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QUOTA Newsletter of the Proportional
Representation Society of Australia QN2019B June 2019 www.prsa.org.au
Minister flags plan to
remove Bracks’s 2003 option for
multi-councillor wards Victoria’s
Labor Minister for Local Government, Hon.
Adem Somyurek MLC, has sought comment on
his proposal for a Local
Government Bill 2019 that would result
in a new Local
Government Act 2019 replacing the
present 1989 consolidated Act. The
Andrews Labor Government had begun that
process late in its first term when it placed
online the text of its then Local
Government Bill 2018, and sought public
comments on it, which were, as promised,
posted on its website. That
bill was passed by the Legislative Assembly,
but stalled in the Legislative Council,
following which it lapsed when both houses
were dissolved prior to Victoria’s 2018 State
elections. Both
major parties had recognized the need for a
replacement of the 1989 Act. The Napthine
Liberal Government had, in 2013, established a
Local Government Review Panel, chaired by a
former member for the federal seat of Kooyong,
Petro Georgiou, which received public
submissions, including
those of the PRSA’s Victoria-Tasmania Branch,
and later made recommendations to the then
Liberal minister, but no legislation
eventuated. Neither
that Liberal Government’s panel, nor the very
open and public online processes undertaken by
the subsequent Labor Government, under its
first Local Government ministers, Hon. Natalie
Hutchins MLA and later, Hon. Marlene Kairouz
MLA, raised the prospect of any proposal to
remove the option for multi-councillor wards.
Since
the Bracks Labor Government’s Local
Government (Democratic Reform) Act 2003
- which provided that elections in such wards
would all be counted by proportional
representation using the single transferable
vote (PR-STV)
- Victoria’s municipalities have been
increasingly coming to be elected from
multi-councillor wards, to the extent that
such wards are now the dominant system. The
current minister, Hon. Adem Somyurek MLC, has
alluded to a proposed Local
Government Bill 2019, but he has not
released a draft of such a bill. Instead, he
has stated online a few major aspects that he
intends to include in the bill, the most
concerning of which is the quite unexpected
proposal to remove the present option for
multi-councillor wards. The PRSA’s
Victoria-Tasmania Branch intends to respond to
the invitation on the Local Government
Victoria website to email a submission. That
will be viewable here,
but LGV’s website had no plan - as it did in
the Andrews Government’s previous term - to
display the submissions it received.
for
all Tasmanian MHAs, and for senators in all
States This
year is the 110th anniversary of the first
Tasmania-wide poll to elect members of the
House of Assembly under the Hare-Clark system
of proportional representation using the
single transferable vote (PR-STV).
Hare-Clark
has been used continually for that House’s
elections ever since. It has evolved well in
three major ways:
The
Hare-Clark system was first used in 1896 when
its leading proponent - Andrew
Inglis
Clark, who fortunately
was Tasmania’s Attorney-General, and who
fittingly was recently commemorated by having
the co-terminus Federal and State divisions of
Denison renamed Clark in his honour – managed
to convince the Legislative Council to have it
used, for one election, in Hobart and
Launceston, which were made multi-member
districts. The Legislative Council accepted
its value, and it was approved for
Tasmania-wide use for Assembly elections in
1907. This
year is also the 70th anniversary of the first
election at which all of Australia’s vacant
Senate positions were filled using PR-STV. New South Wales
2019 Legislative Council polls
On 23 March 2019. a New South
Wales general election was held to elect 93
members of its Legislative Assembly. Also elected
were 21 members of its 42-member Legislative
Council.
Elections for the NSW Legislative Council are counted by proportional representation, using the single transferable vote (PR-STV). Schedule 6 of the NSW Constitution Act 1902 requires voters to record preferences for at least 15 candidates on the ballot, either through numbering individual candidates below-the-line, or at least one group above-the-line. The NSW Electoral Commission website does not reveal the percentage of ballots that are cast using the two options of above-the-line or below-the-line. The overall result for the half of the Legislative Council elected is shown in the table below. The percentages of first preference votes received for each party can be found on the NSW Electoral Commission website, and at Wikipedia.
As
has been observed in other recent elections,
such as the Victorian elections in
November 2018, the percentage of voters
casting votes for non-major parties continues
to increase. Thus,
in the New South Wales elections, the
percentage of voters that supported non-major
parties (i.e. did not vote for Liberal,
National or Labor), was 38.5%, a higher
percentage than for either of the two major
party groupings. Voters
that did not vote for Greens, Labor or
Liberal-National, amounted to 28.8% of all
voters, which is more than voted for Labor.
They voted for 17 minor parties as well as
ungrouped candidates. From among those small
parties, 4 MLCs - which was 19% of the seats
being contested - were elected. No independent
candidates were elected. In
the Lower House, the Legislative Assembly,
which consists of 93 single-member divisions,
significantly more people gave their first
preference vote to major parties, as shown in
the table below:
The Indian federal elections in
May 2019 On 23
May 2019, five days after the most recent
Australian federal elections, the counting of
votes in the 2019 election for the lower house
of the Indian Parliament, the Lok Sabha,
occurred. That count progressed quite rapidly.
It began at 8 am Indian time, and the result was
clear ninety minutes later. This
election was the world’s largest ever in terms
of the number of voters and the numbers of votes
cast. It showed a slight increase in the turnout
percentage, up 0.7% to 67.11%, apparently the
highest on record since the first Indian
election in 1951. The
lower house consists of 545 single member
electorates, all elected using plurality
counting (first-past-the-post). The overall result of the
election for
the lower house was that the governing Bharitya
Janata Party (BJP) - led by the Prime Minister,
Narendra Modi - won
303 seats, with 38.5% support, and the main
opposition Congress Party won only 52 seats,
with 19.5% support, which was not a very
proportional outcome. The
remaining 190 seats were won by candidates from
33 other parties and 4 independents. Men
constitute 85.5% of
the members of the house.
India’s
voters do not directly elect its upper house,
the Rajya Sabha, but India’s Constitution -
which is said to be the longest in the world, and
can only be altered by
parliamentary votes - provides in its Article
80(4) that the votes that State MPs cast for its
members are counted by PR-STV. As
at June 2019, the total number of votes for each
party was not readily available online. The
percentage of votes State-by-State is here.
An
example of the extent of plurality’s failings
can be gleaned from studying the result in the
State of Assam, with which the PRSA National
Secretary, who has drafted this article, is very
familiar. Although
no totals of the number of votes for each party
contesting in Assam are online, there is the
percentage of votes cast for each party, and
that can be compared with the seats won. As
can be seen in the table below for the State of
Assam, the governing Bharitya
Janata Party (BJP) is
significantly over-represented compared to the
percentage of votes it received.
The
Indian National Congress Party, which governed
India for most of the time since India’s
independence began in 1947, is significantly
under-represented by that measure.
Indian electoral constituencies
vary significantly in district
magnitude. One of the larger ones in the
State of Assam is Gauhati, the capital of Assam,
where there were 1,763,757 valid votes cast,
and the district was won by the BJP's
candidate, Q Oja, with 1,005,936 votes, which
was 57.2% of those valid votes cast.
National President: Dr Jeremy
Lawrence npres@prsa.org.au
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