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QUOTA
QN2021B June 2021 www.prsa.org.au
The Western
Australian Ministerial Expert In May 2021, Western
Australia’s Government established a
Ministerial Expert Committee on Electoral
Reform. Its Terms of Reference required it to consider and report
on certain reforms of the electoral system
for the state’s Legislative Council. Those reforms included a
possible alternative to its Group Voting Tickets, which are a form of stage management of elections that has pleasingly
been discontinued for the Senate, and for
the Legislative Councils of New South
Wales and South Australia. The Committee received 184 submissions - including a six-page submission (J102) from the Proportional
Representation Society of Australia – all
of which it commendably published online. The PRSA’s submission noted the
inclusion in the Committee’s Terms of
Reference that a reason for its
establishment was public concern that Mr
Wilson Tucker - who was the leading
candidate of the Daylight Saving Party - had
been elected as an MLC even though he and
his party had gained only 98 first
preference votes, as reported in a QN2021A
article. That article stated, as did the
PRSA’s Submission J102, that nine MLCs - a
full quarter of all the MLCs elected in
Western Australia - had each gained fewer
first preference votes than Mr Tucker’s 98
votes. Among
those nine, the MLC with the fewest first
preference votes was Labor’s Mr Peter
Foster, who was elected as an MLC with only
18 first preference votes, which
was only 18% of the
number that Mr Tucker gained, but neither Mr
Foster nor any of the others was named, or
singled out, by the Committee. The article noted he and those
other nine MLCs were each duly elected
because they had each gained a quota of
votes (14.3% of the total vote in the
relevant Region) after all the
necessary transfers of surplus votes from
elected candidates, and the transfers of the
votes of excluded candidates, had taken
place. The PRSA hopes that the
recommendations of the Committee will be
released in time to be reported in QN2021C,
and that they include a proposal to
discontinue Group Voting Tickets.
On 05 May 2021, the sole
Greens Party member in Victoria’s
Legislative Council, Dr Samantha Ratnam,
who is also the Greens’ leader in the
Parliament, moved a motion seeking support
for discontinuing Group Voting
Tickets for the elections to the Council.
Of the 13 speakers on the motion, there
were two each from the Labor and the
Liberal parties. None of the two MLCs
from Derryn Hinch’s Justice Party, the
sole Nationals MLC, or the former Labor
Minister but now Independent MLC, Hon
Adem Somyurek, spoke. The Hansard record of the debate and the
division at the end of it shows
unfortunately that Dr Ratnam was the
only MLC that voted for the motion. All
the other nine cross-bench MLCs were
among the 37 that voted against it. Many
speakers argued that the Greens had not
opposed GVTs during the three previous
four-year terms, for each of which the
Greens Party had at least three MLCs (that
increased to five MLCs for the 2014-18
term), but they opposed them now
because they were reduced to only one
MLC, Dr Ratnam. Parts 2(b) and 2(c) of the
motion pointedly took issue with the
election of all three MLCs of named
micro-parties, so it is not surprising
that they, and other micro-parties’ MLCs,
spoke and voted against it. No speakers
mentioned the crucial 2002 Constitutional
Commission report. Its Part 11
(end of Page 46) saw merit in a future
abolition of ‘above-the-line’ voting! The predictable tendency of
MPs that were elected by a particular
electoral system being loath to change it
is a likely explanation of that markedly
lopsided vote. It is nevertheless
significant that, given Western
Australia’s present review of Group Voting
Tickets, Victoria risks being left as the
only Australian jurisdiction that retains
them, since they have already been
discontinued for the Senate, NSW, and
South Australia, and have never applied in
Tasmania or the Australian Capital
Territory. If the Greens moved a similar
motion about the Upper House in the
Legislative Assembly, it might gain the
support of between 3.4% and 6.8% of the
Assembly, depending on how many of three
Independent MLAs might also support it,
compared with the meagre 2.6% vote for Dr
Ratnam’s motion in the Upper House. In
his speech opposing the motion, the Leader
of the Opposition in the Legislative
Council, Hon. David Davis, disagreed with
the singling out of particular MLCs as being
not deserving of having been elected, but
conceded that Liberals could see some scope
for reform rather than action to just
‘remove’ Group Voting Tickets without
specifying a possible replacement for them.
Mr Davis said that a suitable
Bill to amend the Electoral Act could gain
some support from the Opposition, and he
noted reforms for other Australian chambers
where GVTs were replaced by voting methods
that required a little more input by voters. The two Labor MLCs that delivered substantial speeches on the motion both opposed it.
Tasmania’s
first House of Assembly polls concurrent
with 2 Legislative Council polls When Tasmania’s then Governor,
Professor the Hon. Kate Warner AC, dissolved
its House of Assembly for a general
election
to be held on Saturday, 01 May 2021, she did
that some twelve months before its four-year
term was due to expire, in 2022. She also
proclaimed that the election date would be
on a day that Sub-section
19(4)
of the State’s Constitution Act 1934
sets as the default day for the periodic
elections to the Legislative Council. Concurrent elections: That was the first time, since
the Hare-Clark system began operation in 1909,
that any election for members of both Houses
was held on the same day, or even in the
same week, as MPs in Tasmania had long seen
it as being desirable to separate campaigns
and voting so that the membership of each of
the two Houses was considered quite
separately by the voters. It was open to the Premier, Hon.
Peter Gutwein MHA, to have advised the
Governor to proclaim another Saturday in May
2021 for those periodic elections to the
Council, or for the general election to the
Assembly, but it seems she was not so advised.
No poll was required in one of the three Legislative
Council
single-member divisions for which periodic
elections were held, Mersey, as its
incumbent Independent MLC was returned
unopposed. That House has become the only
legislative chamber in Australia where
unopposed elections still tend to occur. Such
unopposed elections had occurred quite often
for safe seats in the House of Representatives
before PR-STV was introduced for the Senate in 1948
after which party organizations realized
that they needed to campaign in every lower
house seat if they wanted to maximize their
vote in the Senate. The
division of Clark: By far the greatest diversity in
the political affinity of successful
candidates was in the division of Clark (formerly
Denison). In the preceding election in
2019 for the single-member federal division of
Clark, which is coterminous with the state
division, an Independent MHR, Andrew
Wilkie,
was elected. He gained remarkably an
absolute majority of the first preference
votes (50.05%), thus exceeding the combined
vote of the candidates of Australia’s two
biggest political parties. An unusual feature of the poll in
Clark to elect five MHAs was the change in
party affiliation of two of the candidates,
who were outgoing female MHAs for Clark. One
of those was Suzanne Hickey, who was a Liberal
MHA when the House of Assembly controversially elected
her to be the Speaker in 2018, but she
decided to become an Independent MHA when
she failed to gain Liberal preselection for
the 2021 poll owing to her instances of
voting with the Opposition. Her move seems
to have led to the Premier’s decision to
seek an early election. The other of those two MHAs was
Madeleine Ogilvie. She was an unsuccessful
Labor candidate for Denison (now Clark) in
2018, but replaced Labor’s Scott Bacon in a 2019
countback.
She took her seat as an Independent MHA, but
the Liberals preselected her for Clark in
2021, where she was one of the two Liberals
elected, the other being the
Attorney-General, Hon. Elise Archer.
Unusually for this division, only one Labor
candidate was elected, Ms Ella Haddad. She
had been an MHA since 2018. No candidate
gained a quota of first preference votes,
but the Greens' Cassy O’Connor won most such
votes. As well as Ms
Hickey, who had been the Lord Mayor of Hobart
before her election to the Assembly in 2018,
another Independent in Clark was Kristie
Johnston, a former Mayor of Glenorchy, which
adjoins Hobart’s north. Ms Hickey was not
re-elected, as she finished lower in her
progress total than Ms Johnston, who was
elected on gaining the fifth quota. The 2021 Clark
election also was Tasmania’s first general
election in which all the members elected to
an Assembly division were
women.
As in 2018, that was not due to a shortage of
male candidates, or to party preselectors
being bound by restrictive quotas that
excluded men, as men
were standing
as Liberals, Labor, Greens, other parties,
and Independents. The strong result for female
candidates in Clark was sufficient to ensure
again, as first occurred at the 2018
election,
that 13 of the 25 MHAs were females. Gaining
two Liberals in Clark also ensured that 13
of the 25 MHAs State-wide were Liberals.That
State-wide result ensured that Mr Gutwein
would remain Premier, in Tasmania’s first
Liberal government ever to win a third
consecutive term. Mr Gutwein said
on television when he announced that the
Liberals had won majority government that “Hare-Clark
was brutal”. That remark might have been
more to be expected from the less successful
parties, particularly Labor, which won only
nine seats, after its poor showing in Clark,
where it won only one seat, well below the
maximum of three it had won since the Assembly
divisions were reduced to five members each.
Table 1 below shows that Labor’s ratio of %
seats to % votes was the highest for any of
the contesting groups, so its representation
in the Assembly was higher than it could have
been on the basis of its first preference vote
alone.
Ms Kristie Johnston was the first
Independent MHA elected at an Assembly general
election
since Bruce Goodluck was elected for Franklin
in 1996.
Tasmania’s House of Assembly, which is the
smallest lower house of any State, now has
4% of its members as Independents, whereas
in the next smallest, South Australia’s -
which uses the less representative
single-member divisions - that figure is
10.6%. Mr Peter Gutwein polled very
strongly in his northern division of Bass, where he gained nearly 48.2% of the
first preference votes. That was the second-highest percentage of the votes in an
Assembly division since the first election
with 7-member divisions in 1959. The highest-ever percentage of
first preference votes was achieved by the
Hon. Doug Lowe in Franklin in 1979 when he
gained 51.2% of first preference votes, but
that might be hard to surpass, as it was the
last Assembly poll before Robson
Rotation
was instituted, and three factors coincided
to facilitate it. The first factor was that it was
Tasmania’s only Assembly poll at which the
order of candidates’ names in each party
column was - unlike Robson Rotation - a fixed
order for all ballot papers determined by lot,
because the fixed order had previously been
alphabetical, as it was for the single column
on House of Representatives ballot papers
until that was changed after 1983 to an order
determined by lot. The second factor was that Mr
Lowe’s name won the draw and so appeared at
the top of the column of Labor candidates’
names. The third factor was that Mr Doug Lowe
was the then Premier of Tasmania.
In the other
northern division, Braddon, controversy erupted
over one of the three Liberal MHAs elected, Mr
Adam Brooks, when Queensland Police
charged him over firearms offences on the
day after the declaration of his election.
He resigned his seat before
the Assembly met, and it was filled at a countback by another Liberal
candidate, ex-MHA, Mr Felix Ellis.
Elections to
the 129-member Scottish Parliament The general election for the unicameral Scottish
Parliament, on Thursday, 06 May 2021,
resulted in candidates of the Scottish
National Party (SNP) gaining 64 seats.
That was one seat more than the 63 seats
its candidates gained at the 2016
election. Its candidates were just one
seat short of an absolute majority of the
129 seats available.
Table
2: Seats versus votes in Scotland’s 2021
elections The Scotland Act 1998,
requires elections of MSPs (Members of
the Scottish Parliament) to be
counted by an “additional member”
system, which directly elects 73 MSPs
using the unrepresentative system of
non-transferable ballots and plurality
counting.
That indication is used
to elect as many candidates from that
party-list as possible - in the order they
are listed - to bring the party balance in
the region closer to the voters’ indications
– in party terms only - as possible. Each
party decides that order before the poll,
with the voters being given no choice over
it. MMP: The system is similar to New
Zealand’s Mixed-member Proportional system
(MMP), except the seven compensatory seats
in each region - filled indirectly from
closed party-lists - are allocated, by the
d’Hondt system, on a separate
region-by-region basis rather than from
Scotland as a single region. That basis means that
each of the indirectly-elected MSPs has
successfully vied for one of the seven
party-list seats in the relevant region,
which compares to a quota of some 12.5% in a
PR-STV system. In contrast, in New
Zealand’s MMP system, each of the
indirectly-elected MHRs has successfully
vied for one of the 48 list seats available
for NZ as a whole. That would be comparable
to a PR-STV quota of some 2%, except for New
Zealand’s exclusionary threshold of 5%, although
that is waived for the candidates of any
party that has gained a constituency seat.
Another discrepancy is that the number of
single-member constituencies that make up
each of the eight regions
ranges from 8 to 10. The Band-Aid and hybrid
nature of MMP, where a quite
unrepresentative plurality system is
combined with a compensatory
indirectly-elected party-list system, with
additional quirks such as the arbitrary 5%
exclusionary threshold, and its waiver
proviso, makes it quite inferior to the
long-standing Hare-Clark form of PR-STV of
Tasmania and the ACT. As Table 2 above shows,
the Scottish National Party came close to
gaining an absolute majority of seats, which
it had only achieved once, in 2011.
It came so close in 2021 despite its share
of the constituency vote’s not exceeding
47.7%. Its share of the
party-list vote was only 40.3%, but it won
only two party-list seats because of its
massive over-representation in the
constituency seats, which were filled using
plurality counting. It nevertheless remains
in government with the support of the
Scottish Greens Party. The erratic nature of the
single-member constituency results is shown
by Scottish Labour’s gaining only two seats
there with 21.6% of the vote, whereas the
Scottish Conservative and Unionist Party
gained five seats there (150% more seats)
with 21.9% of the vote, which percentage was
only 1.4% higher. The election was
contested by the Alba Party, led by a former
Scottish National Party leader and First
Minister of Scotland, Rt Hon Alex Salmond.
Mr Salmond appears to have fallen out with
the current First Minister, Rt Hon Nicola
Sturgeon. The Alba Party is
ostensibly a breakaway party from the SNP,
but it also seeks independence for Scotland.
It did not contest constituency seats, as
that could have split the SNP vote, and
risked its success. Alba candidates,
including Mr Salmond, stood for regional
party-list seats only, and not for
constituency seats. That could have been to
get more independence votes for the 56
party-list seats, as the SNP won only two
such list seats, owing to its
over-representation in the 73 constituency
seats. That gaming
of the system to inflate the number of
sympathetic MSPs is an example of the
inequities introduced by a hybrid system
with two classes of representatives, and two
quite different and unsatisfactory rules for
electing them.
© 2021
Proportional Representation Society of Australia National President: Dr Jeremy
Lawrence npres@prsa.org.au
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