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QUOTA Newsletter of the Proportional
Representation Society of Australia QN2019C September 2019 www.prsa.org.au
Review
of Tasmania’s Local Government
Act 1993 PRSAV-T Inc. lodged an online two-page submission to this
review. It supported some proposed
improvements to the Act, but only two of the
four options for electing Mayors, and it
opposed the other two. It also supported reducing the
minimum number of preferences for a ballot
paper to be formal - from the number of
positions to be filled, to five. The Review did not propose any
single-councillor wards, which have never
existed in Tasmania. In 1993, wards were
discontinued. All elections since then have
successfully used the Hare-Clark system. Should
the Senate electoral system be changed to
a Hare-Clark system?
The article below, followed by PRSA
comments on it, is by Dr Adrian Beaumont, an
honorary associate at The University of
Melbourne's School of Mathematics and
Statistics. He writes for both The Conversation and The Poll Bludger about
electoral politics in Australia and
internationally. Tasmania’s Hare-Clark system, with
Robson
Rotation, is a candidate-based
system for electing
Tasmanian lower house MPs. Unlike Australia’s
Senate, there has never
been any above-the-line voting
option. Batches of
ballot papers with different orderings of
candidates within each party are printed. That
removes the advantage of being the
first-placed candidate on ballot papers, and
makes it much harder for parties to recommend
how-to-vote
cards. In the Senate,
parties dictate
the ordering of their own
candidates. While the Hare-Clark system is
appealing to those that dislike party
orderings and think voters should choose which
of their party’s candidates they prefer, there
are legitimate objections to introducing
Hare-Clark for the Senate. One objection
is that an above-the-line ticket
box has been
available for the Senate since 1984. Tasmania
has used Hare-Clark for its lower house State
elections since 1907,
but other States have no equivalent system for
their lower house elections.
Without voter
familiarity, removing the above-the-line
box would be likely to result in a high
informal vote in the mainland States. In Tasmania,
Hare-Clark is used for lower house elections,
and candidates for the lower house tend to
have high profiles within that electorate. For
the major parties, the lower house is the
primary contest, and they would prefer not to
have to devote additional resources to
advertising their Senate candidates. As the media
focus at federal elections is on the lower
house, not the Senate, most voters are likely
to consider their Senate vote as an
afterthought to the main contest. That is not
the case in Tasmania, where quadrennial
general elections are held for the lower house
only, with staggered annual elections being
held for the upper house on a different date,
and only for a minority of its seats each
time. Having
low-profile Senate candidates could actually
benefit major parties in Hare-Clark because of
what analyst
Kevin Bonham calls the
‘Ginninderra effect’. In the
Australian Capital Territory electorate of
Ginninderra, at both the 2012 and 2016 ACT
elections, the Greens lost a seat to Labor
even though they had a higher party quota
fraction than Labor. The
Ginninderra effect occurs because Hare-Clark
is a candidate-based system. If two candidates
from the same party split the vote evenly
between them, they can each have a higher vote
than another party’s candidate, even though
that party may be closer to a quota when just
party votes are considered. If Hare-Clark
were introduced for the Senate, that effect
would be more likely to occur, given media,
party and voter focus on the lower house and
not the Senate. As introducing Hare-Clark for
the Senate would also very likely increase the
informal vote, I do not support its
introduction. PRSA
comments on Dr Beaumont’s article Quite deliberately, as a candidate-based system - which Section 7 of the Australian Constitution also requires the Senate to be - Hare-Clark has never had any above-the-line contrivance, or the regimentation of the vote created by the stage-managed order of candidates’ names on the ballot paper, which the Senate had from 1940, well before the major change to PR-STV in 1948. There is no
good reason why voters ought not regain their
full voting power by the removal of those
party machines’ accretions to the Senate
system put there by parties, to suit them, to
wean voters from using their full Section 7
power to directly choose an MP. Informality rate: The first argument he makes
against using Hare-Clark for the Senate is a
claim that it would ‘very likely’ increase the
informal vote, although he gives no estimate
of the extent of that. The following table shows the
percentages of the informal votes in recent
NSW Senate and Tasmanian Assembly polls. The
closeness of those percentages does very much
cast doubt on Dr Beaumont’s claim.
He says, ‘one
objection is that an above-the-line
ticket
box has been
available for the Senate since 1984’,
but that single
box was all that voters had to mark for a
formal ballot. Unfortunately, he fails to
mention that marking ‘an above-the-line
ticket box’ gave way in 2016 to ballot paper
instructions to mark at least six
such above-the-line
ticket boxes in order of preference, to cast a
formal ballot. Voters have promptly learnt,
with AEC and parties’ help, to mark six
boxes - at both the 2016 and 2019 Senate
polls. The law also
retained – to avoid a high informal vote - a
‘savings provision’ to deem a single mark as a
formal vote for that group’s candidates only. Suiting
parties’ preference, and media focus, should
not override the much higher public value of a
Hare-Clark ballot paper format empowering
voters, as it is not stage-managed, nor does it
take advantage of any voter’s hesitation about
marking real preferences. Hare-Clark encourages
such genuine marking. The
‘Ginnninderra effect’: The PRSA view
is that the effect Adrian describes is an
admirable outcome of Hare-Clark, which has
spared voters the deliberate distraction of
the above two contrivances. Voters have
long been successfully tempted to abdicate
their right to decide their direct
election of senators
by those contrivances. It will
greatly benefit democracy, as parties will
focus voters’ attention more on both
federal houses, rather than just the Lower
House. Hare-Clark for
the Senate will help achieve that, just as PR-STV did when it
replaced the former winner-take-all
systems in force up to 1948, which had kept
the Senate as a chronically unrepresentative
chamber until then. Death of
Colin Gordon Ball, OAM by Brian Austen The funeral for Colin Gordon
Ball, OAM, was held at St Clement's Anglican 1894 Heritage
Chapel, in Kingston, Tasmania, on
Friday, 30 August 2019, with
family, friends, former Commonwealth and State
electoral colleagues, and at least one former
parliamentarian, Peter Hodgman, in attendance.
Jacqueline Visager - an international exchange student from Arizona, USA - who had been hosted by Colin and his wife Helena, came all the way from Arizona to give a moving testimony, and to share memories with her ‘adopted’ Australian family. I attended as a
relative, with Colin’s daughter Belinda
married to the son of my cousin, but mainly
from my political connection with Colin
through his successive roles as Divisional
Returning Officer for Denison (now Clark),
Australian Electoral Officer for Tasmania,
and, from 1989 to 1991,
Chief Electoral Officer for the State of
Tasmania. I was the
Campaign Manager for the Australian Democrats
in Tasmania over several elections, beginning
with the famous by-election for the entire seven House of
Assembly seats for the electorate of Denison in 1980,
which included the election of the Australian
Democrat, Dr Norman Sanders. Colin was
widely known and respected for his knowledge
of the Hare-Clark electoral system, and for
valuing democracy. Dr George Howatt’s classic 1979 report to Tasmania’s Parliament -
successfully convincing it not to introduce
‘regimented’ ballot papers – also acknowledged
Colin’s advice. I remember
Colin’s helpfulness and willingness to explain
the more intricate workings of the counting
process, even to a political novice, but he
always urged proper democratic fundamentals
and processes. I well remember
how several campaigns later when organizing
scrutineering for the count in a particular
Senate election, Colin would explain how and
when to properly query decisions on ballot
papers and even properly challenge some of
those decisions. It was only
later that I came to realize that I was also
being used to challenge and teach his counting
staff on the counting and scrutineering
processes, but that was typical of Colin’s
nature and commitment to democratic processes.
Colin was an
advocate for the electoral rights of the
people in a democracy, and of electoral education as a means of strengthening the
exercise of those rights, but if these are not
continually reinforced and taught they might
be lost. I wonder whether there might be
interest in creating a fund to further Colin’s
legacy, perhaps to offer annually a monetary
prize for an essay on electoral processes in
parliamentary systems.
Nominations - for President,
Vice-President, Secretary and Treasurer - need be signed by the
candidate only, as consent to nomination,
and must be with Mr Goode, at PO Box 7019,
BEAUMARIS VIC 3193, or at nretoff@prsa.org.au by Tuesday, 15
October 2019. They will be on the Elections page.
© 2019 Proportional Representation
Society of Australia
National President: Dr Jeremy
Lawrence npres@prsa.org.au
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