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QUOTA Newsletter of the Proportional
Representation Society of Australia QN2019A March 2019 www.prsa.org.au
No vote of the people elected 10
current senators Quota
Notes again
raises, after its similar report in 2004,
the
embarrassing fact - for a country like
Australia, which prides itself on its
democratic values - that a significant
percentage of its senators can hold
office for up to nearly six years without having
had to face the voters in a
public election. The
1977 Constitution alteration that
discontinued the previous requirement that the
persons filling Senate casual
vacancies should be required to have been ‘chosen
by the people’, has once more resulted in
a significant number of
appointed, rather than elected senators. The
table below gives details of the ten
unelected senators. No State or major party is
without such a senator. Of those
ten unelected senators, six filled long-term
vacancies, and can sit until 30
June 2022.
NOTES: ·
Long-term
senators to 30 June 2022 are shown in red type. ·
Senator
Bushby’s substitute, W Askew, was his sister. ·
* The High
Court declared Senator Andrew
Bartlett, who was an unsuccessful Greens
candidate at the 2016 Senate election,
to have been duly elected instead of Larissa
Waters at that election, but he
resigned to allow her to be appointed after she
had renounced her Canadian
citizenship, which had earlier disqualified her.
In
the Senate debate on the Constitution
Alteration
(Senate Casual Vacancies) Bill 1977,
the PRSA supported the
eight senators opposing the Bill, and argued for
countback
instead of party
appointment. Victoria’s
municipal
representation reviews The
PRSA’s Victoria-Tasmania Branch has
lodged preliminary submissions to the first
twelve of the above reviews,
thirty-one of which are to be completed by April
2020. It
should soon be lodging response
submissions, after considering the
recommendations for various municipal
councils’ configuration of electoral districts
the Victorian Electoral
Commission has published on its website, which
also displays preliminary and response
submissions lodged by members of the public, and
interested organizations, such
as the councils themselves, local citizens’
bodies, and the PRSAV-T Inc. Regularly
updated details of the reviews -
and the submissions made by PRSAV-T Inc. - are
accessible at www.prsa.org.au/time2019.pdf. The
Victoria-Tasmania Branch is pleased
that the VEC’s preferred configuration for the
first three councils being
reviewed, which are in small rural
municipalities, is for a continuation of
their existing arrangement as single electoral
districts electing all seven of
the councillors, in each case. Victoria’s
Local Government Act 1989 requires
that elections in such
multi-councillor electoral districts be counted
by proportional representation
using the single transferable vote (PR-STV),
and
that casual vacancies be filled, if possible, by
countback. The
PRSA’s Victoria-Tasmania Branch often makes
the case that it is important for parity
in the district
magnitude among the
wards of a municipality to be an
important principle of municipal electoral
arrangements. It
is still open to the Victorian Electoral
Commission, in its recommendations to the
Minister for Local Government, to
incorporate that parity in its preferred
options. The
Andrews Labor Government introduced a
Bill for a new Local Government Act to replace
the present 1989 Act, which
would have made such parity mandatory, but
unfortunately that Bill lapsed
before the 2018 election, and a new Bill has not
been introduced yet. It
does seem inconsistent that the VEC has
not seen the value of parity, as had the
drafters of that Bill. A third ‘referendum’ on
Prince Edward Island on a
Mixed Member Proportional system Prince
Edward Island is the smallest of
Canada’s ten Provinces in both
area and population. With most of its land used
for agriculture, it is Canada’s
most densely-populated province, but its
population is less than a third of
that of Australia’s smallest State, Tasmania,
whose land area is almost 240%
larger. In
2018, the Province’s unicameral 27-seat
parliament legislated to hold its third poll
this century involving a possible
replacement of the province’s electoral system
of single-member electoral
districts using plurality
counting with a Mixed Member Proportional
system. Details
of this and the previous two polls,
the second of which included three other
options, are shown in the table below.
The date for the
poll was set for 23 April 2019, concurrently
with the general election for the
Legislative Assembly of Prince Edward Island.
Some
US Democrat senators propose replacing the
Electoral College with a direct
national vote Several
Democrat
senators in the United States have added their
voices to long-standing
proposals for an
alteration to the US Constitution
that would replace the indirect method of
electing the President and the
Vice-President of the United States, known as
the Electoral College, by a
direct nation-wide election. Unfortunately
there
has been no apparent move to use single
transferable
vote counting instead of the
longstanding plurality
counting used. An alteration would require
the approval of 75% of the States, so it is
hard to see how the present State
control of that, and most details of the
process, would result in a uniform
national system. Already
Maine and Nebraska have
different rules for electing their
presidential electors from the rest of the US.
Alabama’s provision for the
election of electors in 1960 is an
example of another decision by an individual
State. It might
prove
hard for the direct method they propose to
disregard State and Territory
borders, and give no special weighting to
smaller States, unlike the present US
Constitution, whose provisions have had those
restrictions since it was adopted in 1788. In her
post-election book, What
Happened, Hilary
Clinton does mention that she received over
2.8 million more votes than the winner, Donald
Trump, but she does not mention
that all her votes (non-transferable) amounted
to only 48.2% of the
popular vote, as 5 candidates stood. There has
been
interest in a direct popular vote, but reformers
would be wise to avoid the
form of two-stage direct popular plurality vote,
with a runoff, used for
presidential elections in France. Its problem in
the 2002 election
was demonstrated again in the 2017 election,
where the two top candidates in the first
round together gained only 45.31% of the vote. Neither of
those
two top candidates was from the broad, but more
fragmented, groupings of the
right, and of the left, that together gained
much of the remaining 54.69% of
the vote. Without votes being transferred until
one candidate gained over 50%
of the vote, the procedure restricts the
candidates in the second round to the
two most-strongly supported candidates at the
first round. A much
sounder,
transferable vote system is used to elect the
President of Eire, as can be seen
by the results of the 2011 election, where
the seven candidates standing was the highest
number that have ever stood. The winner of that
election after transfer of
preferences, Michael Higgins, gained 39.6% of
the first preference vote. He was
re-elected, as one of the six candidates at the
2018 election, with
55.8% of the first preference votes.
© 2019 Proportional Representation
Society of Australia
National President: Dr Jeremy
Lawrence npres@prsa.org.au
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