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QUOTA
QN2022B
June 2022
www.prsa.org.au
Voters
in the 2022 federal elections exerted
the power transferable voting gives them
House of Representatives Transferable
voting is superior to plurality:
The results of the elections for all 151 single-member
divisions
in Australia’s House of
Representatives was a reminder -
despite the inherently
unrepresentative nature of such
single-member divisions - that the
transferable voting Australia has
used for the House of
Representatives since the passing of
the Commonwealth
Electoral
Act 1918
does
produce a fairer outcome than the
crude plurality
(first-past-the-post)
system that Australia used before
that. That crude plurality system still applies for
lower houses in parts of the former
British Empire, such as the USA, the
UK, Canada, India, Bangladesh, Pakistan,
Nigeria, Malaysia, and Singapore, but
not in Australia, New Zealand, Eire, Malta,
South Africa, Papua New Guinea, or Sri
Lanka. At the elections on 21 May
2022, voters chose to utilize the power of
transferable voting by electing a record
sixteen MHRs that were not members of the
groupings that have, in turn, provided
Australia’s federal government since
federation. Table 1 below shows the
breakdown of those 16 MHRs. Its third
column shows that there would have been
only 4.6% of such MHRs, rather than the
present 10.6%, if transferable counting
had not replaced the previous plurality
counting in 1918. The fourth column in Table 1
shows how the present system gives a more
accurate correlation between voters’
ballots and the resulting MHRs. PR-STV is superior to
single-member systems: The
fifth column, possible PR-STV
results, shows percentages as either
greater than or equal to the percentage
of MHRs pro rata to percentage
of first preference votes, or as less
than or equal to them. That is shown for the PR-STV
estimate, as it did not use the detailed
method the PRSA used for its analyses of
House of Representatives elections in the
period
1996-2004, but
it instead relied on the national
percentages shown
on the AEC website.
The groupings shown include 26
"Others", but only three of those
"Others" (United Australia Party,
Pauline Hanson's One Nation, and the
Liberal Democratic Party) contested a
majority of seats nation-wide, and the
only two of them to have an MHR elected
were Katter's Australian Party in
Kennedy, Qld, and Centre Alliance in
Mayo, SA.
(* providing the
Coalition stood only 1 candidate per
division)
Division The
18 Teal candidates Ranking
in first preferences Ranking
in the two-party-preferred
vote Bradfield NSW Nicolette Boele 2nd 2nd Cowper NSW Carolyn Heise 2nd 2nd Hume NSW Penny Ackery 3rd Mackellar NSW Sophie Scamps 2nd 1st North Sydney NSW Kylea Tink 2nd 1st Wentworth NSW Allegra Spender 2nd 1st Warringah NSW Zali Steggall 1st 1st Groom QLD Suzie Holt 4th 2nd Boothby SA Jo Dyer 4th Casey VIC Claire Miles 4th Chisholm VIC Dominique
Murphy 6th Flinders VIC Sarah Russell 5th Goldstein VIC Zoe Daniel 2nd 1st Indi VIC Helen Haines 1st 1st Kooyong VIC Monique Ryan 2nd 1st Monash VIC Deb Leonard 3rd Wannon VIC Alex Dyson 2nd 2nd Curtin
WA Kate Chaney 2nd 1st
The remaining two Independents elected were Mr Andrew Wilkie, MHR for Clark, Tasmania, who won more than the combined vote of his Labor and Liberal opponents, and Ms Dai Le, who won fewer first preference votes than her Labor opponent in Fowler, NSW, Hon. Kristina Keneally, formerly an unelected senator, and earlier a Premier of NSW. The two largest groupings, Labor and the Coalition, will have noted that the 31.7% of voters that did not give either of them their first preference vote managed to include among those elected the re-election of 1 Green, Dr Adam Bandt; 1 Katter’s Australian Party, Hon. Bob Katter; 1 Centre Alliance, Ms Rebekha Sharkie; and 3 Independents, Mr Andrew Wilkie, Dr Helen Haines, and Ms Zali Steggall OAM. Those six re-elected MHRs show an endurance that has previously been rarer with independent candidates. In Hughes, NSW, the outgoing MHR, Craig Kelly - who had been elected as a Liberal in 2019, but left that party to become the Leader of the United Australia Party - gained only 6% of first preference votes. Neither he nor any other UAP candidates in each of the remaining 150 seats was elected. Since the introduction of transferable voting for single-member districts in 1918, elections for the House of Representatives have overwhelmingly been a winner-take-all contest between two sides, the Australian Labor Party and what is now the Liberal-National Coalition, which are known as ‘the major parties’. Most Australian elections have been relatively close between those major parties, with one of them usually gaining an absolute majority of seats with votes generally in the range 50-55% after the transfer of preferences. In the past there have been third parties that sometimes gained a significant vote, up to 10% or more, but they usually did not come close to winning seats in the House of Representatives. The preferences of those that voted for those parties were usually counted, and helped elect a candidate of one of the two major groupings. That situation for the House of Representatives is sometimes described as a ‘two-party system’, but there is no inherent system of that nature, as a change in voters’ choices can quickly create a multi-party system, as the 2022 election nearly did. Because of transferable voting, and the opportunity it gives to calculate a ‘two-party-preferred vote’ for the whole nation, it can be shown that the party winning an absolute majority of seats in the House of Representatives is usually the one preferred by most voters. By that criterion, Labor candidates narrowly won the election of 21 May 2022, with 77 seats of the 151 in the House, and also by the criterion of the ‘two-party-preferred vote’, as Labor led the Liberal-National coalition, after preferences were transferred, by 52.1% to 47.9%. By the criterion of the ‘two-party-preferred vote’, the side most preferred won the election. However only 32.6% of voters gave their first preference to the winning party. The previous lowest percentage of first preference votes for a major party with a majority in the House of Representatives was 39.4% for the Hawke Labor Government in 1990, and 39.5% for the Howard Coalition Government in 1998. Labor candidates won 38.0% of the first preference vote in 2010 and, although Labor formed government, it did not win a majority in the House of Representatives. The Coalition’s first preference vote was also historically low, at 35.7%. Voters that cast a first preference vote for a candidate from other than a major party made up 31.7% of voters. Comparing in Table 1 first preference votes and numbers of seats won shows that the number of seats won by Labor candidates is inflated well beyond the party’s first preference support, and the ‘Others’ are significantly under-represented. No party’s candidates have won a majority of seats with such a low first preference vote since transferable voting was introduced in 1918. If transferable voting had not replaced that plurality counting – which, as stated above, is still used in many Commonwealth countries - the result would have been as in the third column of Table 1 above. Plurality counting could have almost led to a Coalition Government largely because in recent years an increasing majority of preferences of the ‘Others’ in most seats are preferring Labor, and they would not have applied in a plurality count. The 2020 report of the Federal Joint Standing Committee on Electoral Matters, with a majority of Coalition MPs, recommended a change to optional preferential voting, which would likely have seen more Coalition MHRs elected this year, but would tend to become a de facto plurality system. That was opposed by the minority of Labor and Greens members on the Committee. The Morrison Coalition Government took no action on that report. That is a complete reversal from the 1950-70 era when more preferences favoured Coalition candidates. The record 17-year run then of the Menzies Coalition Government needed Democratic Labor Party preferences. Labor MHRs argued then for plurality counting whereas Coalition MHRs successfully defended the longstanding full marking of preferences that dated from 1918. The 2022 election shows more clearly than any other in our lifetimes why the single-member electoral system is so unsatisfactory, and is not representing the voters well. Transferable voting is a considerable improvement on plurality counting, but, in 136 of the 151 divisions, neither major party received an absolute majority of votes, so most Lower House voters are “represented” by someone they didn’t vote for, though they might have preferenced them. The two-party-preferred indicator: The problems of using ‘two-party-preferred’ (TPP) to identify the winner are well illustrated by Macnamara Division in inner Melbourne. On the face of it, that division shows a 0.9% swing to Labor on first preferences and a 7.3% two-party-preferred swing to Labor, leading to a very comfortable 62.3% TPP result. Macnamara, however, was one of the closest divisions, being in doubt for over a week after the election. The first preference votes are shown in Table 3 below.
Preferences
of the 9.6% of voters for the five minor
candidates most strongly favoured Liberal,
and next the Greens. The total vote was very
close after exclusion of those five, and the
transfer of their voters’ preferences, as
Table 4 shows. The final count had the Labor
candidate winning the seat.
Table 4: The second-last count in Macnamara Division
Another
interesting occurrence was in Groom, in
Queensland, which was not commented on during
the election night coverage. The
final
result,
after preferences, was Coalition 56.9%,
Independent 43.1%. The Teal Independent
candidate, Ms Suzie Holt, had won only 8.3%
of first preferences, and was in fourth
place on first preferences. Senate The
result of the election for Labor was that its
overall
number
of senators
stayed at 26, whereas that for the Coalition
decreased from 36 to 32. In each State, Labor
candidates won two seats, except for Western
Australia, where they won three. Coalition
candidates also won two Senate seats in each
State, except for New South Wales and for
South Australia where they won three. The
nation-wide percentage first preference vote
for Labor candidates was 30.1%, for Coalition
candidates 34.2%, for Greens 12.7%, and for
the Independent and other three groups elected
8.4%. Each of the six States elected one
Greens senator, so the total number of Greens
senators increased from 9 to 12. The only other State senators
elected were Queensland’s Ms Pauline Hanson
for her One Nation Party, Tasmania’s Ms Tammy Tyrrell
for the Jacquie Lambie Network, and
Victoria’s Mr Ralph Babet, for the United Australia Party. As
usual, Northern Territory voters elected one
Labor senator and one Coalition senator.
Voters in the Australian Capital Territory
elected one Labor senator and, for the first
time, an Independent senator, Mr David Pocock,
instead of a Liberal senator, as had always
happened earlier. His election, rather than
that of a Liberal, has reduced the Coalition’s
numbers in the Senate. NSW
Regulation for Weighted
Inclusive Gregory Transfer
Method
to replace Random Transfers and for Countback in municipal polls It
is pleasing that the NSW Government made the Local
Government
(General) Amendment (Elections)
Regulation 2018 so that
transfers of surplus votes at municipal
elections, which now all use PR-STV
counting, are effected by the Weighted
Inclusive Gregory Transfer method in place
of the former longstanding random method. The
Schedule
5 mentioned in that regulation is
that in Local Government (General)
Regulation 2005.
A close result
again shows the weakness of France’s
non-transferable voting systems The article in QN2002B on the 2002
Presidential election in France explains
in detail the serious weakness of the lack
of a provision for transferable voting in
the system France used. That system still
applied for the election in April 2022.
A far more democratic and
inclusive system would have avoided the
splitting of the vote that again saw one of
two right-wing candidates being elected from
the twelve candidates standing in the first
round as the only possible outcome in the
second round, as Table 5 shows.
Unanimous
view of all 25 Tasmanian MHAs supports
restoration of a 35-member House The PRSA’s Victoria-Tasmania
Branch wrote to the Premier of
Tasmania, Hon. Jeremy Rockcliff MHA, in
June 2022 to tell him that it fully supports
his party’s proposal to introduce
legislation to restore 35 MHAs to Tasmania’s
Parliament, which is supported by all
current MHAs, to whom it sent a copy of the
letter. The PRSA awaits the restoration.
South Australia’s
State election 2022 On 19 March 2022, South
Australia’s voters elected all 47 members of
its Lower House (the House of Assembly)
from single-member electoral districts.
They concurrently elected - with
the whole State as a single electorate - 11
of the 22
members of its Upper House (the
Legislative Council) using proportional
representation with the single transferable
vote (PR-STV).
Table 6 below shows
the result for both Houses in terms of the
first preference votes and the seats won.
Labor returned to government with an absolute
majority of the 47 Lower House seats, but with
only 40.0% of first preference votes for its
candidates. In contrast, in the Upper House,
Labor’s 37.0% of first preference votes won
only 5 of the 11 positions, showing the
fairness in using PR-STV.
After each
State election, the PRSA’s South Australian
Branch, the Electoral
Reform Society of South Australia Inc, prepares an analysis of
the results to show what the result might
have been with multi-member electorates for
the Lower House with
members elected using PR-STV.
Based on
this analysis, the four strongest-polling
parties would still be overrepresented, but
both the Greens and Family First parties
would have
representatives in SA’s Lower House.
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