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QUOTA Newsletter of the
Proportional Representation Society of Australia QN2013B June 2013 www.prsa.org.au
The Irish
Republic’s Parliament established,
in July 2012, a 100-member Constitutional
Convention to
review, and to report to the
Parliament on, aspects of the Irish
Republic’s Constitution
including the system to elect
members to its lower house, the Dail Eireann.
That system, entrenched in the Constitution’s
Article 16(2) since 1922,
is proportional representation
using the single transferable vote
in electoral districts that each
elect no fewer than three members. The
Convention is expected to
issue its final report
soon. It has already
released results of the voting
in May and June that its
members have undertaken,
which show that: ·
79% opposed
replacing the existing PR-STV
system with a Mixed Member
Proportional
system, ·
86% supported
increasing the minimum number
of MPs per electoral district
from three to five, and ·
67% supported a
change to the alphabetical
ordering of candidates’ names on
ballot-papers. The
deliberations
producing such welcome outcomes appear in
thirty videos
of presentations
and debates.
Transferred control
over ACT Assembly size potentially reduces
voter influence On
13 February 2013, as the Prime Minister,
Julia Gillard, had
foreshadowed,
a Bill to
transfer control over the ACT
Legislative Assembly’s size was introduced
in the House of Representatives. It
provided that a full two-thirds majority
of the Assembly would be required to
effect any future changes.
The Senate passed it unamended on 21
March with no call for public input, so the resulting Act
overrode aspects of the 1995 entrenchment
of Hare-Clark principles. After
a Labor amendment to Gary Humphries's original
Bill, changing the Assembly size, if power
over it were transferred, could be achieved in
two ways, either through a two-thirds Assembly
majority, or by approval by a majority of
electors (in practice nearly 60% of formal
voters) after an Assembly majority initiated a
referendum. The
second alternative, which might have occurred
in response to an attempt to reduce the size
of the Assembly, is no longer available, and
where two-thirds Assembly agreement upon
change already exists, it is difficult to
envisage a referendum being held. Whether the
weakening of potential voter influence was
intentional is not clear. The
PRSA’s ACT Branch was very involved in securing the Hare-Clark
system and getting its key
principles entrenched, so it has long seen the
need for electors to be comfortable about
changes to the system. Its submission
to the Expert Reference Group the ACT
government set up to
examine optimal Assembly size did not seek
more MLAs, as various concurrent reforms of
processes and procedure would be necessary to
attract elector support or acceptance. The
submission showed how the 7-member
electorate more accurately reflected
voters’ wishes and over time led to a
higher percentage of women being elected.
It also gave concrete suggestions about
how the Assembly could more easily tap
into available community expertise, and
make the most of its available resources. The Expert Reference
Group’s report was publicly
released on 16 April. It firmly concluded that
7-member electorates were superior to those
electing 5 MLAs, but that 21 MLAs would be
insufficient to meet all the challenges of
good government. The Group recommended an
immediate or early move to five 5-member
electorates with a view to achieving five
7-member electorates within a further decade
or so. The ACT Branch’s submission had noted
that such large increases, above 100%, would
be unprecedented
among the States and Territories since
federation. The
report heeded arguments that reliance in
the discussion paper
upon unweighted aggregation of numbers
of representatives at three levels of
government was unsound, but was criticized
for overlooking the part-time nature of
various small-population legislatures
overseas. ACT
Greens’ submission
supported either three 7-member or
9-member electorates. The new Liberal
leader, Jeremy Hanson, was quickly sceptical
about a need for extra MLAs given the
exclusion of many resourcing matters from
terms of reference the government alone
drafted, and its being unwilling to
appoint any additional judge or minister. Mr
Hanson took the leadership decisively on 11
February 2013 as his predecessor, Zed
Seselja, won preselection over incumbent
Senator Gary Humphries in two internal polls
with repeated 30-vote margins.
The first attracted widespread complaints
about how much ACT Liberals were
disfranchised by the meeting attendance
rules. After Mr Seselja resigned from
the Assembly on 11 June 2013, seven
unsuccessful candidates, two being Liberals,
stood for the countback.
Just eight votes separated the Liberals
minutes after the computerized countback
began on 24 June. Nicole Lawder, Homelessness
Australia CEO, won on further preferences from
the female ALP and ACT Greens candidates that
were marked earlier on ballot-papers among Mr
Seselja’s 1.8 quotas
of first preference votes.
Article
by Vic-Tas Branch Members on
Unelected MPs At the time that a May 2013 joint sitting
of Victoria’s Parliament was conducting the
charade of ‘choosing’ a Labor Party member to
replace Hon. Martin Pakula MLC, who had
resigned from the Upper House to win the safe
Labor seat of Lyndhurst, The
Conversation website featured an article
by two members of the PRSA’s Victoria-Tasmania
Branch. Its editor chose the title, “Unelected Swill”,
alluding
to Paul Keating’s unfortunate gibe. The article pointed to
Australia’s then six unelected senators, but
at the current rate of departures there will soon be eight
at least. A joint sitting of WA’s
Parliament - at whose end the
Chairman admitted his declaration was
premature - ‘chose’ Susan Lines to replace
WA’s Senator Chris Evans. Also, Senator
Barnaby Joyce must resign if he is to contest
New England, where Nationals have preselected
him, and where its independent MHR, Tony
Windsor, is not standing.
Single-member-electorate
boundary
manipulation At Malaysia’s
2013 election, the governing Barisan National
Party ‘won’
handsomely with 47.4% of the vote. The
united Opposition received 50.9% of the vote,
but ‘lost’. The 133 Government-held seats
averaged 40,838 voters, but in the 89
Opposition-held seats this was 63% higher, at
66,277. Electoral districts were set to
contain more voters per district if likely to
return an Opposition member, making it very
hard for the Opposition to win. This ploy is called malapportionment,
where some seats represent many fewer electors
than others, in order to suit its designers.
It used to be a major injustice in Australia.
In South Australia’s contested Assembly seats
in 1953 and 1962,
Labor candidates won a clear majority of
votes, but the Liberal and Country
League retained government. The
nine and eight uncontested seats respectively
at those two elections made precise statewide
analysis problematic. Rural electorates, which
favoured the LCL, had far fewer electors than
those in urban areas. This was often defended
then as providing adequate representation for
rural people. The then LCL leader, Sir Thomas Playford,
became the longest-serving head of government
in the history of any Commonwealth realm, a
record he would be unlikely to hold if fair
elections had been held in South
Australia in that period from the 1950s
onwards. Until 1989, Queensland
practised malapportionment for decades,
incorrectly called gerrymandering, first with
the Hanlon ALP Government
and its successors, and eventually, for much
longer, with the Bjelke-Petersen
Government. With fair
boundaries, the latter’s National Party could
not have governed, except in its customary
coalition with the Liberals, following the 1983
election, at which the Nationals
won half of the 82 Assembly seats with only
38.9% of the vote, but gained two more MPs by
Liberal MPs defecting
to join the National Party. Australian
media stressed the unfairness of Malaysia’s
latest result, but not that of an equally
unfair and deliberately rigged result in
November 2012 – the United States House of
Representatives. The USA is the birthplace
and home of the gerrymander,
which is an electoral malfeasance that is, by
far, most feasible and effective in
single-member district systems. It is the contriving of
districts with intricate, oddly-shaped
and distorted boundaries to ensure undue gain
for one party. Elbridge Gerry,
Massachusetts Governor from 1810, and
Declaration of Independence signatory, set
boundaries a cartoonist drew as salamanders,
which were soon dubbed ‘gerrymanders’. In
the last US House election,
Democrats won more votes than their
Republican rivals by 49.0% to 47.7%, but
the Republicans ‘won’ the election with
234 seats, to 201 for the Democrats. In
the USA, gerrymandering still occurs as -
rather than an independent body applying
objective legislated criteria - it is the
legislature of each State that sets boundaries
for its State’s federal electoral
districts. Legislatures’ majority parties
routinely set boundaries after each
decennial census to advantage themselves. The
method is to group all the areas that vote
most strongly for a party’s opponents into
as few electoral districts as possible.
Selectively-shaped electoral districts
corral not only the bare majority
guaranteeing that opponents will win, but
also lock up many more surplus votes for
them so those votes cannot elect extra
members, and are thus of no
use to the opponents.
Exponents design their party’s own
districts with a safe, but not
unnecessarily high, winning margin. The ‘Gerrymander
Wheel’ shows how this
works. In
Pennsylvania, Democrat candidates won the
majority of votes (50.3%) in November
2012, but only 5 out of 18 districts.
Democrat-held districts are held with huge
majorities. All 13 Republican-held
district boundaries were drawn in
such a way as to ensure they all have much
smaller but still adequate majorities,
and only one of the 18 districts is what
Australians would call a ‘marginal seat’. Malapportionment
and gerrymanders
are regularly witnessed because
of the intrinsically unfair nature of the
single-member winner-take-all electoral
system, often combined with plurality
vote-counting (first-past-the-post), which
can magnify the unfairness. That allowed each
United Kingdom government from 1987 to 2010
to have a large Commons majority without even
45% of popular support, much less 50%. In 2005, the
Labour Party, under the Rt. Hon. Tony Blair,
ruled with only 35.2% of the vote. Distortions of democracy have
led to appalling results. In the 1948 general
election in South Africa – held
on more or less fair boundaries, but with a
very restricted franchise that denied the vote
to most non-white citizens – the governing
United Party won 49.2% of the vote, but it
lost the election. Government was ‘won’ by the
National Party. It only had the support of
37.7% of the voters but, as the National Party
voters were far more dispersed than the UP’s,
it secured a majority of seats and began the
disastrous apartheid system. An inherent weakness of
single-member systems is that usually almost
half the votes cast in each electoral district
elect nobody. Proportional electoral
systems lack that fault, as a
far greater percentage of the vote elects
representatives.
© 2013 Proportional
Representation Society of Australia National President: Bogey Musidlak 14 Strzelecki Cr. NARRABUNDAH 2604 Editor, Quota Notes: Geoffrey Goode 18 Anita St. BEAUMARIS 3193 Tel: (02) 6295 8137, (03) 9589 1802 Mobile 04291 76725 quota@prsa.org.au |
