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QUOTA Newsletter
of the Proportional Representation Society
of QN54
June 1989
www.prsa.org.au ·
Hare-Clark
Gives Electoral Justice in Tasmania ·
Party
Preselection for Single Member
Electorates ·
Further
Contacts with Electoral Reform Society
of GB & I Hare-Clark Gives
Electoral Justice in Just over
2 weeks after polling day (the A.C.T.
shemozzle took 2 months to count) the
final results of May's Tasmanian
Assembly elections were officially
declared. In 2 electorates Liberals won
twice as many seats as the ALP, but in
the other 3 electorates their number of
seats was equal. The only other group to
win seats - the Green "Independents" -
won one seat in each electorate. Under the
Hare-Clark
system there are
no "safe seats", so the loss of their
seats by the Education Minister, Peter
Rae, and the former Opposition Leader,
Neil Batt, was simply a result of voters
preferring other candidates within their
own party. In the general election of
February 1986, Peter Rae's total of
first preference votes was the highest
in Bass at 1.66 quotas, and Neil Batt's
reached 0.55 quotas in Unlike the
Senate's minimalist version of PR,
Tasmanian voters have a large choice of
candidates within each party. This is to
enable voters at the general election to
also decide, by the later preferences
they mark on their ballot-papers, which
of the candidates will fill any casual
vacancies that may arise. In unfortunate
and unnecessary contrast, in Australia's
other parliamentary and municipal PR
elections so far, electors are not
consulted, in that way or in any other
way, in the filling of casual vacancies.
Whereas Senate teams normally have only
one more candidate than the number
expected to be elected, Because
the Liberals won one less than an
absolute majority of Assembly seats, and
the second largest party, the ALP, won
five less than an absolute majority,
dire forebodings are being heard in some
quarters. These are not justified on
present indications, as the apparently
cohesive Green "Independents" seem just
as capable of working constructively in
an ALP-Green alliance as the various
factions (parties within a party) are
capable of co-operating to run outwardly
single party ALP governments, or the two
distinct and competing Coalition parties
in NSW are capable of co-operating to
run their Coalition Government. 0f
course the Tasmanian Liberals have not
been decimated. They have the largest
Opposition possible and cannot lose
numbers by capricious by-election polls.
The ALP-Green alliance also has that
protection against haphazard depletion. Critics of
PR ignore the long periods of single
party government By
contrast Nor has
the single member electorate system
guaranteed stability for the UK House of
Commons. This was demonstrated
dramatically in February 1974 when
Labour, with a smaller vote than the
Conservatives, won four more seats than
they did, but not an absolute majority
of the seats, as indicated in the graph
below. Labour took office, but the
ingrained habits of parties not attuned
to coalition governments led to an
election 8 months later. Note the
system's attack on the Liberals compared
with all the others! Single member
electorates, not just the The
election in October 1974 gave Labour an
absolute majority of 4 seats in the
635-member House, with only 39% of the
vote. Never before, in a fully-contested
election, had a party with less than 40%
of
Exactly
two months after polling day, the
results of the A.C.T. Assembly election
became widely known - ironically on the
day of a well-attended Public Forum on
what to do about the electoral system,
chaired by Mr Justice Else-Mitchell. The
opening address at the Forum was given
by Mr Bogey Musidlak, a PRSA member
living in the A.C.T. He reports below on
the A.C.T. results: The
Australian Electoral Commission has
suffered much uninformed abuse from MPs
and others unwilling to contemplate the
organization needed to cope with the
Byzantine processes instituted under the
Machiavellian
d'Hondt procedure. The
Commissioner, Dr Colin Hughes, was
reported as having written to the
Government describing the procedure as
"bizarre" and "absurd". He said, "that
any plausible justification there may be
for it in terms of underlying principles
is now invisible behind the veil of
compromises and trade-offs", and,
"Finally I wish to make it clear that if
there is any suggestion made publicly
that consolidated d'Hondt has the
Commission's approval, we will be
obliged to repudiate it." The
percentages of first preferences (and
votes after the initial exclusions) are
shown in the graph below. The informal
vote was 5.7%. The Fair Elections
Coalition fell 117 votes short of the
arbitrary exclusion quota and hence
failed to participate in the
distribution of seats. Just over one
third of all formal votes were
re-examined to determine whether they
could be re-allocated to a party
excluded. Over 25% of those votes had to
be set aside as exhausted. The
provisional distribution of seats was
based on the highest average process,
and a Senate-style scrutiny within each
list to determine which of the 6 ALP, 4
Liberal, 3 RR, 3 NSG and 1 ASG
candidates would be provisionally
elected. Then came
the distribution of preferences from
candidates not provisionally elected.
Billed as an enhancement allowing some
effective cross-party voting, this
process revealed its true purpose,
namely to make it virtually impossible
for candidates to be elected otherwise
than in the order of the party lists. For some
unexplained reason, if the next
available preference was for the same
party, the paper was transferred away
from the candidate that the voter most
preferred in the list. In fact that
candidate would be deemed last in the
order of the voter's preference if all
squares in the party list were numbered,
and would in any case be deemed to be
preferred less than any other candidate
with a numbered square. Only those
papers without further available
preferences would be allowed to reflect
the voter's real intentions. The
individual tallies attributed to three
candidates fell by over 2000 votes as a
result of this process, which noticeably
augmented the proportion of votes held
to be for the candidate at the top of
the party list. The final percentages of votes attributed to parties (and of seats allocated under the d'Hondt highest average procedure) were as shown below. As expected, Machiavellian d'Hondt then succeeded in securing the election of individual candidates in the order of appearance of names in each list on the ballot-paper.
The
average number of votes per seat for the
different parties varied from 6734 to
12433. So
much for one vote, one value. Only
quota-preferential methods, starting
from the most appropriate principles for
securing maximum vote effectiveness,
provide results that accord with voters'
expressed wishes. In April,
Senator Jenkins (Australian Democrat,
WA) gave notice of motion: "That
the Senate refer the A.
C. T. modified d'Hondt procedure
to be examined by the Joint Standing
Committee on Electoral Matters; and in
the light of the procedure's
unsatisfactory performance in the
A.C.T. election of 4 March 1989, seek
the views of' the Committee as to
whether a Hare-Clark electoral
procedure similar to that used for
Senate elections (and recommended by
the Australian Democrats and the Proportional
Representation Society of Australia)
would have served the A.C.T.
electorate better than the d'Hondt
procedure." Are you
surprised, gentle reader, that her
motion was supported by neither
Government nor Opposition? Party Preselection for
Single Member Electorates Nationwide
publicity has attended the efforts of
the Hon. Ian McPhee, Liberal MHR for
Goldstein in The answer
is the Hare-Clark system where a panel
of candidates, nearly double the number
of likely winners, is offered. Not only
can a real choice be made, but the major
shades of opinion within the party can
be represented in proportion to their
support. The parties do not even have to
be compelled to offer candidates of
various shades of opinion, because, if
they do not, they will soon realize that
their share of the vote may easily go to
their competitors. Votes they lose
however do not necessarily have to go to
their opposite number, but, because of
the much wider effective choice offered,
electors may well vote for the closest
acceptable candidate of a similar party. Mr McPhee,
in his campaign for Goldstein,
emphasized his support from the electors
of Goldstein. Instead of simply leaving
politics altogether, he could well
provide at least one last service to his
country by standing for Goldstein as an
independent and demonstrating the
strength of his following. The high vote
he would surely gain could usefully show
what Goldstein's electors really want.
He would not threaten the Coalition's
chances of government, and would help
Australians understand their electoral
systems better. Further
Contacts with Electoral Reform Society
of GB & I The National Office-Bearers
in Lord Kitchener
told us he was working to encourage his
Society to strive for the development and
promotion of cheap, reliable software as a
potent and necessary means of making the
use of quota-preferential counting more
convenient, rapid and widespread. Before
his retirement he had worked with ICI in
the field of mathematics and computing. We
told him of the Victorian Government's
trial of PR and computers in the 1988 Richmond
Council elections. Having had little observation
of preferential systems being used in
elections for parliament, he was
enlightened by our accounts of the
self-serving rules that Australian
politicians have built into our electoral
laws, such as the stage-managed
order of candidates on all
our PR ballot-papers except for the
Tasmanian Assembly. He was pleased to hear
how In the context of the role of
the Parliament, of which he is a member,
in making provision for electoral systems
in Hong Kong before it leaves The Secretary of our South
Australian Branch, Deane Crabb, on a
recent trip to © 1989 Proportional
Representation Society of National President: Geoffrey Goode 18 Anita Street BEAUMARIS VIC 3193 National Secretary: Andrew Gunter 5 Wheatland Road MALVERN VIC 3144 Tel: (03) 9589 1802, (03) 9509 1514 info@prsa.org.au Regd.
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