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QUOTA
QN2023A
March 2023
www.prsa.org.au
New
South Wales held a general
election for its Legislative
Assembly, and a periodic election for half the
members of its Legislative Council, on 25 March
2023. A redistribution of Legislative
Assembly seats took place in August 2021. All
available seats in both houses were contested by
the Coalition, Labor and the Greens. A minority
Labor Government, with support by Greens and
some Independents, resulted. Legislative Assembly: The incumbent three-term
Coalition Government won only 36 of the 93
seats, after winning 48 in 2019. That decrease
was accompanied by a decrease for that house
in the Coalition’s two-party-preferred vote,
versus Labor, to 45.7%
in
2023, from 52.0%
in
2019. As Table 1 below
shows, Labor’s first-preference vote grew to
37.0% in 2023, from 33.3% in 2019.
Table
2 below compares the results of three different
counting systems. The last column is not from a detailed
analysis like those
for some chambers, 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: The term of the 42
MLCs is twice that of the 93 MLAs, so
only 21 of the Upper House seats become
vacant at each conjoint election for
both Houses. At each periodic
election for MLCs, a
State-wide electorate is used with PR-STV counting, so the
quota for election in 2023 was 209,858
votes, which was just over 4.76% of the
State-wide
Mark Latham used a
weakness in the Constitution’s Section
15
The
Leader of the One Nation Party in the NSW
Legislative Council, Hon. Mark Latham MLC, is a
former Federal Leader of the Labor Party, who resigned
from the House of Representatives in 2005. In
2017 he resigned
from the Labor Party, and was briefly a member
of the Liberal Democrats Party, but by 2018
he had joined his present party, One Nation. In
2019, he was one of two ON candidates that each
won an eight-year term in the NSW Legislative
Council. ON’s only candidate elected in 2023 was
him, so his ploy let him sit for 8 years instead
of his remaining 4, but it did not gain the
extra MLC sought. Soon
before the 2023 periodic election for 21 seats
in the 42-member Council, with four years of his
eight-year term still remaining, Mr Latham
resigned his seat and nominated
again for a full eight-year term.
The
loophole enabling it - also in the 1977
alteration made to
Section 15 of the Australian Constitution
- of the combination of
periodic elections and the indirect filling of
casual vacancies by party appointments, is a
grave weakness. The former Tasmanian Independent
senator Brian Harradine said he believed it
should never be exploited, on publicly
revealing it
in 1996.
Comparing the Lower House
2022 Victorian election
The vagaries of
the single-member system of elections are
clearly demonstrated by a comparison of the
recent New South Wales election for its
Legislative Assembly with the result in
Victoria in 2022. As the following
table shows, the percentages of first
preferences for candidates from each of the
main parties – Labor and the Liberal and
National Coalition – were very similar in the
two elections. In both elections,
Labor candidates received more first
preferences than the Coalition’s, and in both
elections Labor comfortably won the ‘two-party
preferred vote’ (2-PP), which is first and
subsequent preferences favouring Labor on the
one hand versus the Coalition, Labor won 55.0%
2-PP in Victoria and 53.0% 2-PP in NSW. The
number of seats won in the Legislative
Assemblies, however, was strikingly different,
with Labor winning a large absolute majority
in Victoria, but it won just below a bare
majority in NSW.
Table 4: Votes versus seats in
recent Legislative Assembly polls
As Table 4
shows, the Labor Party is grossly
over-represented in Victoria’s Legislative
Assembly, but less significantly so in New
South Wales. In Victoria, National Party
candidates won 10.2% of the seats with
4.7% of the vote, while Greens candidates
won 4.5% of the seats with 11.5% of the
vote. That
over-representation of the National Party
and under-representation of the Greens is
a common feature in elections in Victoria.
It is due to the locational bias of
single-member districts, where smaller
parties that have wide support across the
whole State get fewer representatives than
those with concentrated support in a small
number of districts. Another big
difference between the two elections is
the large number of 9 ‘other’, mostly
Independent, candidates elected in NSW,
versus no Independents in Victoria,
despite the first preference vote for
‘others’ being similar between the two
elections. It has been suggested that
the optional preferential system in NSW
meant that Labor won fewer seats.
However, in both States, the great
majority of seats was won by the
candidate with the highest number of
first preference votes. In Victoria, 85
of the 88 seats were won by the
candidate that led on first preference
votes. In NSW, 88 of the 93 seats were
won by the candidate that led on first
preference votes.
In Victoria,
Hastings was the only seat where a Coalition
candidate led on first preference votes, but
Labor finally won the seat. In New South
Wales, on the other hand, the Liberals or
Nationals led on first preference votes in
five seats that they ultimately lost. In one of those five, Penrith, the Liberal candidate’s lead on first preference votes was only four votes, but Labor won it with 51.6% of the vote after transfers. Table 5 below lists the seats where the leading candidate changed after the transfer of preferences.
Table 5: Votes versus seats in
NSW’s recent Legislative Council polls
SA’s Parliament changed
plurality counting to PR-STV in bill for a “First
Nations Voice” to it On 23 February
2023, South Australia’s Labor Minister
for Aboriginal Affairs, Hon. Kyam
Maher MLC, introduced the Government's
First
Nations
Voice Bill 2023 into the
Legislative Council of South Australia. In Schedule
1, Part 5 of that Bill, as introduced,
Clauses 11(1) and 13(1)(b) unfortunately
specified the use of plurality
voting - which was replaced by transferable
voting for the Senate as long ago as 1919
- as the system for marking and counting the
votes for elections of the members of the Voice. Hansard
records,
under the heading, Schedule 1, the success of a
Greens MLC, Hon. Tammy Franks, in changing from
plurality counting to PR-STV,
with optional preferences. That record also
refers to good work of Deane Crabb, PRSA(SA)
Vice-President, and Ben Raue of The Tally Room,
in urging that change. The
Legislative Council passed the amended Bill. On
26 March 2023, the House of Assembly later passed
it, and it gained Royal Assent in an Executive
Council meeting, at a well-attended public ceremony held on the
steps of South Australia’s Parliament House, on
North Terrace, Adelaide.
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