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QUOTA
QN2023B
June 2023
www.prsa.org.au
The PRSA’s
Victoria-Tasmania Branch this month lodged its
submission
to Victoria’s Inquiry into the Conduct of
the 2022 State election by the Electoral
Matters Committee of its Parliament. A central aspect of
that submission was the case for the State
of Victoria - which is the last legislature
in the world to use Group
Voting Tickets on ballot
papers at its elections - to discontinue its
use of them at its PR-STV elections
for its Legislative Council. The value of
using Robson
Rotation for both
houses is also made clear. The submission
reminds the Committee of the recommendations
for those aspects made by Victoria’s Constitutional
Commission in 2002, as well
as its support for the direct election of
all MLCs by using countback to fill casual
vacancies. The rationale for
emphasizing the importance of discontinuing
GVTs is well summed up in the last paragraph
of an excellent 2013
paper on the subject by Mr
Michael Maley PSM. The Electoral
Matters Committee has invited the Branch to
have representatives appear before it on 11
August 2023 to make an oral presentation,
and to take questions from the Committee,
which the Branch
has agreed to do.
Widespread protests
against Government actions
Israel and
Poland are each nations whose present
status as continuously-operating
democracies has existed only in the period
after World War II. The members
of their parliament’s governing houses are
elected solely by a d’Hondt party list system of
proportional representation rather than a
direct PR-STV system, of
the type that all Australian voters have
used since 1949, and that is supported by
the Proportional Representation Society of
Australia. Israel’s
form of PR is a closed party list in a
single, nation-wide electoral district
with a very large district
magnitude of 120, and
a 3.25% threshold. In contrast,
Poland’s 460-member lower house uses
PR-party list with an open party list in
its 41 electoral districts, whose district
magnitude varies from 7 to 20, and its
minimum threshold is 5.00%. In both
those countries, there have been sustained
large-scale public protests against
proposals of the governments each
maintained in office by an absolute
majority of MPs in their governing lower
houses. Israel: The
right-wing Netanyahu Coalition Government of Israel -
appointed with the support of 64 of the
120 members of the Knesset - after the general
election of November
2022, which had a record low turnout of
4,794,593 (70.6%), introduced draft
legislation to curtail some powers of Israel’s
Supreme Court. Mr Netanyahu’s Likud Party
is the largest single party in the very
fragmented Knesset, and won only 32 seats,
with 23.4% of the total vote. The
Netanyahu Coalition can enact that
legislation, as Israel - like the United
Kingdom, Canada, and New Zealand - has no
written Constitution. Without a written
Constitution to specify and place limits
on the power of a legislature or a
government, there is a greater possibility
of a democratically-elected legislature
passing laws that would not be approved by
voters at a referendum.
Australia’s
written constitution fortunately requires
proposed alterations to it to be approved
by voters, but few
countries, among them
those just mentioned, as well as the
United States, have such protection. The mostly
left-wing opponents of its plan claim -
often in large, sustained and vociferous public protests attended by
up to 200,000 people - that the draft
legislation is grossly undemocratic.
Similar numbers of supporters also
protested. The Israeli President, Isaac
Herzog, made an
unprecedented address to the nation on
national television to present his view that the
civil unrest might verge on a civil war,
and that his Government should reconsider
the legislation. The Government argues that its support by an absolute majority of the democratically-elected unicameral parliament entitles it - given the lack of any constitutional restraint on it - to pass laws it says are needed for more democratic control of Israel’s unelected Supreme Court.
Nevertheless,
by the end of June 2023, it did relent and
modify the legislation somewhat, but not
to the satisfaction of the still numerous
and very activist public protestors.
Meanwhile, Mr Netanyahu has long had a heart
rhythm disorder, and
Israel’s District Court is continuing his
trial on
corruption charges. The minority
of MPs opposing the legislation, and the
protestors supporting them would benefit
by advocating a written Constitution
requiring voters’ approval for its
adoption and any subsequent alteration,
with such a Constitution entrenching
protections for significant matters such
as the legislative, executive and judicial
powers of the State, and for key aspects
of its electoral system. The latter should
prescribe direct elections and Hare-Clark
features, like the protections in the Proportional Representation
(Hare-Clark) Entrenchment Act 1994 of the
Australian Capital Territory. Poland: The
right-wing Morawiecki Law and Justice
Party Government of Poland has, following
the general elections of each house
of its bicameral parliament in October
2019, which had a record high turnout of
18,678,457 (61.7%), had bills passed by
its 51.1% majority in the lower house.
Those bills were strongly resisted by
non-Government MPs there. That majority of
MPs was based on its 43.6% of the vote. Those bills
were to modify laws on Poland’s
Constitutional Court - but not the wording
of the Constitution itself,
whose alteration needs a parliamentary
supermajority - and to provide for more
restrictive abortion laws in this solidly
Roman
Catholic country. As in
Israel, the Polish bills were opposed by
large public
protests, which
attracted up to 500,000 people, mainly in
Poland’s capital city, Warsaw. Poland’s
100-member Senate, whose members are
elected in single-member districts by plurality counting,
and are mostly of the Opposition parties,
are not empowered to do more than delay
such legislation, which will be tested at
the forthcoming general elections for both
houses, in late 2023.
As for Israel,
this is also a case of a
democratically-elected majority of lower
house MPs being accused by the minority of
that house’s MPs of acting
undemocratically on very important public
issues. QN2023D might be able to
report on how much voters support Poland’s
Law and Justice Party at its general
elections later in 2023. General elections in Greece
in 2023
The
Hellenic Republic’s idiosyncratic electoral
laws led to two general elections - in each
of two consecutive months - for its
unicameral 300-member parliament, in May 2023 and in June 2023.
As
such a majority was not reached, that
inbuilt delay meant that the election in
May 2023 had to be held using the purely
PR-party list system that had been restored
by the former Government led by Prime
Minister Alexis Tsipras, of the left-wing
Syriza Party. At the July 2019 election, the
right-wing New Democracy Party gained an
absolute majority of MPs, as a result of the
lingering 50-seat bonus. The May 2023
election was the first time since 1990 that
the electoral system lacked such bonus seats
designed to have the largest single group
make up an absolute majority of MPs. That May 2023
election was held early when - at the
request of Kyriakos Mitsotakis, the New
Democracy Prime Minister - the President of
Greece, Katarina Sakellaropoulou, dissolved
the Parliament under Article 41 of the
Constitution. That election
resulted in New Democracy winning 146 of the
300 seats, whereas the main left-wing party
opposing it, Syriza, won only 71 seats. That
election also caused the electoral law
amendment to take effect, so that subsequent
elections would include the 50-seat bonus
for the party that won the most seats. The President
agreed to the further general election in
June 2023 at which New Democracy gained a
total of 158 seats, 50 of which were bonus
seats. Those seats became available when the
amendments to the electoral law that the
Syriza Government made after the September 2015 election had finally taken effect.
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