Proportional Representation (Hare-Clark) Analysis of the 2004 Polls for the 41st Australian House of Representatives

PROPORTIONAL REPRESENTATION ANALYSIS

2004 POLLS FOR THE 41ST AUSTRALIAN HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES

Estimated No. of PR (Hare-Clark) Seats in possible multi-member divisions

www.prsa.org.au info@prsa.org.au Final AEC data, from www.aec.gov.au

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 thegraph 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 Tasmania or the Australian Capital Territory, as there is in all the other Lower Houses in Australia, which still continue to be elected from single-member electorates.

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