QUOTA
NOTES
Newsletter
of the Proportional Representation Society of
QN2005D
December
2005
www.prsa.org.au
Restoration of
direct democracy vital
In
Tenterfield on 22 October Senator John Faulkner, former Labor
Minister and Senate Leader, delivered the Henry Parkes Oration 2005
commemorating again the 1889 call for a Constitutional Convention that was a
catalyst for nationhood (http://www.parkesfoundation.org.au/Projects_oration2005.htm).
Following
former Labor leader Mark Latham’s diarised disowning
of involvement in organised politics a month earlier, Senator Faulkner began:
“In
The
media publicity obtained by the speech was largely confined to parts of a
forthright statement of the corrosive effects of factionalism based on spoils
rather than ideas:
“Undemocratic
practices are often blamed on factions and factionalism. There is nothing
inherently wrong or undemocratic about like-minded people voting together to
maximise their chances of success. It is, after all, the principle of Party
politics. When such groupings are based not on shared beliefs but on shared
venality, factionalism goes bad. When factional interests are
put ahead of the Party's interests, the Party rots.
As
Party membership declines, the influence of factional warriors increases. They
maximise their influence by excluding those who disagree, not through
leadership and persuasion. Those who defer to the powerbrokers are rewarded
with positions in the Party and with employment. This is not factionalism. It
is feudalism, and it is killing the ALP.”
Senator
Faulkner indicated that public funding, originally seen as levelling the
election playing field, had merely made campaigns much more expensive. This
placed a premium on the big corporate dollar and resulted in a downplaying of
the usefulness of individuals’ commitment and contributions.
Grass-roots
members were now “an afterthought and for many in the machine, an
inconvenience.”
The
Senator said that a restoration of direct democracy was a vital aspect of three
major desirable changes.
First,
there needed to be openness and transparency within political parties – “no
code-words, no cabals, no secret handshakes” and “as many as possible Party
officials, executives, committees and for that matter Senators, ought to be
directly elected or preselected by the Party membership.”
Secondly,
a level of responsibility in the media was essential, with meaningful
corrections receiving the same coverage and emphasis as any original error:
“Today,
as trash tabloids and opinion-for-hire commentators destroy any semblance of a
debate of ideas, the principle of informed decision-making at the heart of the
ideal of democracy drowns beneath racy headlines and print-now, retract-later
coverage. Radio shock-jocks and shallow television infotainment do the same.”
Thirdly,
although it was understandable that “the main preoccupation for our pioneer
national democrats was to preserve the rights of the residents of the colonies
while creating a new democratic institution”, it was time now to consider ways
of maximising “democratic participation in the constitutional reform process”
through a commission into constitutional reform as a starting point.
“Without
both an understanding of the practicalities of political change, and the
confidence that the citizen can shape the state, Australians will drift further
and further into disengagement and resentment. It is a dangerous moment for our
democracy. I hope it will be the impetus for renewal,” concluded Senator
Faulkner.
Many
supporters of proportional representation are motivated by the fairness of
balanced outcomes everywhere accurately reflecting voters’ views. Most
Hare-Clark advocates especially value the importance of voter influence on election day. Because there are no safe seats to be
allocated through backroom deals, and hence no guaranteed short-cuts into
Parliament under Hare-Clark, there are no incentives for branch stacking and
other unsavoury practices that regularly go hand-in-hand with single-member
electorates.
National Office-bearers for 2006-07
The
Returning Officer for the recent elections of PRSA National Office-bearers, Mr
Jim Randall, has declared the candidates below elected for the term
National
President:
Mr Bogey Musidlak
National
Vice-President: Mr Deane Crabb
National
Secretary:
Dr Stephen Morey
National
Treasurer:
Mr Robert Forster
The four positions were all filled unopposed.
Extending
voter influence not a feature of federal electoral legislation
Despite
the submission of the Electoral Reform Society of South Australia demonstrating
the problems of single-member electorates and calling for an end to Senate
ticket voting and its replacement with optional preferential voting to place
electors at the heart of the political system (see QN 2005A), the report
of the Joint Standing Committee on Electoral Matters into the conduct of the
2004 federal elections that was released in October 2005 (http://www.aph.gov.au/house/committee/em/elect04/report.htm)
did little to advance effective voting.
While the report contained a discussion of the pros and cons of
optional preferential voting (its application in the ACT was not correctly
summarised), it was not centred on the role of voters in a democracy, but dealt
more with the difficulty of achieving national uniformity given the
entrenchment of optional preferential voting for the Legislative Assembly in
New South Wales and the absence of consensus. Of the ERSSA proposal, it was
simply claimed that it "does not appear to have widespread support".
Unanticipated orders of
exclusion that saw preferences from defeated Australian Democrat and Labor candidates contribute decisively to the election of
Family First’s Senator Fielding in Victoria and only strong below-the-line
voting in Tasmania thwart a similar outcome from preference deals set out on
registered tickets gave rise to extensive public disquiet (see QN2004D).
Coalition members and Australian Democrat Senator Andrew Murray called for an
end to the current arrangements, and their replacement by compulsory marking of
individual preferences among all party boxes or the onerous current alternative
of marking nearly all squares below the line.
Votes marked in party boxes
would remain with candidates in a party column until all had been elected or
excluded before moving to the highest-listed continuing candidate in the next
available column. This change, based on altered New South Wales Legislative
Council arrangements but without voters free to choose how many boxes to
number, had been set out in the Senate Voters’ Choice (Preference
Allocation) Bill 2004 by Greens Senator Bob Brown.
The Committee unanimously
supported a continuation of compulsory marking of preferences for the House of
Representatives.
In other areas, pointing to
instances of false enrolments and claiming various Commonwealth and State
precedents, Coalition members stated that the integrity of elections would be
improved by closing the roll to newcomers (other than new citizens or those
about to turn 18) on the day an election was announced, and allowing those
already on it three days to report a new address. Others claimed that this
suggestion and a tightening in relation to identity requirements at the time of
enrolment constituted an attempt to tilt the single-member playing field in favour
of the Coalition, as did a rise (the first since 1992) from $1,500 to $10,000
in disclosure thresholds for individual political donations and broader scope
for tax deductibility, and moves to disfranchise all full-time prisoners (but
allowing them to remain enrolled).
Four year terms for the House
of Representatives were also put forward during the Committee’s deliberations
and immediately scotched by the Prime Minister, while Finance Minister Senator
Minchin’s publicly-expressed hope that a mandate for voluntary voting would be
sought at the next election also brought a swift statement that there would be
no change in Government policy. The Committee recommended four-year terms,
encouraging more debate on consequences for the Senate, and a specific enquiry
into voluntary voting.
Special Minister of State
Senator Eric Abetz enthusiastically supported many of
the changes the Committee proposed (http://www.smos.gov.au/speeches/2005/sp_20051004_electoral.html). However, House
of Representatives terms, voluntary voting and Senate voting matters were not
taken up in the Electoral and Referendum Amendment (Electoral Integrity and
Other Measures) Bill 2005 introduced at the end of the year’s sittings.
There were amendments relating to enrolment procedures, reporting thresholds
for campaign donations and their greater tax deductibility, voting by
prisoners, and ensuring registration requirements tightened in 2004 applied to
all parties without parliamentary representation.
Under winner-take-all electoral systems, any advantage gained from
eligibility arrangements for voting can be crucial in marginal electorates.
Where systems of quota-preferential proportional representation are in use,
because the effects from inclusion or exclusion of relatively small numbers of
voters are limited, parties are more likely to put effort into maintaining or
improving their local standing than trying to tilt particular electoral
arrangements to their advantage.
First Woman
Chancellor Heads Second German Grand Coalition
A
period of declining political fortune for the Social Democrats (SPD) (in the
wake of continued high unemployment and social welfare cuts) culminated in the
last state-level red-green coalition being turfed from office in North
Rhine-Westphalia in May 2005. Languishing in the polls by up to 20% behind an
expected Christian Democrat and Free Democrat alliance, Chancellor Gerhard Schröder wanted to take the initiative by seeking voter
approval for his Agenda 2010 platform a year earlier than necessary.
On 1
July, following a precedent set early in the first term of Helmut Kohl, 148 of
his supporters abstained on a confidence motion that was in consequence lost.
The President set elections for 18 September after the
Under
Germany’s mixed member proportional system, electors have two votes, the first
in constituencies decided on a first-past-the-post basis, and the second which
determines national and then state representation in proportion to the number
of those votes won by parties meeting either of two eligibility criteria:
achievement of 5% of the second vote nationally, or success in three
constituencies (both waived for parties representing recognised regional ethnic
minorities).
There
are 299 constituencies that are periodically reviewed, together with notionally
a further 299 party-list places in the Bundestag: independents may stand only
in constituencies. Under the Hare-Niemeyer system, total national second votes
for each qualifying party are multiplied by 598 and divided by the sum of
second votes for all such parties: there is an entitlement to a seat for each
full quota of votes achieved, with the rest allocated by rounding up as many of
the highest fractional remainders as is necessary.
National
entitlements for each party are then distributed among the states in proportion
to votes it received there, with again as many of the highest fractional
remainders rounded up as is necessary to exactly complete the allocation. Total
seats in a state are therefore not always double the number of constituencies
and only become known after an election.
Normally
the number of list seats in a state for a successful party is the difference
between its entitlement on the basis of second votes and the number of
constituencies won through first votes. Where a party has won more
constituencies than its state entitlement, additional “excessive mandates” (überhangmandate) are created in the next parliament.
There
are no by-elections. Replacements come from a party’s next available candidate
on the state list. However, a constituency vacancy is only filled if the party
concerned has no remaining excessive mandates in that state.
Order
of parties on both parts of the ballot-paper is determined in each state by the
relative magnitudes of second votes at the previous election for the Bundestag,
the rest following alphabetically. A total of 3,648 candidates came forward in
2005, 742 just in a constituency and 1,586 only on a state list, and 1,320 in
both capacities.
The
Social Democrats, Christian Democrats and Free Democrats had candidates in each
constituency, the Greens in 297 of them and the Left Party (combining the
successor of the Socialist Unity Party in the East with the Labour and Social
Justice Party in the West that included several SPD dissidents) in 290. In the
constituencies, 21% of candidates were female, compared with 32% of those in
the state lists (http://www.bundeswahlleiter.de/bundestagswahl2005/presse_en/index.html).
During
the campaign, once the putative Christian Democrat Finance Minister proposed a
flat tax and Dr Merkel indicated that value added tax would have to rise, Chancellor Schröder went on
the offensive energetically, asking Germans not to accept such a radically
different way of life that favoured the rich. The gap between the largest
parties continued to shrink rapidly in polls, but observers were still
surprised at how close the final vote was.
Turnout
was a lowest-ever 77.7%, a 1.4% decline from the previous election, and 4.5%
lower than in 1998. Spoilt or otherwise invalid papers amounted to 1.8% of the
constituency vote and 1.6% of the party-list vote, compared with respectively
1.5% and 1.2% in 2002.
The
Christian Democrats (43.6%) achieved nearly a 4% margin over the Social
Democrats in
The
Social Democrat vote nationally fell from 38.5% to 34.2% and that for the
Christian Democrat coalition from 38.5% to 35.2% (most noticeably in
Elections
in one
Of
the constituencies, 145 (48.5%) were won by the Social Democrats with 38.4% of
first votes, and 150 (50.2%) by the Christian Democrat coalition on 40.8%.
Sixteen excessive mandates were created (there were just five in 2002), nine
for the Social Democrats (who won all constituencies in Hamburg, Brandenburg,
Saarland and Saxony Anhalt) and the rest for the
Christian Democrat coalition (who took all but one constituency in Bavaria and
all but three in Saxony).
The table below shows
national support and seats for parties that obtained representation in the
Bundestag, with figures in brackets indicating the relevant proportion of
seats. As just 3.9% of second votes were wasted this time, despite the significant
distortion in relation to the constituencies, total seats closely reflected
overall voter support levels.
Summary of
national outcomes for successful parties
|
|
first
votes % |
direct
mandates (%) |
list
seats (%) |
total seats (%) |
second
votes % |
|
CDU/CSU |
40.8 |
150 (50.2) |
76 (24.1) |
226 (36.8) |
35.2 |
|
SPD |
38.4 |
145 (48.5) |
77 (24.4) |
222 (36.2) |
34.2 |
|
FDP |
4.7 |
- |
61 (19.4) |
61 ( 9.9) |
9.8 |
|
Left
Party |
8.0 |
3 ( 1.0) |
51 (16.2) |
54 ( 8.8) |
8.7 |
|
Green |
5.4 |
1 ( 0.3) |
50 (15.9) |
51 ( 8.3) |
8.1 |
Source: Federal
Statistical Office
A
tug-of-war immediately began over who should lead a grand coalition of the
Social and Christian Democrats (the Left Party had been universally ruled out
as a coalition partner in government before the election). After three weeks,
Angela Merkel prevailed on the basis of greater national voter support, and was
ratified as Chancellor when the Bundestag first met on 22 November, a week
after the detailed coalition agreement was settled. Gerhard Schröder
retired from public life and, following an adverse internal vote, Social
Democrat chairman Franz Müntefering stood aside from
that leadership position after the composition of the Cabinet with 8 SPD and 6
CDU/CSU Ministries (plus the Chancellor and a support Minister) was negotiated
with him as Labour Minister and Vice-Chancellor.
Vale Rod
Donald, NZ Electoral Reformer
On 6
November, the day before the swearing-in of the forty-eighth New Zealand
Parliament, Greens co-leader Rod Donald died suddenly of a heart attack at the
age of 48, before he could take responsibility for a “Buy Kiwi” initiative in
the term of the new Labour-led government (see QN 2005C).
Political
leaders and the media paid tribute to his personal integrity, the consistency
between his beliefs and lifestyle, and the genuineness of his forceful
advocacy.
Mr
Donald had been a major national proponent of the mixed-member proportional
(MMP) system, particularly in the period between the 1986 release of the report
of the Royal Commission on the Electoral System and subsequent referendums in
1992 and 1993 that saw the previous first-past-the-post system ditched. He
remained an articulate promoter of the new system and, after being elected to
Parliament in 1996, originally as a Green Party member of the
While
the PRSA has no enthusiasm for MMP arrangements because the Hare-Clark system
used in
Victoria’s
Municipal Election Configurations
The
November 2005 round of Victorian municipal elections was the last before 2008,
when all councils in the State will again hold elections on the same day, for
the first time since the Kennett Government’s changes in 1993 (see QN2004B).
>From then onwards, elections will be held for all municipal councils every four
years on the last Saturday in November.
The
2005 polls were the first time in Victoria where quota-preferential
proportional representation was the only electoral system that was used in any
multi-member municipal electoral district (ward or undivided municipality as
the case may be).
Of
the 79 municipalities in existence, 14 are undivided, 11 all have three-member
wards, 12 have multi-member wards of which at least one returns an even number
of councilors, and 13 have at least one multi-member
ward along with one or more single-member wards.
The
remaining 29 municipalities have between 5 and 12 single-member wards and
therefore have not yet experienced any of the benefits of quota-preferential
proportional representation.
The
PRSAV-T hopes that forthcoming statutory representation reviews beginning at
the start of 2007 and continuing until mid-2008 result in further improved
electoral arrangements. The Branch has conveyed to the Government the
desirability of having a consistent straightforward system under which all
councils are either undivided or have all wards returning the same odd number
of councillors, at least three.
© 2005
Proportional Representation Society of
National
President: Bogey Musidlak 14 Strzelecki
Cr. NARRABUNDAH 2604
National Secretary: Dr Stephen Morey 4 Sims Street SANDRINGHAM 3191
Tel: (02) 6295 8137, (03) 9598 1122 Fax (03) 9589 1680 ggd@netspace.net.au
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