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QUOTA
QN2022D
December 2022
www.prsa.org.au
The welcome
enactment of Tasmania's
On 14 December
2022, Tasmania’s Governor, Hon. Barbara Baker
AC, gave Royal Assent to the Bill for the
above Act, after
the House of Assembly had voted to pass it
unanimously, and it had then been passed by
the Legislative Council. The Premier, Hon.
Jeremy Ratcliff MHA, introduced the Bill, as
was reported in QN2022C. Future
elections for the House of Assembly will
therefore now be for seven MHAs in each of the
five Assembly divisions, which will restore
the arrangement that existed from 1959 to
1998. In the Legislative
Council, the Independent Member for Nelson, Ms
Meg Webb, spoke well
in her support of the Bill.
Victoria's 2022
General Elections
for both Houses of its Parliament
Victoria held general elections
for both houses of its Parliament on November
2022. A redistribution
of Legislative Assembly seats took place a
year earlier. All seats in both houses were
contested by Labor and the Coalition, except
for Narracan, where the election had to be
postponed owing to the death of the
Nationals candidate. The Narracan
election - where the Liberal candidate is
likely to obtain over 50% of first preference
votes - is scheduled for 28 January 2023. Legislative
Assembly: The
incumbent two-term Andrews Labor Government
gained 56 of the 88 MLAs, compared with the 55
it had won in 2018. That increase was despite
a decrease for that house in Labor’s
two-party-preferred vote, versus the
Coalition, from 57.3% in
2018 to 55.0% in
2022. As Table 1 below shows, Labor’s first-preference vote also decreased from 42.9% in 2018 to 37.0% in 2022. Single-member electoral systems are prone to anomalies like those decreases, and to that striking disparity of its candidates gaining 63.6% of MLAs with only 37.0% of the first-preference vote.
Table 1: Votes versus seats in
Victoria’s Legislative Assembly
The 14%
decrease in Labor’s total first preference
vote (by 5.9 percentage points) was largely
due to a marked decrease in its vote in its
previously safest seats, in the western
suburbs of Melbourne. There was no
corresponding decrease in its seats there
owing to the quite large margins by which they
had long been held. By contrast,
Liberal candidates held many seats in
Melbourne’s eastern suburbs by much smaller
margins. Relatively small gains in Labor’s
vote in those suburbs’ seats resulted in
Labor’s winning many of them from Liberal
Party candidates. The different
patterns in those areas of Melbourne help
explain Labor candidates’ small gain in seats
despite that marked decrease in Labor’s
overall vote. The Liberal Party was the only
party whose candidates suffered a reduction in
both votes and seats, but its percentage
reduction in votes was less than that in
seats. For the
candidates of the four largest parties, the
Greens candidates’ overall vote increased the
most, by 7.5% - from 10.7% to 11.5% - but that
only yielded the party 4.6% of the seats, as
it gained an extra MLA, going from three MLAs
to four.
Nationals
candidates’ overall vote percentage barely
changed, but the party benefited by a 51%
increase in its number of seats (by 3.5
percentage points), going from six seats to
nine. Its three extra seats had been won from
the three Independents elected in 2018,
despite increases in the percentage of votes
for Independents and other parties. That
disproportionate windfall in seats for the
Nationals compensated for the Liberals’
deprivation by the vagaries of the
single-member system. The Coalition will have
a net overall gain of one seat if, as
expected, Narracan is held by the Liberals at
its supplementary election in January 2023. Table 2 below
compares the results of three different
counting systems. The last column is not from
a detailed analysis like that in 2002, but is just an
estimate using State-wide first
preference data.
Table 2: Comparing 3
different counting systems (*
providing the Coalition stood only 1 candidate
per division)
Legislative
Council:
As Table 3
below shows, the results for Victoria’s
Upper House, where PR-STV
counting applies, were much more
proportionate.
Table 3: Votes versus
seats in Victoria’s Legislative Council The anti-democratic features of
Group Voting
Tickets, which still apply in
Victoria - but nowhere else in the world -
explain key differences between the results
in 2018 and 2022, which
were detailed in the PRSAV-T’s 2019
submission to Victoria’s
Electoral Matters Committee. The Branch’s next submission to
that Committee will stress the need to
dispense with any form of above-the-line
voting option. It could also comment on the
300% increase from 2018 in the number of
Greens MLCs despite their candidates’ first
preference vote increasing by only 11%. Labor’s percentage of first
preference votes and MLCs elected decreased,
compared to its second term, by 16% and 17%
respectively, but there appear to be enough
MLCs likely to support the Labor Government
on supply and confidence for it to be likely
to have no threat to its serving a full
four-year term. There was no change in the
number of different groupings that had MLCs
elected at each of those two successive
general elections. A newcomer was the fourth
largest party, in both votes and seats, the
Legalise Cannabis Party. It stood two
candidates in each of the 8 Regions, with an
MLC elected in Western Metropolitan and
South-Eastern Metropolitan Regions. No
lower-polling party had more than one MLC
elected. Two outgoing Labor MLCs, Dr
Tien Kieu and Mr Cesar Melhelm, each had
their name placed third on a Labor Group
Voting Ticket, and were not re-elected, as
newcomers to the Upper House were placed
higher on the GVT, thus displacing them. Hon. Adem
Somyurek, a former Labor MLC
for South-Eastern Metropolitan Region -
whose commission as a Minister was earlier
withdrawn by Victoria’s Governor on the
advice of the Premier - stood in Northern
Metropolitan Region as a Democratic Labour
Party candidate. He was the only DLP
candidate elected to the Parliament.
Inquiry
into the 2022 elections by Federal
Parliament's
The Proportional Representation
Society of Australia and PRSA(SA) made Submissions
323 and 392 respectively to
the above Inquiry, which had received nearly
1,500 submissions. The Committee’s
Report to the Parliament may well be
considerably delayed owing to the very large
number of submissions it has to consider.
The
Republic of Israel held a general
election for its
120-seat Knesset in its unicameral
parliament on 01 November 2022. The 70.6% turnout
was the lowest in the nineteen elections
ever held for the Knesset. An article in QN2021A compared
the outcomes of Israel’s previous election
in March
2021, under
its indirect and fragmented party list
system, with Eire’s PR-STV system of direct
election of candidates. It pointed to the
far greater stability of Eire’s system,
which has not needed early elections after
its most recent elections, in February 2020. The
election resulted in ten political parties
being represented in the Knesset. The largest
- with only 26.7% of the seats - was the Likud
Party, led by a former Prime Minister,
Benjamin Netanyahu. Israel’s
President appointed him as the Prime Minister,
as he was supported by enough of his
right-wing allies to have him supported by a majority
of votes in the Knesset.
The 2022 elections to
Malaysia's Parliament
Malaysia held its 15th
general
election for
all 222 Lower House seats in its
national Parliament on 19 November 2022,
owing to party
instability,
seven months before it would have
expired. It is the first general
election since the Parliament changed the
Constitution, by the two-thirds vote of
all members in each House needed, to
reduce the minimum voting age from 21 to
18. The previous general election
was held in May 2018. The
Lower House MPs have a 5-year term and
are elected in single-member districts
using plurality counting. That
is a system that is often claimed to
work against political instability. As
shown in Table 4 below, it resulted in
candidates from seven party groupings
being elected.
Table
4: Votes versus seats in Malaysia’s 2022
Lower House
After
lengthy negotiations, the King was eventually
able to appoint Anwar Ibrahim, the leader of
the largest Parliamentary Party, who had a
very controversial and chequered history, to the
position of Prime
Minister.
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