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QUOTA NOTES 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, brought 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). ALP Senate
Leader, 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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