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QUOTA
 NOTES
Newsletter
of the Proportional Representation
Society of Australia
Number
71 September
1993 www.prsa.org.au
New
Zealand Electoral Referendum
Approaches
Last
year New Zealanders voted in an advisory
poll to indicate
their views on whether their
single-member electorate
first-past-the-post electoral
procedure should be changed, and
which of four alternatives
nominated should be used if change
was sought. The indications for
change, and a change to a German
type electoral procedure, called
Mixed Member Proportional (MMP) in
New Zealand,
were quite substantial. The
National Party Government promised
legislation, which has been
passed, to hold at the time of the
next election a referendum that
would produce a binding decision
on whether MMP would replace the
present system. That election has
now been called for 6th November.
Earlier indications suggested that
the referendum might include an
option to create a Senate, but
that option has not been proceeded
with.
MMP would leave half
of the seats in the unicameral
Parliament filled by the present
procedure, based on the first of two
ballot-papers given together to each
voter. The remaining half of the
seats would not be filled directly
by the voters, but would be filled
from closed party lists with the
numbers selected from each list
being in proportion to the numbers
of votes for parties (not individual
candidates) marked by voters on
their second, separate and distinct
ballot-paper. The parties, and not
the voters, would decide the order
of the names on the list, which
would be fixed and unalterable by
the voters.
The PRSA
unequivocally supports the
quota-preferential form of
proportional representation, which
is best exemplified in Tasmania's
Hare-Clark system
and which involves direct election,
with all MPs being elected by the
same counting system. It is quite
impossible for the PRSA to support a
procedure whereby half the seats are
filled from single-member electoral
districts. It is also unacceptable
that the other half of the seats are
being filled by people that voters
have no direct electoral control
over. Mr Malcolm Mackerras, in major
articles in The Australian
on 31st December 1992, and 15th
September 1993, has labelled MMP a ratbag
scheme.
He has been
campaigning in New Zealand
against MMP, and warns of the unfair
and unpredictable penalty that will
apply to the party that gains most
of the directly elected seats, which
they cannot be blamed for winning
given their high vote relative to
others. They will be penalized by
having far less than their
proportionate share of the
indirectly elected seats. One will
not compensate for the other as
vacancies for directly elected seats
are filled by a new poll, which the
party may lose, whereas vacancies in
the indirectly elected seats are
automatically filled by the next
available Party Machine candidate on
the closed list. The
directly elected MPs have to please
both Party Machine and the
electorate, but the others can be
singled out for exclusive acceptance
or rejection by the Party Machine
only.
Mr Mackerras
predicted a narrow loss for MMP. He
also rightly scorned the
unavailability of preferences which,
with the 5% threshold, leads to all
votes for a party getting less than
5% going into the rubbish bin.
Splinter parties proliferate
under rigid list systems, so six
parties each gaining some 4% of the
vote could see 24% of the vote
entirely wasted. On ABC radio he
described it as not being an
electoral system at all, but rather
a mechanism for deciding how many of
their appointees each Party Machine
would be allowed to make to what
would be the Party Machine half of
the Parliament.
The most promising
indication in this unhappy choice
between two unsatisfactory systems
is the suggestion that the
legislation to implement the
referendum may prescribe a trial
period for MMP following which a
further test of public opinion must
be held. People could then compare
the systems after having experienced
each in action. Furthermore it would
leave the door open for
quota-preferential PR to be
considered, and that could be put as
an option that might in the end be
acceptable to a larger proportion of
voters than either of the faulty
systems in November's referendum.
Also, it would survive a trial!
Nominations for National
Office-bearers for 1994-95
It is the turn this
year for the Returning Officer
for the above PRSA elections to
be the Secretary of the
Queensland Branch, Mr Tom Round.
Under the PRSA
Constitution, nominations,
for President, Vice-President,
Secretary and Treasurer, need to
be signed by the candidate only,
as consent to nomination, and
should be received by Mr Round
at 10 Nelson St,
DUTTON PARK QLD 4102 by 31st
October 1993.
Any
candidate may submit 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 1994. If any poll is
required, ballot-papers will be
posted on 7th November 1993, and
the poll will close on 14th
December 1993. Results will appear
in December's Quota Notes.
Proposal
for 2 MHRs per Division
The Hon.
Jim Carlton MHR, a member
of the Opposition Front Bench,
has produced his own proposal
for what he and many others see
as the need to have a greater
proportion of female members of
the House of Representatives. He
favours amending the
Commonwealth Electoral Act, and
the Constitution, as would
surely be necessary, to halve
the present number of electoral
divisions, but have two
vacancies per division, with one
being open to male candidates
only and the other being open to
female candidates only. He
proposes that voters in each
division, regardless of which
sex they were, would each have a
single vote for each of the two
seats.
There
is a fundamental problem with all
such schemes where law makers
entrench permanent restrictions on
the voter, rather than having each
and every voter at each election
individually making his or her
direct untrammelled choice from a
wide range of candidates. It is
the attempt to remove from every
voter's control at each election
one of the factors that voters
should remain entitled to include
in their choice each time. At
present each voter's intended
contribution to the composition of
a particular House as indicated by
the voter's first preference vote
is, among numerous other factors,
for a male candidate or a female
candidate. Obviously a given voter
with a single transferable vote is
unable to give, whether the
division is single-member or
multi-member, a first preference
vote to both sexes equally - a
choice has to be made.
In
single-member electorates, where
organized parties nearly always
restrict themselves to a single
candidate, they have mainly
preselected males in the winnable
seats. Of the 147 MHRs in this
37th House of Representatives only
12 (8.2%) are women. It is
ministers from this House that are
currently pointing the finger at
the judiciary, whom such ministers
alone have selected over the
years. They are deploring the
failure of their appointees to
collectively reflect the
composition of sex, age and race
in the community. It appears not
to bother them greatly that they,
the appointers, do not
collectively reflect it either.
Perhaps the failure of the
judiciary to be a mirror might
be related to the failure of the
House to be a mirror. Measures
to make the judges of
transgressors against our laws
collectively more reflective
are being touted, but the
obvious and more fundamental
measure, to make the instigator
and maker of our laws, our Lower
House, more a Mirror
of the Nation's Mind,
by
converting to multi-member
divisions and using a Hare-Clark
form of proportional
representation for the election of
MHRs, has not inspired those that
profess such concerns about
judges.
In
multi-member electorates, like the
Senate's, parties normally stand
more candidates than they suppose
will be elected, just in case
their percentage of the vote is
higher than expected. If all the
candidates standing for a
particular party were extremely
similar, including being of the
same sex, a proportion of voters
might look for something different
in another party. If however the
diversity of the party's
candidates is maximized, without
being inconsistent with the
party's essential principles, the
range of that party's voters happy
to stay loyal is also maximized.
As a result candidates of both
sexes are normally offered in all
Senate electorates by all
successful parties, and there are
16 female senators (21.1%).
A
much better illustration of the
effect of multi-member electorates
with PR is given by Tasmania's
Hare-Clark system where, unlike
the stage-managed
Senate ballot-paper,
the ballot-paper shows an order of
candidates' names down the columns
that is not selected by the
parties. Under Robson
Rotation,
ballot-papers are printed in equal
batches having different orders. Australia's
first nation-wide use of Robson
Rotation is occurring now in the
postal ballot of telephone
customers choosing between Telecom
Australia
and Optus. To remove bias, the
ballot administrator, Austel,
has printed half the ballot-papers
with Telecom on the left side and
half with Optus there.
Unlike
the Senate ballot-paper format, as
dumped
former senators will attest,
the Tasmanian Assembly format
lacks death seats that
virtually guarantee non-election.
Those Senate positions are often
awarded by a Party Machine to
candidates that it honours
publicly, but that can be safely
relied upon to have been
positioned where there is minimal
risk of their being elected. In
Hare-Clark, the need to provide
candidates to fill casual
vacancies by countback
ensures that parties nominate
many more candidates than the
number they expect to be elected.
Also the parties know they have to
be candidates of quality because,
as the order of candidates' names
down the ballot-paper is not
stage-managed like the Senate's,
voters might actually elect them.
These days the parties tend to
nominate enough men and women to
allow equal numbers to be elected
if voters wish that, but
Hare-Clark does not force it. The
exact balance of men and women is
a matter for the voters'
priorities, as it should be.
Much
rhetoric about improving the
representation of women is
confused by the ambiguous meaning
of the word represent
and its derivatives in the
English language. The Concise
Oxford Dictionary lists six
meanings,
the last of which is the
parliamentary one where choice is
involved. The five meanings listed
earlier focus on likeness to,
corresponding to and symbolizing
the subject being represented. It
may be this linguistic uncertainty
that stimulates the naive proposal
that a House is representative if
the fixed and unarguable
characteristics of its members are
reflective of the readily
discernible and objectively
describable characteristics of the
people that it represents. Such a
shallow approach could lead to
suggestions that the distribution
of age, race, income, intelligence
etc. in a House should be the same
as that among the electors
generally. Those with that
approach should be reminded of the
need for as many voters as
possible to have the
representative they choose whether
that MP resembles them or not -
hence the phrase Mirror
of the Nation's MIND, If
the name for a PR House were being
coined today, the term House of Electees
might be considered. It more
clearly shows the relationship
needed between electors and MPs.
Mr
Carlton has a legitimate
complaint about most of Australia's
winner-take-all
Lower House systems, but his
remedy is arbitrary and
undemocratic. It would
unreasonably constrain female
voters as a class at a particular
future election where they may
actually prefer, of the available
candidates of both sexes, a
preponderance of males. Likewise
at such an election male voters as
a class might prefer, by a
significantly larger margin, a
majority of females. The proper
outcome there, which PR would
deliver, would be for a moderate
preponderance of females to be
elected. Mr Carlton's rigid rules
would leave us with exactly equal
numbers regardless of the quality
of the candidates, or the wishes
of the electors.
A Record
Early Start to the Senate Casual
Vacancies Game
Hopes
for a reasonable breathing space
before Quota Notes had to
report the swearing-in of the
first indirectly elected senator
for the Senate season that began
on 1st July were
dashed only five days after the
season began.
Senator Michael Tate stood
as an endorsed ALP candidate for the
poll on 13th March 1993 to fill the
six periodic Senate vacancies for Tasmania
for 1993-99, and duly achieved a
quota of votes. The Australian
of 7th August reported that he
decided on 19th March to leave the
Senate and accept a Government offer
of appointment as Australia's
next Ambassador to the Netherlands
and to the Vatican.
Following that decision he
completed his 1987-93 term, which
ended on 30th June and, on 1st July,
began the 1993-99 term for which he
had been elected. Senator
Tate resigned from the Senate
on 5th July - only four days from
the beginning of the six-year fixed
term for which many thousands of
Tasmanians had elected him. The cost
of the polling for his direct
election was paid for from the
general taxation raised by the
Commonwealth.
Unlike Tasmania's
direct
election by countback
for vacancies in its Assembly,
filling the Senate vacancy involved
three separate operations none of
which involved most of those that
had voted for Mr Tate. The
Mercury of 19th July in Hobart
reported the typical bitterness
within the Party Machine associated
with its naming the usually sole
candidate that is ultimately
appointed under the indirect
procedures of Section
15 of the Commonwealth
Constitution. A Labor MHA,
Mrs Judy Jackson, a former State
Minister, lost the contest for the
critical Centre-Left nomination for
the remaining 99% of the six-year
Senate term to Mrs Kay Denman, who
was private secretary to Hon.
Michael Field when he was Premier.
The Mercury
reported Mrs Jackson as saying that
she felt Mrs Denham may have been
manipulated by the male ruling
clique in the Centre-Left faction,
to which they both belonged. Party
sources said that it could be seen
that Mrs Denman was only filling the
position until the urgency of having
a woman candidate died down and the
seat could be taken by a man, and
also said that another member of
that faction, Michael Aird MHA,
had indicated a desire to be chosen
until the decision was made that a
woman should take the position.
"There
needs to be more women in politics
but they should be chosen on their
merits and not simply as part of a
power play by the men," Mrs
Jackson said. She said after her
defeat she was considering her
options, which could include
taking her campaign to the rank
and file members although it was
unlikely, because of the need for
party unity.
After the Centre-Left had
concluded its contest to decide its
preferred candidate, Mrs Denham was
nominated by it at a plebiscite of
all Tasmanian ALP members to decide
who would be put forward as the
Party Machine's sole candidate, to
be formally appointed by a joint
sitting of the Tasmanian Parliament.
Former senator Terry Aulich, who
had been dumped to fourth position
down the stage-managed
Senate ballot-paper, and was
assured because of that placement of
not being re-elected, stood at that
plebiscite but was defeated by Mrs
Denham who, unlike him, had not been
presented as a candidate to the
Tasmanian people at the 1993 Senate
elections. The Australian
reported that Mrs Denham received
63% of the vote at the plebiscite.
Calm did not yet
prevail. The Mercury of 25th
August reported that three members,
from both Houses of Tasmania's
Parliament, including Green
Independent and former law lecturer,
Dr Gerry Bates MHA, argued that the
joint sitting should be adjourned so
that the Speaker could get legal
advice on the disputed rules that
had been adopted for the joint
sitting, including whether they were
constitutional. Claims were made
that the procedures did not give
Parliament a choice, that there was
no formal vote taken, and that there
was no independent check on the
eligibility of Mrs Denman to take a
seat in Federal Parliament. Section
15 of the Commonwealth
Constitution is ill-conceived, and
should be replaced by a countback
system to allow direct election
by the voters.
The present Life
Peeresses (there are only
peeresses at the moment) in
Australia's Upper House are:
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VACATING
SENATOR
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SUBSTITUTE
SENATOR
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STATE
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PARTY
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END
OF TERM
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J.
Vallentine
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C.
Chamarette
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WA
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Greens
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30JUN1996
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M.
Tate
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K.
Denman
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Tas.
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ALP
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30JUN1999
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Activity in the
A.C.T.
The Convenor of the PRSA's ACT
Branch, Mr Bogey Musidlak, has
written to the ACT's Chief
Minister, Ms Rosemary Follett,
with several constructive
suggestions to assist in the
drafting of legislation to
implement the Hare-Clark system
in the Territory, and inquiring
when it would be completed. Ms
Follett's letter in reply
stated,
"Comprehensive
legislation to implement the Hare-Clark
system is currently being
drafted. The legislation will be
introduced into the Legislative
Assembly later this year".
She
also invited Bogey to discuss
the Branch's suggestions with an
officer of her Department
responsible for electoral
matters.
Earlier
the ACT Branch had made
submissions on the boundaries to
be adopted for the three electoral
districts that the ACT is to be
divided into for its first
Hare-Clark election. The
boundaries to be used were
gazetted in early September.
Bogey
was also active in his role as the
PRSA's National Research Officer
in which capacity he presented the
Society's submission to the
Federal Parliament's Joint Select
Committee on Electoral Matters in
its Inquiry into the Conduct of
the 1993 Election. A columnist in
The Canberra Times of 6th
September based his column on the
Society's submission and headed it
Swill
is in Reps, not the Senate.
Thesis on
Preferential Voting
Congratulations are in
order for the Secretary of the
PRSA's Queensland
Branch, Mr Tom Round, who has
had his degree thesis entitled A
Matter of Preference?
Defending the Single
Transferable Vote accepted
by the University
of Queensland.
One of the examiners in the
Department of Government that
approved the thesis was Mr Colin
Hughes, the former head of the
Australian Electoral Commission.
The thesis is timely in view of
New Zealand's
sorry choice between two
non-preferential systems, as it
illuminates the inadequacy of
both and contrasts them
effectively with their
preferential counterparts.
Quota
Notes Article reported in
the Senate
The leading
article on the March election,
in Quota
Notes No. 70,
was the subject of an
enlightened and informative
seven-minute speech
to the Senate on
the afternoon of 19th August by
Senator John Coulter of South
Australia.
©
1993 Proportional Representation
Society of Australia
National President:
Geoffrey Goode, 18
Anita Street,
BEAUMARIS VIC 3193
National Secretary:
John Alexander, 5
Bray Street,
MOSMAN NSW 2088
Tel: (03) 9589
1802; (02) 9960 2193 info@prsa.org.au
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