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QUOTA
QN2020D December 2020 www.prsa.org.au
Surprising, but mixed,
recommendations by the Australian
Parliament's JSCEM Of the 27 recommendations
in the Report
of the Australian Parliament’s Joint
Standing Committee on Electoral
Matters (JSCEM) on its Inquiry into
the conduct of the 2019 federal
election, the six discussed below are
cases where the PRSA is likely to
provide its support for some, but its
concern about others. Recommendation 2: The Committee
recommends that the Electoral Act be
amended to: ·
replace
compulsory preferential voting with
optional preferential voting; and ·
introduce the Robson
Rotation of ordering
candidates on ballot papers for the
House of Representatives. This fully optional
preferential voting proposal lacks the PR-STV thrust
of the PRSA’s Policy PRSA-002
‘House of Representatives’, but it
does include two aspects of the
Neutral Ballot Paper paragraph
of that policy. Unlike the PRSA, a critic
wants party
list PR. PRSA Policy is to replace
the House’s system of single-member
divisions with multi-member divisions
using proportional representation with
the single transferable vote (PR-STV),
where a number of vacancies are to be
filled for a division concurrently. Fully optional preferential
voting without PR-STV unfortunately runs
the risk of the present single
transferable vote system
degenerating into a largely de
facto plurality
(first-past-the-post) system, as
happened for Queensland state
elections when such an OPV system
operated from 1992 to 2015. There is already a strong
precedent for the application of Robson
Rotation, and for partial optional
preferential voting in Tasmania’s
Legislative Council. A ballot in its
single-vacancy winner-take-all
divisions is not informal just because
it fails to show preferences marked
beyond the
first three preferences. Such a requirement for a
partial optional preferential voting
system avoids a degeneration into a
plurality system, and the absurdity of
forcing voters to mark a preference
order for some ten or so candidates,
most of whom would be obscure.
The
Barton Government’s Commonwealth Electoral
Bill 1902 sought fully
optional transferable voting, but the
Senate successfully held out for both
Houses to have plurality voting, which
remained until 1918. Using
Robson Rotation for ballot papers for
the House’s single-member divisions
again has a precedent in its use for the
single-member divisions for Tasmania’s
Legislative Council. Submission 58, by the
PRSA’s South Australian Branch, made a
good case for mandating Robson
Rotation. Recommendation
19: This
would require persons that were not
representing candidates, but were
offering how-to-vote material, to
remain at least 100 metres away from
the entrances to polling booths. Other
persons offering such material would
have to remain at least 6 metres from
the entrances. Recommendation
24: This
seeks another referendum to alter Section 24 of the
Constitution to remove its nexus
requirement that the number of MHRs be
as close as practicable to twice the
number of senators. A 1967 referendum on that
question yielded a
59.75% NO vote. Only NSW had a
majority YES vote. Why would most voters in
the five smaller States ever vote to
reduce their representation relative to
NSW? Recommendation
25: This
wants the Government to ask the JSCEM to
inquire into increasing the size of the
House of Representatives, given the
steadily increasing average enrolment in
House divisions. Recommendation
26: This
seeks to replace the limit of 3 years
for MHRs’ terms with a limit of 4years,
and to change the fixed term of senators
from the present 6 years to 8 years, “to
bring the Commonwealth Parliament into
line with State Parliaments”. PRSA members would not be
Australia’s only voters to ask why they
would want to vote for longer terms,
given the unrepresentative nature of the
House’s winner-take-all electoral
system, and the blatant stage management
of the Senate’s above-the-line
voting option. Most State Parliaments
moved from 3-year terms to 4-year
terms with no attempt to seek voters’
approval. That longer period of
comfort for MPs might well be seen as
perhaps a self-interested move.
Recommendation
27: This
wants the Government to ask the JSCEM to
inquire into: (a)
the viability of replacing by-elections
for the House of Representatives with
alternative methods of selecting (sic)
the replacement MP, and (b)
viability and ramification of
determining a seat to be declared vacant
when the sitting MP resigns from or
leaves the Party under which they were
elected. In regard to (a) above, the
PRSA’s Policy PRSA-002 - which calls for a
multi-member electorate system for the
House - is that casual vacancies
should be filled by direct election
using countback,
with Tasmania’s contingency provision
for a by-election poll if necessary. Countback, with that
provision, could be used as a direct
election system
for single-member divisions. That use
could have political parties each
nominating two or more candidates,
which would give voters more choice of
directions within a party. It could
also assist the widely-perceived need
for more
female
‘representatives’. For (b) above, the JSCEM,
which is made up entirely of MPs from
registered political parties, would seem
to have utterly lost sight of the most
important wording, “…
directly elected by the people …”, which
is common to both Sections 7
and
24
of the Constitution.
The smooth words used, “...
the Party under which they were
elected …”, with its capital P
for Party, ignores the plain meaning
of the Constitution’s commands:
senators and MHRs must be
directly
elected by
the people. That means that the people
are not electing Parties.
Changes not recommended
by the JSCEM:
The JSCEM considered the option of
legislation to not have each state as one
electoral district for Senate
elections, but did not recommend such a
change.
An example of such an
option was the 2020 private member’s
bill of former Coalition Deputy Prime
Minister, Hon. Barnaby Joyce MHR. That
bill, the Representation Amendment
(6 Regions Per State, 2 Senators
Per Region) Bill 2020
lapsed for want of support in November
2020 after its second reading,
which was seconded by the Hon. Bob
Katter MHR. If that bill had been
enacted, the district
magnitude
for all Senate electorates would have
been set at two, as for the ACT and
the Northern Territory, which would
have normally resulted in each state
electing six Coalition senators and
six Labor senators, which might have
been what Mr Joyce really wanted.
Dissenting reports by
Labor and the Greens: Both dissenting reports
opposed Recommendations 2 and 27, but
supported 19, 24, 25 and 26.
Transferable votes at some U.S.
national polls It is
noteworthy that the electoral system
that uses the single transferable vote
applied - for the first time at any U.S.
federal election - for all of the
single-vacancy positions at the 2020
federal elections in the small state of
Maine,
which has only two districts for the
House of Representatives. Maine
and Nebraska are the only states where
all the Presidential Electors are not
elected by a bare plurality of a
state-wide vote. Instead, two Electors
are elected state-wide, with the others
elected as a single vacancy in each of
the House districts. As it
happened, in Maine, no preferences were
transferred, as each of the contests had
an absolute majority of the votes for a
slate of candidates. Donald Trump gained
one Elector in Maine’s large rural
district. Joe Biden gained one from the
small urban district, and two from the
state-wide vote. This
small, first move at the federal level
for replacing plurality voting with
single transferable voting - albeit it
not PR-STV -
does take the U.S.A, after 244 years, a
little bit further towards the idea its
1776 Declaration of Independence called,
in the language of the day, “…
a decent respect to the opinions of
mankind …”. Maine’s Senate, but
not its House of Representatives, also
used that system. Australia’s
first replacement of plurality voting by
the single transferable vote system was
124 years ago, in Tasmania, in 1896. It
was a trial use for the two major urban
electoral districts for both its
Legislative Council and Legislative
Assembly, which was made permanent for
the whole State by Tasmania’s Electoral
Act
1907.
Its
first use under Australian federal
legislation was for a House of
Representatives by-election in 1918,
although that House had wanted transferable
voting prescribed for both Houses via an early version of
its Commonwealth
Electoral Bill 1902. The
Senate opposed that, so plurality voting
for federal elections persisted until
the Commonwealth
Electoral
Act 1918 changed the House of
Representatives system, and the Commonwealth
Electoral Act 1919 changed the
Senate system, to a form of transferable
voting, but not PR-STV.
The
election for the Australian Capital
Territory’s 25 MLAs held in October 2020 This second election for
the Legislative Assembly of the Australian
Capital Territory with 25 MLAs to be
elected, was also the second election where
most elected MLAs were women. The number of
Greens Party MLAs trebled, from 2 MLAs to 6.
A summary of the outcome is
shown in Table 1 below.
Table 1: Summary of the 2020
election for the Legislative Assembly of the
Australian Capital Territory Pre-poll voting was
encouraged, because of the COVID-19
pandemic. The number of voters utilizing
that was markedly higher than in
previous elections - 69.9% of the total
ballots cast, compared to 33.7% in 2016.
The pandemic and other
factors hampered
campaigns as there were long periods when
face-to-face campaigning was reduced, and
media coverage was dominated by the pandemic
rather than local political issues. This was the second
election for 25 MLAs in five 5-member
electorates. Last time the Greens had two
MLAs elected. The surprising
outcome for the Greens was their
MLAs increasing from two to six members,
which was a record for them. Greens candidates
won 24% of the seats with 13.5% of the first
preference vote plus enough votes
transferred - as voters chose - from ballots
for the 12 other groups whose candidates
were excluded as they and their groups each
failed to gain more than 2.5% of the overall
first preference vote. Those votes largely
went to the Greens. In party list systems,
those votes would be wasted. Malcolm Mackerras’s
prediction
was that the Greens would not make any
gains, but the overall swing to Greens
candidates on first preference votes was
3.2%, which proved enough to allow them to
receive transfers from ballots cast for the
many minor party candidates, and from
surplus votes for Labor candidates. The Greens claim it
was astute
campaigning,
but serious missteps from both the Liberals
and Labor helped the Greens do well. The
Liberals seem to realize that they failed to
win because of their uninspiring campaign,
and did not blame the Hare-Clark
system. This time the Greens abandoned their
earlier use of roadside
signs and
letterboxing. A significant
increase
in voters’ use of the ACT’s electronic
voting system, reaching 70.6%,
compared to 29.6% in 2016. Electronic voting
was available at the pre-poll centres, so
that largely followed the trends with
pre-poll votes, but the electronic voting
system had also been updated to be more
user-friendly, with touch screen rather than
keyboard entry of preferences. Queensland
elections 2012-20
The
2020
election was the
second Queensland election after the
increase in 2016 in the number of MLAs from
89 to 93. It was also the second election
after the dramatic change of fortune
experienced at the 2015 election by the
former Liberal
National
Party Government led
by the Hon. Campbell Newman.
Table
2: Qld. 2012 Assembly seats vs. first
preferences
Table 3:
Qld. 2015 Assembly seats vs. first
preferences For the 2017 election, the
House was enlarged to 93 members, and
numbering all squares on the ballot paper
was made compulsory.
Table 4:
Qld. 2017 Assembly seats vs. first
preferences
Table 5:
Qld. 2020 Assembly seats vs. first
preferences Mr Newman, a former Lord Mayor
of Brisbane, had campaigned, at the 2012
election, as the elected leader of that
party, although he had never won a
parliamentary seat, and its candidates
polled so strongly that the Labor Party, led
by the Hon. Anna Bligh as Premier, won only
seven seats, and only 7.9% of the first
preference vote, which was a record low
number for an Opposition party in
Queensland’s history. The Liberal National Party won
87.6% of the seats with only 49.7% of the
first preference vote. It was a classic
example of the ‘landslide’ effect in
single-member ‘winner-take-all’
electoral districts where the percentage of
a winning party’s seats won tends to be very
much higher, and very disproportional,
compared to the overall percentage of the
votes for its candidates. As Table 5 above shows, that
effect, to a lesser extent, was seen at the
2020 election for the Legislative Assembly
of Queensland.
The ninth
triennial MMP election
for New Zealand’s House of Representatives was
held on 17 October 2020. It was the first MMP
election at which a single party, the Labour
Party, gained an absolute majority of both
party votes and of seats. Seventeen
registered parties contested the election, but
only five either won one or more single-member
electorate seats or reached the 5% exclusionary
threshold that let
them win list seats. The five winning parties
are shown in Table 6 below. Noteworthy
changes from the 2017 election were the loss
of his seat by the Deputy Prime Minister,
Right Hon. Winston Peters, and his New Zealand
First party’s failure to reach the 5%
threshold in the party vote, leaving his party
winning no seats.
Table
6: NZ House of Representatives seats vs.
votes The PRSA has
long made the case that MMP is an
unsatisfactory form of largely
indirect
election where it is
mostly the political parties, and not the
voters, that can choose which candidates are
elected.
© 2020
Proportional Representation Society of Australia National President: Dr Jeremy
Lawrence npres@prsa.org.au
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