Public Law, 1983), p 119. [Back to text]
35. Bogdanor, p 227. [Back to text]
36. Bernard Black, "Electoral Reform" (Good Government, October 1982, p 19); Bogdanor, p 220; Buchanan, p 2. 4; Jesse, p 446; Lakeman, p 43. [Back to text]
37. Hain and Hodgson, p 13. The New Zealand Royal Commission on the Electoral System, while recommending the version with party lists, expected that "many list members will attach themselves to a constituency or group of constituencies, particularly where they have been unsuccessful constituency candidates." (New Zealand Royal Commission, p 53, paragraph 2.141). [Back to text]
38. Lakeman, p 165. [Back to text]
39. Carstairs, pp 79-80; Jesse, p 446; New Zealand Royal Commission, pp 45-46, paragraph 2.119. [Back to text]
40. Jesse, pp 441, 445. [Back to text]
41. Bogdanor, p 213. [Back to text]
42. Sharman, p 104. The additional-member system is a list system as well, with a "hidden list" formed after the election, through the same haphazard operations of the single-member system that the additional-member element is meant to correct (Bogdanor, p 221).
43. Ray, p 141. [Back to text]
44. Dr Miko Kirschbaum, "d'Hondt vote still unfair" (Canberra Times, 13 August 1988); Bogdanor, p 231. [Back to text]
44. ??? [Back to text]
45. The use of these real-life politicians' names is not intended to defame or denigrate anyone so mentioned, but merely to illustrate the wide diversity of political views within each political party. [Back to text]
46. Bogdanor, p 226. [Back to text]
47. Andrew Knapp, "Proportional but Bipolar: France's Electoral System in 1986" (West European Politics, January 1987), p 96. Compare the actions of Senator Neville Bonner in the 1983 Federal election. [Back to text]
48. Bogdanor, p 213. [Back to text]
49. Bogdanor, p 213. [Back to text]
50. The d'Hondt PR system "has been used for over forty years in countries like Austria, Belgium, Finland, the Federal Republic of Germany, and the Netherlands, all of which are recognised as stable, democratic states." (Minister of Territories, personal correspondence, 11 October 1988). [Back to text]
51. However, it should be remembered that Czechoslovakia, in its inter-war years of democracy, used a virtually identical list system and yet had no problems of instability. The recent democratic elections in East Germany also used the former Weimar system; this did not prevent the conservative coalition from winning a majority of seats in their own right. [Back to text]
52. Sir Eric Willis, Hansard (New South Wales Legislative Assembly, 2 June 1977, p 6562). [Back to text]
53. McGuinness, "The wrong vote for the wrong reason" (Weekend Australian, 10-11 March 1990). [Back to text]
54. Suggested by Peter Hanks, "Wrestling with the Constitution" (Australian Society, August 1986, pp 19-21); Charles Moore, "Diary" (The Spectator, 12 November 1988); Max Teichmann, "Vale the Democrats?" (Australian Society, August 1986); National Review ,17 July 1987, p 12. [Back to text]
55. Sir Eric Willis, Hansard (New South Wales Legislative Assembly, 2 June 1977, p 6562). [Back to text]
56. Bogdanor, pp 211-212; New Zealand Royal Commission, p 37, paragraph 2.97; Report of the Joint Standing Committee on Electoral Matters (1989), p 103; Dawn Oliver, "Reform of the Electoral System" (Public Law, 1983), p 125; Jeff Richards, "Electoral Change in a Small Community: The Isle of Man Revisited" (Parliamentary Affairs, July 1987), pp 388-408. [Back to text]
57. Report of the Joint Standing Committee on Electoral Matters (1989), p 102. [Back to text]
58. Joan Rydon, "The Electoral System", in Australian Politics: A Fourth Reader (1981), p 384. [Back to text]
59. Jaensch p 59; c/f Colin Howard, "The Constitution as a Legal Document", in Change the Rules! Towards a Democratic Constitution (1977), p 145. [Back to text]
60. Colin Howard, "The Constitution as a Legal Document", in Change the Rules! Towards a Democratic Constitution (1977, p 145). [Back to text]