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QUOTA Newsletter of the
Proportional Representation Society of Australia QN2018C September 2018 www.prsa.org.au
British Columbia’s
advisory poll on replacing its
single-member system
In October
2018, electors in British Columbia will receive
postal ballots for an advisory poll with two
questions. The first question will be: Which
system should British Columbia use for
provincial elections? (Vote for only one.) - The
current First Past the Post voting system - A
proportional representation voting system The second
question will be: If British
Columbia adopts a proportional representation
voting system, which of the following voting
systems do you prefer? (Rank in
order of preference. You may choose to support
one, two or all three of the systems.) - Dual
Member Proportional (DMP) - Mixed
Member Proportional (MMP) -
Rural-Urban Proportional (RUP) Unlike the
Province’s first poll on PR-STV as the electoral system for its
unicameral legislature, in 2005, this third poll
has no super-majority hurdles to cross before it
is officially regarded as having provided a
decisive answer to the questions, as each
question requires only a bare majority for such
an answer. The answer
to the second question will be decided by a
transferable vote system. The 2005 poll showed
strong support for PR-STV, but it was
disregarded because it fell just short of the
two high hurdles imposed. A second poll in 2009
showed that support for PR-STV had fallen below
a bare majority, so it simply failed. Unfortunately,
this third poll, instigated by the coalition
government of the New Democratic Party and the
Greens Party, is a poll where the first question
has one defined alternative - the existing plurality system in
single-member electoral districts - whereas the
other alternative is not predictable, as it
depends on which of the three alternative
systems in the second question achieves a
majority after transfer of preferences. That
asymmetry could deter some voters that require
an unmodified PR-STV system, as the two earlier
polls did offer, because each of the three
options in the second question includes aspects
that either modify the use of PR-STV, such as
the RUP option, or avoid it altogether, as the
DMP and MMP options do.
Many
voters might take the view that understanding
the details of the three options is too
demanding, and thus reluctantly accept the
simpler, flawed, plurality system. The RUP
option is the closest to PR-STV. With it, PR-STV
would apply in all urban areas, which include
nearly all of the Province’s voters. MMP would
apply for the few voters in vast,
thinly-populated rural areas. The MMP
option is fairly conventional MMP, which is a
hybrid of single-member plurality districts and
an indirect closed
party list, so it is definitely not PR-STV. The DMP
option has never been used for parliamentary
elections anywhere in the world and, having
2-member electoral districts, it would normally
only give, in terms of political stance, either
a winner-take-all result, or a stalemate. It is a
long way from PR-STV.
Victoria’s Local Government Bill 2018
The
PRSA’s Victoria-Tasmania Branch made two submissions to the
Government’s welcome invitation for online
comments on the above Bill. Victoria’s
Andrews Labor Government introduced the Bill
as a revision of Victoria’s Local Government
Act 1989, and as a consolidation of that Act’s
many subsequent amendments. It was passed by
the Legislative Assembly, with a few
amendments. After the amended Bill reached
the Legislative Council, debate was adjourned
after the second reading speech had been
delivered by the Minister representing the
Minister for Local Government. The Bill will
thus lapse when the Legislative Council
expires before Victoria’s election in November
2018. The Branch’s submissions covered several
parts of the Bill, which the Branch President
and Secretary expect to discuss when they meet
the Liberal Shadow Minister, David Morris MLA,
in October. Casual
vacancies: One
main concern was the Bill’s proposal to
replace the countback
procedure that Victoria has used for filling
casual vacancies since the Bracks ALP
Government introduced PR-STV for elections in
all multi-councillor wards in
2003. That countback
procedure has been in force for filling casual
vacancies in Tasmania’s House of Assembly
since 1918, and for Tasmania’s municipal
elections since the Groom Liberal Government
introduced Hare-Clark PR-STV
for all of Tasmania’s municipal elections in
1993. The 1992
advisory poll that resulted in Hare-Clark PR-STV
being introduced for the elections for the
Legislative Assembly of the Australian
Capital Territory included
a provision for Tasmanian-style countback.
Hare-Clark in the ACT was entrenched by a 1995
referendum. Tasmania’s
countback
is based on the rationale of filling the seat of
a vacating councillor by a re-examination of the
quota of votes that elected that vacating
councillor, and on no other votes. The
proposed replacement for that sound and
well-proven countback
is that the votes in the Droop
near-quota that were insufficient to elect a
councillor be added to the quota of votes that
elected the vacating councillor. Unfortunately
that concept departs from the fundamental
rationale of countback,
which is to maintain the preferred choice of the
voters that elected the vacating councillor, and
of no other voters. The submission by the Victorian Electoral
Commission agreed with that concern. It noted
that was also the view of the Proportional
Representation Society of Australia.
Group representation constituencies predominate in Singapore’s
parliament
Until 1988, elections to
Singapore’s unicameral Parliament were held
entirely in single-member electoral districts,
using a plurality
(first-past-the-post) electoral system in which
the MP was directly elected, and was the
candidate that had gained the largest number of
votes in that district. The electoral districts in the
small island State, with just over 5 million
inhabitants, were each fairly similar in
character, so its winner-take-all
system at most elections resulted in all of the
seats being won by a single political party, the
People’s Action Party, as it routinely gained a
plurality of the vote. In 1998, the law was changed to
elect most of Singapore’s MPs from multi-member
electoral districts called group
representation constituencies. There
are now 16 of those, returning 74 of the 87
elected MPs. Candidates must stand as a party
group of between four and six, or as a group, or
groups, of independent candidates. Most voters
can thus only vote for a group, and not for
individual candidates, so most of Singapore’s
MPs, although popularly elected, are no longer
directly elected by the voters. The electoral system for those MPs
is a plurality winner-take-all system,
like that used in 48 US States to elect a
State’s slate of electors to be the members of
the electoral college that elects the President
and the Vice-President. The group with the largest vote in
the multi-member Singapore constituency - even
if that is not an absolute majority of votes -
wins all the seats in that multi-member
constituency.
There must be at least one
candidate in each group nomination that is a
member of a Malayan, Indian or other minority
community by descent, to ensure that some MPs
will be people from those communities, but those
candidates need not be nominated by those
communities, or even preferred by them to other
candidates. That aspect is akin to concepts for
gender quotas in some Australian party
pre-selection rules for particular single-member
electorates, where a candidate of the mandated
gender must take precedence over those not of
that gender. The
only majority community in Singapore is its
community of Chinese descent, but there is a
considerable number of minority communities. Another reason given for this type
of winner-take-all
electoral system is that the larger electoral
districts used need far fewer changes in
electoral boundaries, which are relatively
difficult with Singapore’s great extent of public
housing in
numerous flats in large high-rise buildings. The group representation
constituencies are not inherently
candidate-based, so they cannot result in the direct
election of
candidates. They are thus even less
representative than the multiple plurality system that was
used to elect Australian senators until 1919,
which was at least a system of direct election,
where voters were required to vote for
individual candidates. This undemocratic type of group
nomination was unfortunately introduced into
Australia by Victoria’s Bracks ALP Government
when it provided in
2001 for such a system to elect
Melbourne City Council’s Lord Mayor and Deputy
Lord Mayor jointly.
The centenary of
transferable voting in every
House of Representatives seat The transferable vote now used
for every House of Representatives seat became
federal law only when the original Commonwealth Electoral
Act 1918
received royal assent on 21 November 1918. Its
only opponent in the
Senate was its only Labor senator, Albert
Gardiner.
The impetus for the Bill was
Labor’s victory in the Swan
by-election, in WA,
the month before, with only 34.4% of the vote.
Labor would also have won Corangamite, in
Victoria, under the then plurality
system, but it
was won by one of the non-Labor candidates
after the transfer of preferences. The
100-year old Act has had many changes since,
and in its consolidated
form
remains the principal Act governing elections
for both federal houses.
© 2018
Proportional Representation Society of Australia
National
President: Dr Jeremy Lawrence npres@prsa.org.au
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