|
QUOTA Newsletter
of the Proportional Representation Society of
Australia
QN2022A
March 2022
www.prsa.org.au
Preselection woes again precede
the stage management of Australia’s ballot
papers The imminent federal elections -
for senators for the two internal territories
and half of the State senators as well as all
members of the House of Representatives have,
as usual - been accompanied by many
widely-reported very unedifying preselection
squabbles, most noticeably within the Liberal
and the Labor parties. That is a result, for the House
of Representatives, of its single-member winner-take-all
divisions’ usually being contested by a single
candidate of each major party rather than
several candidates standing so voters get a
choice within each party. Such a choice would
let voters influence the factional balance
within each party, so they have a greater
effect on who represents them, as naturally
occurs in multi-member electorates. That used
to occur
in some single-member electorates. In the Senate, laws to facilitate
the stage
management
of ballot papers began in 1940, well before PR-STV, particularly those that let party
administrations decide the order in which a
party’s candidates names appear down the
party column on PR-STV ballot papers. That
cannot occur under the Hare-Clark
system used in Tasmania, and in the
Australian Capital Territory. Stage management began its worst
era in the 1970s, when South Australia
introduced a fortunately short-lived party
list system for its upper house polls. New
South Wales tried that, but opposition to it led to a PR-STV ballot paper, but with Group Voting Tickets. Group Voting
Tickets began for Senate elections in 1983.
The fashion spread to South Australia,
Western Australia and Victoria, but GVTs
were discontinued as their faults emerged so
that now the only legislative chamber
afflicted with them is Victoria’s upper
house. Liberal Party woes: The Liberal Party’s preselection
of New South Wales candidates for Senate seats
has led to the disputed involvement of the
Prime Minister, Hon. Scott Morrison MHR, and
some senior ministers. For the lower house, that has
gone as far as the Liberal Party’s Federal
Executive’s overruling the party’s NSW Branch
to determine who the party’s candidate would
be in several seats. It set aside the NSW Branch’s use
of local plebiscites in those seats, and
determined that, instead, three sitting MHRs (two
of them ministers) would be preselected:
Hon. Alex Hawke, Hon. Sussan Ley, and Mr Trent
Zimmerman. Mr Matthew Camenzuli, who is said
to be on the right-wing of the NSW State
Executive, sought a ruling from the High Court
of Australia that the party’s Federal
Executive should return the matter of
preselections to the NSW State Executive, in
accordance with the constitution of the NSW
Branch. The Chief Justice, Susan Kiefel, in
hearing the case ruled that it should instead
be dealt with by the NSW Court of Appeal. Labor argued in the House that it
was improper of the Prime Minister to have
instructed the publicly-funded
Solicitor-General to act for him to defend his
actions in court on a matter that was
essentially a concern of the Liberal Party
Federal Executive (a private organization)
- not the Commonwealth of Australia. Concurrently, Senator Hon. Concetta
Fierravanti-Wells, a Liberal senator for
NSW for 17 years since the NSW parliament
appointed her to fill a casual vacancy on
05 May 2005 - whose current term will end
on 30 June 2022 - reacted angrily to her
relegation by the NSW Executive to an
almost certainly unwinnable fourth
position down the NSW Senate ballot paper.
She was the twelfth speaker in the Senate’s
adjournment debate on 29 March 2022,
where she surprised many with her very
robust and detailed criticisms of her
party’s parliamentary leader, the Prime
Minister, Hon. Scott Morrison. Labor Party woes: Soon after the recent
shock of the untimely death of Victorian Labor Senator
Kimberley Kitching, a factional colleague
of hers, Hon. Bill Shorten MHR - who was
the immediate past Leader of the Federal
Opposition - said,
in praising her, "Preselection
is never easy. I'm not a coroner, I
can't tell you why this woman of 52 was
taken from us. But I have no doubt that
the stress of politics and the
machinations in the back rooms had its
toll." Ms Kitching
was appointed to fill a Victorian
casual Senate vacancy in 2016. She served
for over 5 years without ever having been
elected at a Senate election. Mr Shorten’s
frank sentiments starkly revealed a
manipulative aspect of Australia’s political
culture that can and should be modified.
It appeared that Senator
Kitching's bid for a suitably high position on
the Labor party ticket was being opposed by a
trio of high-ranking female senators, which
included Senators Penny Wong and Kristina
Kennealy, and that was placing considerable
pressure on her, as Malcolm Mackerras mentioned
in a tribute
to her. Tasmania’s use of its Hare-Clark electoral system for the
lower house of its parliament, for over 110
years, has convinced most
democratically-minded parliamentarians there
of its superiority. Tasmania’s absence of
stage-managed ballot papers and election of at
least five Members of its House of Assembly in
each of its five divisions has saved the
political parties from their own mistakes. Its Robson
Rotation
does that by leaving more power to the voters
themselves to choose, from a larger number of
party nominees - whose surnames each have an
equal incidence of occurrence in a particular
location down the ballot paper - a smaller
number that are actually elected as MHAs. By
contrast, as is demonstrated in the next
article, single-member electorates limit the
representation to one point of view only, as
opposed to the far more accurate
representation of a few more views, which
usually give the greatest representation to
the most strongly-supported views and, in
lesser strength, to views that can differ
from those. A comparison between the
elections of the MHR for Clark and those
of its five MHAs Since
the first polls under the Commonwealth
Electoral
Act 1902, Tasmania has had five
single-member divisions for the election
of its members of the House of
Representatives, but it has, since then,
always used the boundaries and names of
those divisions for the five multi-member
divisions from which its House of Assembly
members are elected. Because
those
federal and state electorate boundaries are
coterminous, a comparison between the outcomes
in party terms provides a good illustration of
the benefits of Hare-Clark over a winner-take-all system.
The comparison is most revealing in the most
recent elections for the electorate of Clark
(earlier called Denison). In
May 2019, Andrew Wilkie, an Independent MHR,
achieved the remarkable feat of being re-elected with 50.05% of the first
preference votes cast in the federal
division of Clark. In sharp contrast, the
election of Clark’s five MHAs in May 2021
resulted in electing one Independent MHA,
one Labor MHA, one Greens MHA, and two
Liberal MHAs. That diversity in the
representation in the State division
obviously reflects the views of Clark’s
voters at the State level far better than
the winner-take-all single-member
division does at the Federal level. Changes
since
Tasmania’s 2021 Assembly poll In the ten months since the
general elections held in May 2021 for
Tasmania’s House of Assembly, two MHAs that
were ministers have resigned. Instead of expensive by-election
polls being held that could have altered the
balance of power in the Assembly for quite
arbitrary reasons - such as some of the actual
voters at the later by-election poll being
different from those at the earlier general
election - the replacement MLAs are, under countback, those indicated by an
absolute majority of the voters at that
general election as their preferred
consenting candidates. Another change since the Gutwein
Liberal Government began its new term as a
result of that general election, was the
appointment of new ministers to replace those
two. One of those new Liberal Party ministers,
who replaced Hon. Jane Howlett MHA, was Madeleine
Ogilivie MHA.
Ms Ogilvie was first
elected
as a Labor MHA in Denison (since changed to
Clark) in March 2014. Ms Ogilvie failed to be
re-elected at the 2018 general election, but
was elected at a 2019 countback, following which she
sat as an Independent MHA. She joined the
Liberal Party before the May 2021 general
election, at which she was elected as one
of the two Liberal MHAs for Clark. Repercussions from
Victorian Labor’s “Red Shirts Affair”, and
Adem Somyurek’s branch-stacking Victorian Labor’s dismissed
Minister for Local Government, Hon. Adem
Somyrurek MLC - who now sits as an Independent
MLC - successfully
moved
a motion in the Legislative Council on 09
February 2022 that was opposed by all but
one of his former Labor colleagues. The detailed motion included the
proposal that the House should refer the
matter of Labor’s “Red
Shirts Affair”,
which involved the improper expenditure of
substantial public funds on campaigning for
Labor at the 2014 elections, to Victoria’s
Independent Broad-based Anti-corruption Commission. The Hansard
record
of Mr Somyurek’s motion and the subsequent
debate and division, showed that the motion
was carried by a vote of 19 to 17. The vote
that ensured it was carried was cast by Ms
Kaushalia Vaghela,
then a Labor MLC for the Western
Metropolitan Region, who had been a member
of Labor’s Socialist Left faction, which is
the same faction as the Premier, Hon Daniel
Andrews MLA. Ms Vaghela had earlier lost Labor
Party preselection for the 2022 election. She
did not speak in the debate, but later issued
a
telling statement
that particularly implicated that Socialist
Left faction in the “Red Shirts Affair”, and
she resigned from the Labor Party. It was
expected that she would have, under Labor
Party rules, been expelled if she had not
resigned first. She now sits as an
Independent MLC.
At the 2018 elections in Western Metropolitan
Region, Labor fielded five candidates. The
first three down the Group Voting Ticket were
elected. Ms Vaghela was the third down the Group Voting Ticket. She gained only 430
of the 214,208 first preference votes
received by those Labor candidates, which
was the fewest for any of them. Eire’s
Electoral Reform Bill upon the centenary of
its adoption of PR-STV On 30 March 2022, the Government
of the Republic of Ireland, which is a
three-party coalition, announced that it
will introduce to the Parliament an Electoral Reform Bill 2022 that would - among other things -
create for the first time in Eire a
statutory Electoral Commission. It would resemble the Australian
Electoral Commission, which was established by
the Hawke Labor Government in 1984. The Government claims the Bill
will also pioneer, among countries in Europe,
the regulation of online political
advertising, and will require online electoral
material to include an identification of its
sponsors, its cost, and an explanation of why
its recipients are being targeted. The Commission will be required
to investigate district magnitudes and
make recommendations about any changes
made. That is an important reform as,
unlike the uniform district magnitude that
applies for electoral districts used for
each Australian chamber that uses PR-STV,
Eire lacks a uniform district magnitude,
as the only constitutional requirement there is for it to be
a minimum of three seats. A Tribute to Dean Jaensch of South Australia Professor Dean
Jaensch AO - a
prominent and highly respected South Australian
political scientist, who had been a Professor of Political and
International Studies at The
Flinders University of South Australia - died on 17 January 2022, aged 85. He was a
regular columnist for Adelaide’s newspaper,
The Advertiser, and he was often a
part of the Australian Broadcasting
Corporation’s team analysing Federal and
State electoral prospects and outcomes. Fortunately for the PRSA’s South
Australian Branch, the Electoral Reform
Society of South Australia, Dean was a
strong advocate of PR-STV as the fairest electoral method. Dean was never a PRSA member, but he
was very much a ‘friend’ of the PRSA,
supporting much of its work and readily
offering advice, including his being the
guest speaker at one of the South Australian
Branch’s annual general meetings. Members will
remember Dean’s excellent explanation of
Tasmania’s Hare-Clark version of PR-STV - and why he considered
it much superior to the
stage-managed version used to elect senators -
in the context of earlier election night
presentations of results for Tasmania’s House
of Assembly. At
the end of the election night coverage of
the March 2022 South Australian State
election by the Australian Broadcasting
Corporation, its elections analyst - Antony
Green AO - paid tribute to Dean, telling
viewers that long before he had begun his
present ABC role, Dean Jaensch was
explaining preference flows, and which
candidates might be elected, all well before
sophisticated computer graphics became
available.
|
