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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!
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.
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 Vacancy 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.
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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