Fortunately, Australia has steered clear of electoral college systems, and party list systems such as the d'Hondt variant used in the ACT have generally been short lived. All members of the Legislative Council are currently directly elected. Nevertheless, there are threats to this principle, most importantly in the area of filling casual vacancies. We note that the original version of the Constitution (Proportional Representation) Bill 2000 allowed casual vacancies to be filled by appointment in some circumstances. We applaud the fact that this was later amended, though not to our preferred method. In the Senate, casual vacancies are filled by appointment and recently the number of senators that have not been elected by the voters has been as high as 10 percent of the Senate. In contrast Western Australia has a constitutional requirement that all members of both Houses be directly elected by the voters and this provision has prevented legislation that would have allowed member to be appointed to fill casual vacancies (instead, countback is now used).
Section 73(2)(c) of the Constitution Act 1889 of Western Australia2 is a good model for direct election of all members. That provision, which was introduced by Sir Charles Court's Government, is doubly entrenched. The provisions in Sections 7 and 24 of the Commonwealth Constitution are also entrenched, but unfortunately they do not yet extend to casual vacancies. If direct election were entrenched, it is hard to envisage such a safeguard being repealed at a referendum. Entrenchment is strongly recommended, as recent New Zealand electoral experience shows how easily a substantial element of indirect election can be accepted by voters if the question and the issue are not explicitly put to them as a proposal to relinquish the protection of direct election.
Group voting tickets are technically a shorthand for a predefined set of preferences and hence do not violate the principle of direct election (arguably, split tickets are an exception, but this has not yet been legally tested). Nevertheless, they can result in the same consequences as party list systems -- most preferences run according to what the parties dictate rather than the voters opinions of different candidates and hence candidates are more responsive to internal party pressures than to the voters. In Senate elections, a large majority of voters vote ``above the line'' without deliberately choosing the set of preferences that option translates to. Despite legislation requiring the display of group voting tickets or the availability of an explanatory booklet in all polling places, members of the PRSA have noted many cases where this has not been done or the print size renders the display unreadable to many voters. We discuss group voting tickets in more detail below.