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QUOTA Newsletter of the Proportional
Representation Society of Australia QN2018B June 2018 www.prsa.org.au
Tribute to the PRSA National President 1994-2017, the late Bogey Musidlak by Dr Stephen Morey, PRSA National
Secretary This
re-launched Quota Notes begins with my tribute to
the Society’s long-term
National President, Bogey Musidlak, who died
on 27 August 2017, at the age of 63. Bogey had
been President of the PRSA since 1 January
1994, for over 23 years. In his
obituary in The Canberra Times, Malcolm
Mackerras AO referred to Bogey as the ‘father
of Hare-Clark in Canberra’, pointing out that in
the period when many were just working towards
getting self-government for the ACT, Bogey was
making sure that this self-government was
elected by the best and fairest of electoral
systems. Members of the ACT Legislative
Assembly from all parties also paid tribute to
Bogey in speeches in the Assembly on 19
September 2017. As the last of a number of PRSA National Secretaries to
work with Bogey, I had an opportunity to get to
know him personally. In 2000 and 2001, I was working for
a Member of the House of Representatives, and
visited Canberra frequently. Bogey kindly
offered me room to stay at his home, which he
did on at least six occasions. In
those days, Bogey was accustomed to working very
late hours and I would often only see him in the
morning. We sometimes took breakfast together in
the garden on a summer's morning – and breakfast
discussions were where I learned much about the
importance of a clear understanding of the fine
details of electoral arrangements. In
his obituary, Mr Mackerras described Bogey as
‘a hoarder – but also a genius, as
hoarders so often are.’ I
can certainly attest to both of those as
facts; Bogey had many things - some might say
junk - but he certainly had a lot of knowledge
and ideas. Both of those assets he had were
immensely valuable for the PRSA and its cause. His
submissions to various government inquiries,
particularly those of the Federal Parliament’s
Joint Standing Committee on Electoral Matters
(JSCEM), showed how best practice electoral
systems can be well managed, and how important
is the kind of PR-STV
system now established in both Tasmania
and the Australian Capital Territory. Over
the years, Bogey and I would meet in many
different locations; I can recall a picnic lunch
with him in front of the National Library the
day after the 2013 Federal election when we
needed to make a comment about the Senate
result, leading to an article that appeared on The
Conversation website. I have
shared several long walks with him from Canberra
City out to Kingston, or from the ANU to where I
was staying, with discussions about the PRSA,
and about how it can further its aim to promote
good electoral arrangements, where the voters’
will is primary. I saw
him for the last time in July 2017, on a
freezing night in Canberra. Bogey had walked
from his home in Strzelecki
Crescent, Narrabundah, wearing shorts! It was the usual
very engaging and informative discussion, with
Bogey clearly outlining the priorities that the
Society needs to follow. I will certainly miss
him, as will all that believe in a democracy
that should much more fairly represent its
voters’ wishes.
PR analysis of Queensland’s 2017 election
The recent
Queensland election, held on 25 November 2017,
had the following overall result: Table 1:
Votes versus Queensland Assembly seats won
Australian
Labor Party candidates won 48 (51.6%) of the
93 seats in the Legislative Assembly of
Queensland’s unicameral Parliament - which
exceeded an absolute majority - with just
35.4% of the first preference votes cast. Since all
Australia’s mainland Lower House polls still use
single transferable vote marking and counting in
single-member electoral districts - and at this
election the formality rules had changed again
to require a valid ballot to show at least all
but the last preference - a ‘two-party
preferred-vote’ can be
calculated to measure the relative strength of
the two ‘major parties’ vote after the transfer
of preferences - the Australian Labor Party and
Queensland’s Liberal National Party. The
two-party-preferred vote was as follows: Table 2:
Two-party-preferred Vote
That TPP vote might suggest that a
majority for the Australian Labor Party is
reasonable, but not when half the votes cast
elected nobody. From the perspective of true
representation, for a party to gain only 35.4% of
the vote and yet have a majority in the Parliament
is quite improper. What would the use of PR-STV (proportional
representation using the single transferable
vote) instead of the existing winner-take-all
single-member electoral system have brought to
this Queensland election? To answer
that, a PR-STV analysis by the
Proportional Representation Society of Australia
has grouped Queensland’s 93 seats into six
multi-member districts in the rural and regional
sector each with 5 MLAs, and nine districts each
electing 7 MLAs in the south-east. Table 3:
Overall PR-STV result of Queensland’s election
In Table 3,
the ‘other MLA’ was the re-elected Independent MLA
for Noosa, Ms
Sandy Bolton. As with
any other PR-STV elections, this result would
have led to three main significant advantages
over the current parliament: 1. More than
80% of voters would be represented by a
candidate that they voted for, either first
preference or another high preference, 2. The
various minor parties, One Nation, Greens, and
Katter’s Australia Party would be represented at
levels close to the support they received from
the voters, and 3. In every
one of the 15 multi-member districts there was a
contest, and the final position in each of those
districts would have been very close. Unlike the
recent election, where at least 70% of voters
lived in safe seats that were not really in
contest, under PR-STV each part of Queensland
has a genuine electoral contest. For example, in multi-member
District12, named ‘Southern Suburbs’ in the PRSA
analysis (the
7 single-member districts in that District
appear on the left), results were as
follows: Table 4:
First Preference Votes in 7-member District 12
Table 4
shows the ALP with 3.53 quotas, and the LNP with
2.73, which guarantee 3 ALP and 2 LNP candidates
being elected. The Greens, with 0.82 of a quota,
would almost certainly have one MLA elected. Table
4 shows the seventh MLA elected to be an LNP
candidate, but that depended ultimately on the
transfer of later preferences, as described below. It was
likely that the third LNP candidate would be
elected, but if enough subsequent preferences
shown on ballots marked as first preferences for
‘Others’ strongly favoured One Nation, its
candidate could have been elected instead. If - on the
other hand - the preferences for ‘Others’ had more
strongly supported the ALP, with ON preferences
not strongly to the LNP, a fourth ALP candidate
could have been elected. The point
here is that the final two positions in Southern
Suburbs were close enough that every vote in that
region was important. A very small shift in votes
would have either elected a One Nation candidate,
or an additional Labor candidate, and might have
seen the Greens candidate defeated. PRSA members
will notice immediately that whereas Queensland’s
current single-member electoral system led to a
majority ALP government, in PRSA’s analysis, a
PR-STV election might have led to a minority
Liberal National Government, supported by One
Nation. PRSA
member
urges PR-STV in Canadian webinar Malcolm Baalman, a member of
the Victoria-Tasmania Branch of the PRSA, was
invited by FairVote Canada to explain the Hare-Clark form
of PR-STV in a
substantial webinar on
YouTube this year. The Netherlands party
list system was then explained by a FVC
member that had grown up under it, but now lives
in British Columbia, where he is a strong PR-STV
supporter. Malcolm’s lucid description of
PR-STV, and its value, from a PRSA member that has
experienced its use will assist campaigners in
another referendum to be
held in British Columbia in 2018 to choose between
the existing single-member plurality system
and a PR system. FVC is silent
on the great importance of voters’ direct
election of
candidates. It has made a longer
video with
accounts of PR-STV by
Professor David Farrell of University College,
Dublin, and by Antony Hodgson, President of a
separate group, Fair
Voting BC, which
prefers PR-STV. Accounts of a Mixed
Member Proportional alternative
by a Canadian, and a New Zealander, follow. The
PR-STV case easily beats MMP. MMP’s absence of
transferable votes, and its hybrid of
single-member plurality districts, and its
at-large component with exclusionary
threshold, are
undesirable.
Tasmania’s 33rd Hare-Clark
general election On 03 March 2018, the world’s
longest continually-operating PR-STV electoral
system demonstrated again the extremely
satisfactory translation of voters’ ballot
instructions into parliamentary seats it is famous
for. Table 5:
Votes versus Tasmanian Assembly seats won
As established in Tasmania’s
Constitution, the
election was for its Lower House, the House of
Assembly, as the periodic elections for the
Upper House - for those of its less-recently
elected members - occur in May each year. The distinctive
characteristics of Hare-Clark now
include its lack of the stage
management, such as an above-the-line
option, that has been introduced for mainland
electoral systems, except the similar Hare-Clark
system of the Australian Capital Territory. Those characteristics
include the filling of casual vacancies by countback, which
removes the need for expensive and destabilizing
by-election polls and also ensures that each
serious party stands several more candidates
than it expects will be elected. Hare-Clark now combines that
greater choice of candidates with its impressive
Robson
Rotation, in which ballot papers are
printed so that the order of candidates’ names
in each party column differs from one ballot
paper to another such that each candidate’s name
appears with equal frequency at specified
positions down each column. A striking
feature of the election result was the election
to the lower house of Tasmania’s Parliament, the
House of Assembly, of a majority of women. Although 40% of the 109
candidates State-wide were women - and only one of
the five electoral districts, Denison - had a
majority of women candidates, 13 of the 25 MHAs
elected were women. In Denison, four of the five
MHAs elected were women even though eight men were
candidates. That result matched the 13 of
the 25 MLAs elected that were women in the Australian
Capital Territory’s Assembly Hare-Clark
election in October 2016. Both of those
results were a result of voters’ decisions much
more than the stage
management by the party machines that
predominates in Australia’s other elections to
legislative chambers. Tasmania’s 2018 election
demonstrated, for a second consecutive term, that
Hare-Clark will deliver an absolute majority of
MHAs to a single political party if that is an
actual reflection of the voters’ indications, as
it was in this case. In this case it was again the
Liberal Party that had clearly retained the
voters’ confidence. Detailed
results can be accessed via PRSA’s website. Another consistent Hare-Clark
feature in the 2018 outcome for the Jacqui Lambie
Network was its failure to have any of its
candidates elected, even in its stronghold in Braddon, where
it totalled only 0.35 quotas. Jacqui
Lambie was first
elected to a parliament - with a 14.3% quota
- in the September 2013 half-Senate election as a
Senator for Tasmania as she was the leading
candidate on the Group Voting Ticket for the
Palmer United Party. She took up her seat in the
Senate as a member of that party in July 2014. Ms Lambie was far less
well-known then, even in Tasmania, than Clive
Palmer, the party’s Queensland billionaire leader,
who spent lavishly on campaigns in all the
elections that his eponymous
registered political party
contested during its short-lived existence. Between Jacqui Lambie’s
election and her joining the Senate, his Palmer
United Party stood at the March 2014 election for
Tasmania’s Assembly, but it failed to gain a seat,
even in Braddon, where
its five male candidates only totalled 0.43 quotas
– a vote well below the State-wide half-Senate
quota that the party had achieved only six months
earlier. The Assembly quota of 16.7%
was higher than Ms Lambie’s half-Senate quota of
14.3%, but the 2014 Braddon failure to gain a
quota would have still applied with that lower
quota. South
Australian election versus Tasmania’s On 17 March 2018, South
Australia’s election followed Tasmania’s Assembly
election earlier in March, though in SA’s case the
general election for all 47 members of its House
of Assembly was concurrent with an election for
its Legislative Council of 11 of its
22 members. Table 6
shows Liberals won an absolute majority of the 47
seats in the Assembly with only 38.0% of the
votes.
The Electoral Commission of South
Australia must determine a notional two-party-preferred
(TPP) vote. To do that
the ballot papers in 15 of the 47 electorates
where the final two candidates were not Liberal or
Labor had to be redistributed again for that
purpose. The notional State-wide
two-party-preferred vote was: Table 7:
Notional two-party-preferred vote for the
Assembly
That TPP
vote might suggest that a majority of Liberals is
reasonable, but not when half the votes cast
elected nobody. From the perspective of true
representation, for a party to gain only 38.0% of
the vote and yet have a majority in the House of
Assembly is quite improper. The
Electoral Reform Society of SA’s PR-STV analysis groups the
47 seats into 8 multi-member divisions, each with
5 MHAs, plus one with 7 MHAs. Table 8 shows the
overall result under that much fairer electoral
system. Table 8:
Party share of Assembly seats with PR-STV
While the
Liberal Party, ALP and the Independents are still
over-represented, it does mean that SA Best and
even the Greens would have some representation in
the new House of Assembly. In contrast
to the House of Assembly’s single-member
electorates, the Legislative Council is elected by
PR-STV
(proportional representation with the single
transferable vote). At this election, 11 MLCs,
which are half the Council, were elected. Malaysia’s
extraordinary parliamentary election Malaysia’s 14th
general election, on 09
May 2018, gave a very different result from its
13th, in 2013, and
earlier polls. At the 2018
election, 3 coalitions stood ; Pakatan
Harapan, led by
Dr Mahathir Mohammed, but with the long time
opposition Democratic Action Party (Mahathir had
once imprisoned its leader); Barisan
Nasional, led by defeated Prime Minister
Najib Raza;, and Gagasan Sejahtera,
which is a conservative Islamic party. Malaysia uses single member
electorates and plurality
counting. The results for those 3
coalitions in the 222-member lower house, the Dewan
Rakyat, are as follows: Table 9:
Coalition shares of Malaysian Lower House
seats
Each of those three
coalitions is represented in the lower house at
levels less distorted than usual for plurality
polls. That is because the defeated Barisan
Nasional, which had governed since Independence,
had enacted a pronounced malapportionment of
electorates that strongly favoured itself. Table
10 gives details in 2013 of the electorates in
the State of Negri Sembilan. Note that the
opposition coalition was called Pakatan Rakyat
in 2013. Table 10:
Coalition shares in 2013 of MHRs for Negri
Sembilan
The electorates held by
Barisan Nasional in Negri Sembilan had a mean
enrolment of 59,065 while those of the then
opposition parties had a mean of 87,165. Table
11 shows malapportionment let Barisan Nasional
‘win’ in 2013 with far fewer votes than its
opponents. Table 11:
Coalition share of Malaysian lower house seats
(2013)
That malapportionment,
intensified in a pre-election redistribution,
led a
reform group to note
that Barisan Nasional could regain control with
just 33% of the vote. That
did not happen, but the malapportionment could
well have let Barisan Nasional control the lower
house with only 38% of the vote. Electoral
reform is overdue in Malaysia, as it is in many
other jurisdictions.
© 2018 Proportional Representation
Society of Australia
National President: Dr Jeremy
Lawrence npres@prsa.org.au
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