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QUOTA Newsletter
of the Proportional Representation Society of Australia
QN2011A March
2011 www.prsa.org.au
State Elections in Victoria and NSW The
Legislative Council results in both States, where quota-preferential proportional
representation applies, showed a close match between the votes cast and the
seats won. The results
for the Legislative Assemblies, where MLAs are elected by winner-take-all
contests in single-member electoral districts, showed a much poorer correspondence
between votes and seats when all parties are considered. In each
State, Liberal MLCs were an absolute majority of the MLCs elected. That
reflected a widespread loss of support for Australian Labor
Party MPs, most strongly in NSW, after the ALP had held power for more than a
decade in each State. In the
November 2010 Assembly election in Victoria, the common “winner’s bonus” or “landslide” exaggeration of seats for the
group that gained government surprisingly did not occur. The effect is shown
most easily by comparing the figures achieved by the pair of parties, the ALP
and Greens, that came closest to having the
Coalition lack a majority in each house. That pair’s results were, in first
preference votes:
As the table
shows, the Coalition’s main opponents’ joint Legislative Assembly vote was
only 0.1 percentage point above their Legislative Council vote. However,
their seat total (all won by the ALP) in the Legislative Assembly was 1.4
percentage points above that in the Council. Mostly losers do worse in
the non-PR Assembly. In The 21
Legislative Council seats (half of the
full house of 42 MLCs) that were subject to election - by the whole of The
Coalition, together with groups that would generally support it over Labor and the Greens, won an absolute majority of those
Upper House seats. With 19 seats overall, it is in a good position to
negotiate passage of legislation through the Upper House, just as its ALP
predecessor did. Restoration in District Magnitude for
Tasmanian Assembly has been deferred Tasmanian party leaders have
recognized that the 1998 experiment that reduced
the number of members to be elected for each of the five electoral districts
for its House of Assembly from seven MHAs to five has not been a success. The Proportional Representation
Society of Australia supported a number of groups at the time that
campaigned against the reduction, but a combination of both of the largest
political parties ensured that the change did occur. In September 2010, the then ALP
Premier, David Bartlett, the Greens Leader, and the Liberal Opposition Leader
signed an
agreement
that they would take to their respective party rooms a recommendation to
support a restoration of the district magnitude to seven MHAs per Assembly
district. Shortly after David Bartlett stepped
aside as Premier and was replaced by Lara Giddings, the need for extensive
public sector cuts was announced. The Liberal party room then voted against
proceeding with the proposed restoration at present even though that had been
a campaign platform. The next day, the Premier announced
that restoration was not possible without tripartisan
support. The Mercury regretted
that, given the 12-year experience with the smaller Assembly. The Greens
still support this overdue restoration. The question has also arisen of what
corresponding change, if any, should be made to the size of the 15-member
Legislative Council. It had consisted of 19 members when the Legislative
Assembly last had a membership of 35, in 1998. May 2011 Referendum could replace UK's First-past-the-post with
Preferential Voting Legislation
this year by the The
legislation resulted in a compromise between the policies of the two
Coalition partners. The larger partner, the Conservative
Party,
favours the present system of election of members of the House of Commons in
single-member electoral districts with the result in each being determined by
first-past-the-post counting. The
smaller Coalition partner, the Liberal Democrats, favours introducing
multi-member electoral districts, with the result in each being determined by
quota-preferential proportional representation counting, known in the UK as
the Single Transferable Vote (STV). The Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Act
2011
specifies that the question to be asked is “At present,
the The
Act requires the UK Electoral Commission to provide
explanatory material about the question to be asked, and to encourage public
participation in the referendum. The
Victoria-Tasmania Branch of the PRSA has
donated £500 to each of the Queensland
Local Government Electoral Inquiry The
PRSA made a written
submission in August 2010 to the Law, Justice and Safety
Committee of the Queensland Parliament during its review of election
arrangements for all Queensland councils except for Brisbane City Council,
after the Committee Secretariat drafted an excellent issues paper. As
the Legislative Assembly motion that initiated the review required an inquiry
into electoral systems, including proportional
representation, the submission gave examples of low vote effectiveness under
current arrangements, and outlined how this could best be rectified under
systematic application of voter-empowering principles and default procedures for setting
boundaries. PRSA
National President, Bogey Musidlak, gave teleconference
evidence
to the Committee’s Public Hearing in Other
matters examined by the Committee and referred to in the PRSA submission
included the existing provisions for the popular election of mayors, which
prohibit candidates standing for positions of mayor and councillor
concurrently. The PRSA pointed out the merits of
Tasmania’s Local Government Act 1993
in providing fairly for such
popular elections in conjunction with the proportional representation polls
that apply for all Tasmanian councils. That
Act requires candidates for mayor (and deputy mayor) to be an existing
continuing councillor, or be elected at the election in question as a councilor, in order to be eligible to be elected mayor
(or deputy mayor as the case may be). Despite
evident problems and PR now being the major system used for municipal
elections in most Australian states, the final report of the Committee stuck
fairly closely to the status quo,
and did not recommend any introduction of proportional representation for First PRSA Honorary Life Members Three
PRSA members were admitted as the first ever Honorary Life
Members
of the PRSA earlier this year. Each of those members had become eligible by
having first been admitted as an Honorary Life Member of a PRSA branch. The
longest-standing of those members was Mr Edward Goode, who designed the PRSA
logo, and in many earlier decades worked actively to spread the PR message. Hon.
Neil Robson AM, whose health unfortunately worsened earlier this year, is
well known in electoral circles and for his instigation of the Robson
Rotation system used in Hare-Clark elections in The
immediate past Treasurer of Victoria, Mr John Lenders MLC, was admitted as a
PRSA Honorary Life Member for his fine work in championing the introduction
and legislative entrenchment of PR for © 2011 Proportional Representation Society of Australia National President: Bogey Musidlak 14 Strzelecki Cr. NARRABUNDAH ACT 2604 National Secretary: Dr Stephen Morey 4 Sims Street SANDRINGHAM VIC 3191 Tel: (02) 6295 8137, (03) 9598 1122, 04291 76725 quota@prsa.org.au |
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