PROPORTIONAL REPRESENTATION ANALYSIS:
2002 POLLS FOR 55TH LEGISLATIVE ASSEMBLY OF VICTORIA
 
© 2002 Proportional Representation Society of Australia: 18 Anita Street Beaumaris 3193        www.prsa.org.au 
Tel 0395891802, 0429176725         Fax 0395891680           ggd@netspace.net.au         Final Data from www.vec.vic.gov.au
             
SEATS
             
ALP GREEN OTHER NAT LIB TOTAL
HARE-CLARK PROPORTIONAL REPRESENTATION SEATS 45 8 2 3 30 88
PRESENT SINGLE-MEMBER "WINNER-TAKE-ALL" SEATS 62 0 2 7 17 88
FIRST PREFERENCE VOTES 1,392,574 282,531 135,730 108,781 984,926 2,904,542
             
PERCENTAGES
             
ALP GREEN OTHERS NAT LIB TOTAL
% OF HARE-CLARK PROPORTIONAL REPRESENTATION SEATS 51.14% 9.09% 2.27% 3.41% 34.09% 100.00%
% OF PRESENT SINGLE-MEMBER "WINNER-TAKE-ALL" SEATS 70.45% 0.00% 2.27% 7.95% 19.32% 100.00%
% OF FIRST PREFERENCE VOTES 47.94% 9.73% 4.67% 3.75% 33.91% 100.00%
             
SUMMARY: Under a Hare-Clark electoral system the ALP would have still gained an absolute majority of seats, and would thus still be freed from its previous limitation of being a minority Government. The Liberal Opposition would have 76% more MLAs than the system of single-member districts has produced for them. The distribution of the Opposition's MLAs among the twelve multi-member groupings of existing Assembly districts is so sparse and skewed that a third of those groupings have no Liberal MLA at all, whereas under Hare-Clark PR all would have at least two Liberal MLAs, except for the North-west Port Phillip grouping, which would have only one.  
 
The proportionality within each multi-member district under Hare-Clark PR would result in the 9.1% of Green first preferences translating into 9.7% of seats, and the unjust over-representation of the Nationals being reduced from the "winner-take-all" figure of 7.9% to that of 3.7%, which is still a generous result for a first preference vote of 3.4%. The Nationals' three PR seats would give them representation over two rural 7-member districts, which is a representational status, parliamentary voice and presence over an area covering fourteen present districts - double the number of the seven districts for which they presently hold a monopoly of the representation. As a party with a declining voter base, the future rate of decrease of their PR parliamentary representation would approximate their rate of decline of votes better than the precipitously falling rate that a winner-take-all system soon produces, as the Liberal Party in the UK has found to its cost ever since the 1920s. 
 
The Government would have a much smaller majority of seats, but it would be less vulnerable as a result of seats becoming vacant, as Hare-Clark vacancies are filled not by a by-election poll, but by a re-examination, by the Electoral Commission, of the ballot-papers that formed the quota of votes that elected the vacating candidate at the last General Election.