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PROPORTIONAL REPRESENTATION ANALYSIS 2004 POLLS FOR THE 41ST AUSTRALIAN HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES Estimated No. of PR (Hare-Clark) Seats in possible multi-member divisions Copyright © Proportional
Representation Society of Australia 2004: www.prsa.org.au info@prsa.org.au Final AEC data, from www.aec.gov.au |
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Summary
Table:Click on
this table, which
shows that the returned Liberal Party
and National Party Coalition Government gained
only 46.70% of first
preference votes, yet gained 58.00%
of the single-member seats, whereas the ALP gained 37.64%
of the first preference votes, and 40.00%
of the seats. The table shows that this imbalance would not apply under a
Hare-Clark proportional representation electoral system, where the outcome
would be a Liberal and National Party Government with 50.67% of the seats, an ALP share of 44.67% of seats, with the Greens gaining a 2.67%
share, and the Independents
also gaining 2.00% of the
seats. Graph: Click on the graph of the
various parties' percentage of the vote, which illustrates the statement
above. Details of the 26
Multi-member PR Districts: Click on details to see the PR districts, the
votes in each, and the seats that would be won with that arrangement,
compared with the single-member seats actually won. The single-member system
reveals that in 56 of the 150 single-member districts an absolute majority of
voters cast their first preference vote for a candidate other than the
candidate that was elected. If the crude and unrepresentative first-past-the-post
form of voting had applied, the result would have been even more skewed, as
the ALP's total number of
seats would have been 8 fewer, and the Coalition's would have been 8 more. Discussion: Unexpected casual vacancies would
not threaten the Coalition Government's small PR majority nearly as much as
the present system can. Hare-Clark fills casual vacancies by countback
of general election ballot-papers, as for the Tasmanian and ACT Assemblies,
and the predictable party continuity lets Governments last full term. In
contrast, by-election polls in single-member seats are notorious for losing
those seats for Governments in power. That can effectively focus a
determination of a change of government on a single poll, in isolation, and
out of context with a general election. Countback, by
contrast, continues to determine who fills the seat on the basis of the vote
at the preceding general election, so all MHRs are elected by
decisions made in the various electoral divisions of the nation concurrently,
in the same election campaign. This election, as the graph
shows, demonstrates that the diversity of views of the electorate would have
been more faithfully represented in accordance with the extent of their
electoral support, and less distorted, if a Hare-Clark multi-member PR
electoral system had been used instead of single-member electoral districts. Under
Hare-Clark PR in Tasmania, a party has often won a majority of votes in one
or more of that State's five multi-member districts, but only once has a
Tasmanian MHA (Douglas Lowe in 1979) received an absolute
majority of first preference votes, because the diversity of candidates and
their support has nearly always let voters express their diverse views with a real chance of their being represented.
There is no restrictive "winner-take-all" scheme operating for the
Lower House of either |
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