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QUOTA Newsletter
of the Proportional Representation
Society of September 1999 QN1999C www.prsa.org.au Proportional Representation for the Senate: the 50th Anniversary! In 1948,
legislation enlarged the
Commonwealth Parliament - from 36
to 60 in the case of the Senate -
and introduced quota-preferential
proportional representation for
elections to the Senate. At the
time, the Opposition in the
36-member Senate consisted of only
three senators - the other
33 senators were all from
the Government Party, the ALP. The
Senate was widely regarded as a
national embarrassment. The
first PR elections for the
Senate, on 10th December
1949, accompanied the Menzies-led
Coalition into Government and left
it with 23 of the 42 Senate
vacancies contested on the day.
Control of the Senate remained
with the Labor Party until the 1951
double dissolution election because
of the winner-take-all
advantage it retained
from 1946. To
commemorate fifty years of
proportional representation being
used to elect the Senate, the
Research School of Social Sciences
at the Over 100
people registered for the
Conference, including the National
President, Vice-President, and
Secretary of the PRSA, one or more
Office-bearers from all but one
PRSA Branch, and other PRSA
members. After each session,
people questioned the presenters
or commented on the talk. PR
campaigners’ questions elicited
current policy positions and
canvassed improvements to current
counting methods. Their comments
illuminated points of historical
interest and led to lively
discussion in the forum and during
intervals. In
advance, registrants received
overview papers on why PR was
chosen for the Senate in 1948, by
Dr
John Uhr (ANU), and on the
institutional impact of PR, by
Professor Elaine Thompson (UNSW).
The ALP Senate Leader, Senator
Hon. John Faulkner, a strong
supporter of proportional
representation for many years,
undertook archival research into
motives for the Chifley
Government’s plan of a new system
for the Senate. Professor
Thompson noted that the Senate was
the first Upper House in the world
to be popularly elected, but that
before 1949, the Senate had not
fulfilled the expectations of the
framers of the Constitution. She
wrote, “By 1949 the Senate, while
not quite moribund, was largely
regarded as a weak institution,
irrelevant to the conduct of
politics”, and contrasted this
with the “vital, representative,
democratic second chamber” that
now seeks to ensure laws are
supported by a majority, properly
representative of the country, and
that ministers are accountable to
the people for their conduct. Her
paper highlighted how the Senate
had increased accountability and
community participation. Both Dr
Uhr and Senator Faulkner outlined
how far the majority-preferential
“winner-take-all” system had
fallen into public disrepute,
owing to the frequent lop-sided
poll outcomes, making a travesty
of debate in the ensuing
Parliament, interspersed with
several occasions on which the two
Houses were controlled by opposing
parties and both showed
intransigence until a double
dissolution was sought to break
the deadlock. They also showed how
quota-preferential
counting had long been
promoted by vigorous proponents
before and after Federation, and
how it had gained and maintained
the status of a serious
alternative in the minds of
prominent figures. This
included its championing, before
and after 1901, by Melbourne
University’s Mathematics
Professor, Edward Nanson, then
Secretary of the Proportional
Representation League of
Victoria, and by the South
Australian advocate of effective
voting, Catherine
Helen Spence; its use in
1901 to elect all Tasmanian MHRs
and senators
before a Commonwealth electoral
statute existed; and its presence
in the Barton Government’s first
Electoral Bill, in 1902, after a
committee of experts had commended
it to the Home Affairs Minister,
the Hon. Sir William Lyne. The
Senate amended the 1902
Bill to replace PR with a
multiple plurality system,
despite warnings of the one-sided
outcomes that soon eventuated.
Amid growing public disquiet, the
Royal
Commission Upon the
Commonwealth Electoral Act
recommended PR for the Senate in
1915, as did the Royal
Commission on the Constitution
in 1929. The
Country Party’s emergence after
1918 brought further persistently
strong support. Earle Page was
only nine votes short of passing
committee stage amendments in the
House of Representatives to
introduce PR for the Senate in
1922. Other strong PR supporters
from both Labor and the Coalition
argued that a Senate that was not
representative or performing
useful functions risked a charge
of redundancy. There was
regular dissatisfaction with
electoral outcomes, but Dr Uhr and
Senator Faulkner both noted
occasions on which each party was
reluctant to make a change when it
perceived itself as being
currently advantaged by the
system. Worse results were
produced under
majority-preferential counting
(from 1919) because disciplined
party voting had by then come to
dominate patterns. Making
the Change to PR: Dr Uhr
noted that when the change was
finally made, the Opposition
Leader, Robert Menzies, kept up a
barrage of accusations that the
Chifley Government was making the
change to retain its control of
the Senate in case it lost
Government. He quoted Fred Daly
MHR, a long-time opponent of PR,
insisting that Arthur Calwell
played strongly on the
self-preservation instincts of
other Caucus members in his
promotion of the change. The mean
number of voters per MP had risen
from some 12,000 at Federation to
63,000 in the late 1940s,
producing pressures for an
expansion of the Parliament. For
the much larger Senate mandated by
the nexus in Section
24 of the Constitution (the
House to be as nearly as
practicable double the size of the
Senate) a one-party Senate would
be harder to defend, and more
obviously farcical. Senator
Faulkner did not deny the
likelihood of self-preservation as
a factor in the change, but stated
that in his detailed examination
of Caucus and Cabinet records, the
process of change appeared to have
been driven by the perceived
desirability of enlarging the
Parliament and the consequences
that flowed from that. In
particular, following the 1947
Census, redistributions would have
been required in all mainland
States, and desirable in In May
1947, Caucus recommended an
increase in the size of Parliament
before the next redistribution. On
3rd July, Cabinet deferred
consideration of a proposal to
increase representation until
after a detailed analysis of the
Census results and their
implications had been prepared. On 8th
December 1948, the Prime Minister,
J.B.Chifley, presented a
memorandum on the need for
redistributions. It was silent on
the issue of PR. A Cabinet
sub-committee - Arthur Calwell
(Vic), Senator Nicholas McKenna
(Tas) and Victor Johnson (WA) -
examined redistribution proposals
and how Parliament could best be
enlarged. Cabinet accepted, on
12th January 1948, its
recommendation that “in the event
of Caucus approving an increase in
the size of Parliament, senators
at the next and subsequent
elections be elected on the basis
of proportional representation”. Caucus
gave approval for proportional
representation the following month
and for the resultant Commonwealth
Electoral Act 1948,
passed in April 1948, to be based
on The
Opposition Leader, Robert Menzies,
said that the threat of a double
dissolution would be far less
formidable than in the past should
the Senate consistently oppose
legislation of an elected
government. The Opposition finally
voted for the Bill to enlarge
Parliament and alter the way the
Senate is elected, after
unsuccessfully proposing a
referendum to remove the nexus
provision and thus allow a small
Senate to continue to be elected
by defective methods. Keynote
Speech: On the
first day, well-known American
political scientist, Professor
Arend Lijphart, whose distinction
between ‘consensus’ and
‘majoritarian’ models of democracy
has been taken up all over the
world, gave a major keynote speech
examining the empirical evidence
of whether proportional
representation was associated with
less decisive and less effective
government. He began by noting
that among democracies that had
experienced British rule,
adaptations from the For the
latter dimension, he observed that
majoritarian democracy was
characterized by one-party
majority cabinets, executive
dominance over the legislature,
two-party systems, majoritarian
and disproportional electoral
systems and pluralist interest
group systems with free-for-all
competition among groups, whereas
power was dispersed and limited in
consensus democracy. At the same
time, majoritarian systems tended
to involve unitary and centralized
government, concentration of
legislative power in a unicameral
legislature, flexible
constitutions that can be amended
by simple majorities, legislatures
that have the final word on the
constitutionality of their own
legislation, and central banks
that are dependent on the
executive. He said
that STV elections for the Senate
had strengthened bicameralism and
the federal character of
Australian democracy. As the
number of vacancies was usually
small, the index of
disproportionality (imbalance
between votes and seats for
various parties) was at the higher
end for PR systems, but much lower
than for any majoritarian systems.
He noted a clear trend towards
multipartism. He concluded that adoption
of a proportional representation
system for House of
Representatives elections was
“probably not just a necessary
but also a sufficient condition”
for turning Professor
Lijphart mentioned the
conventional wisdom of
“a trade-off between the
quality and the effectiveness of
democratic government”, and its
quite wide acceptance without
adequate empirical examination.
Political theorists challenged the
assertions that faster decisions
by majoritarian governments were
necessarily better ones, and
observed that “the supposedly
coherent policies produced by
majoritarian governments may be
negated by the alternation of
these governments” and abrupt
changes in economic direction.
Empirical work suggested that
small countries with PR and
corporatist practices compensate
for the disadvantages of their
size in international trade. Professor
Lijphart collected all the
necessary data about all but the
very smallest democracies, and
then conducted regression analyses
of five sets of macro-economic
variables (economic growth,
inflation, unemployment, strike
activity and budget deficits)
against the degree of electoral
proportionality. He initially
found that that proportionality
was associated with less economic
growth and higher budget deficits,
fewer strikes, and less inflation
and unemployment. However, when
the level of economic development
and population size were
controlled for, the picture turned
“uniformly favourable for PR”,
prompting three conclusions: “PR
has a uniformly better
macro-economic performance record
than majoritarian systems,
especially with regard to the
control of inflation and also,
albeit more weakly, with regard to
all of the other economic
performance variables”; the
presence of only a few
statistically significant
correlations “did not permit the
definitive conclusion that PR
systems are better policy-makers
than majoritarian systems”; and
most importantly, “majoritarian
democracies are clearly not
superior to PR systems as
policy-makers” and “the
conventional wisdom is clearly
wrong in claiming that this is the
case”. Professor
Lijphart studied the relationship
between PR and five indicators of
the quality of democracy and
democratic representation; women’s
representation in parliaments and
cabinets, income inequality, voter
turnout, satisfaction with
democracy, and proximity between
governments and citizens on policy
positions. He found PR making
large differences for all
indicators, concluding that “PR
has a much better record than
majoritarian democracy on all of
the measures of democratic
quality”, and that ...
majoritarian systems do not have a
better record of governing. This
means that there is no trade-off
and no difficult choice to make in
electoral engineering: PR systems
clearly outperform non-PR
systems.” At the
Conference, Professor Lijphart
said he had not expected to find
such strong and unequivocal
patterns. He also gave a ‘National
Interest’ interview with Radio
National’s Former
senator, Peter Baume, and Mr Harry
Evans, the Clerk of the Senate,
spoke at a Senate reception and
launch of its Web pages on the
Australasian Federal Conventions
of the 1890s at www.aph.gov.au/senate/pubs/records.htm
Text
of original documents on the
PR Society’s 1940s campaign for PR
for the Senate, and the
parliamentary debate on Dr Evatt’s
Second Reading Speech on the 1948
Bill appear in the ‘Brief History’
item on the PRSA Web site below. QN1999D will
report on other topics at the
Conference raised by participants
such as Professors Campbell Sharman,
Murray Goot, and Ian Marsh; former
senators Hon. Fred Chaney, David
Hamer and Dee Margetts; and Senators
Andrew Bartlett, Helen Cooney and
Kate Lundy. Summing
Up: In summing
up proceedings Professor Geoffrey
Brennan (ANU) said he was struck by
remarks by the PRSA National
Vice-President, Geoffrey Goode, that
Catherine
Helen Spence had witnessed and
been impressed by the conduct of the
world’s first public election using
proportional representation, in
Adelaide in 1840, and that 1999 was
also the 80th anniversary of the
introduction of preferential voting
for the Commonwealth Parliament. He
said that there was room for a major
study of Call for
Nominations for Elections of PRSA
Office-bearers for 2000-01 The
Returning Officer is Mr Jim
Randall of NSW. Under the PRSA
Constitution the Returning Officer
rotates among the Branch
Secretaries. The order, by
precedent, is Any
candidate may submit, with the
nomination, 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 2000. If any
poll is required, ballot-papers
will be posted on 7th November
1999, and the poll will close on
14th December 1999. Results will
appear in Quota Notes for
December 1999, QN1999D. NSW Branch
Responds to ‘Tablecloth
Ballot-paper’ and Threshold Threat The New
South Wales state elections held
on 27th March 1999 might not be
remembered for much in years to
come: a first-term Labor
government gaining a second four
years and an increased lower house
majority (with single-member
electorates, optional-preferential
voting, and only 42% of the voters
supporting Labor), and much
post-defeat soul-searching by the
Liberal-National coalition. Those
events are virtually
indistinguishable (just change the
names) from dozens of other state
election results Australia-wide. A dubious
legacy of these NSW polls was the
introduction of the term ‘tablecloth
ballot-paper’ into
the political lexicon. The
Legislative Council poll filled 21
vacancies state-wide, using
quota-preferential proportional
representation (the quota was 4.5%
of the vote), together with a
ballot-paper format that included
Group Voting boxes above-the-line
and provision for parties and
groups on the ballot-paper to
register Group Voting Tickets
facilitating the rigid exchange of
preferences between them. In 1995 these rules allowed the election of a very minor party candidate whose first preference vote was 1.3%, and who received the disciplined delivery of Group-Voting-Ticket preferences from other small groups to reach the quota for election to an 8-year term. By 1999, many more groups had registered as parties, some chiefly to garner enough votes from interlocking preference swaps to reach the quota. When nominations closed, 80 parties and 264 candidates had nominated. The Electoral Commissioner produced a ballot-paper with 80 boxes above-the-line, in three rows, as well as 259 ‘grouped’ candidates in 27 columns of three rows each, plus five ungrouped candidates in the lower right-hand corner of the paper. Talkback radio, tabloids and broadsheets seemingly could not resist the 1010 by 720 mm size, 2.8 times the paper area of the ballot-paper at the previous Council poll, using it mainly as a figure of fun or absurdity. Much comment attacked PR in general, rather than this manifestation of it. Opportunities for the Society to rebut the less well-informed claims were limited, but were taken where possible, and resulted in at least some broadsheet coverage for the Society’s defence of the PR principle. The Upper House poll unsurprisingly produced a proportional result: of the 21 seats, Labor candidates gained 8, with 38% of the vote; Liberal-National Coalition candidates gained 6, with 28% of the vote; and the remaining candidates gained 7, with some 34% of the vote. However several very small parties took advantage of preference exchanges using the Group Voting Ticket rules to win a seat with even fewer first preference votes than in 1995, one with a mere 0.2%. That would not have been objectionable had voters directed their own preferences openly between these parties and groups, rather than the parties and groups exchanging voter preferences behind the ‘veil’ of Group Voting Tickets, and usually without the voters’ knowledge, as actually occurred. After the polls, the Treasurer, Hon. Michael Egan MLC, launched an Upper House reform proposal, to entail:
The President of the Society’s NSW Branch, John Webber, observed that the Egan package would retain the current system’s greatest defect and chief contributor to the ‘tablecloth’ ballot-paper - the rigid direction of preferences behind the ‘veil’ of Group Voting Tickets, and above-the-line voting. It would also create two ‘classes’ of candidates, favouring weaker candidates on major party tickets over the stronger lead candidates on minor party or independent tickets, contrary to the arithmetic integrity of the quota-preferential form of proportional representation. The Egan package failed to get support from other than the Labor MLCs, and it was withdrawn, but it will probably resurface with some variations in the near future. The Society’s NSW Branch has instead responded with the following preferred model for Legislative Council reform, with practicality and fairness as the prime objectives: · reduction of the House from 42 to 33 MLCs; · reduction in the term from two Lower House terms (8 years) to one Lower House term (4 years); · division of NSW into three regions (one mainly rural and regional, two mainly metropolitan, each formed by grouping 31 of the 93 Lower House districts); · each region to elect 11 MLCs, with a quota of 8.3% of the vote required for election; · no group-based threshold (such as the Egan package’s 3% threshold), which would have created distortions between ‘classes’ of candidates; · abolition of above-the-line voting and Group Voting Tickets, with voters to mark their own preferences; · minimal requirements for a vote to be formal, with a clear first preference vote sufficient by itself; · batch-printing of ballot-papers, with the ‘Robson Rotation’ as in Tasmanian and ACT Assembly polls. The NSW Branch is promoting these reforms on the basis that they would make ballot-papers far more manageable, the range of candidates more comprehensible, and the membership of the Upper House less fissured, all without distorting the rules between ‘classes’ of candidates for essentially undemocratic purposes. The
Branch is also seeking to engage
some of the political players and
commentators in discussions on the
pursuit of these reforms, and
readers can thus expect further
instalments in future issues of Quota
Notes. Copyright
© 1999 Proportional Representation
Society of National President: Bogey Musidlak 14 Strzelecki Cr. NARRABUNDAH 2604 National Secretary: Deane Crabb 11 Yapinga St. PLYMPTON 5038 Telephone: (08) 8297 6441, (02) 6295 8137 www.prsa.org.au Editor: info@prsa.org.au Printer:
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