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QUOTA
QN2024A
March 2024
www.prsa.org.au
The
General Election for Tasmania’s House of
Assembly in March 2024 was over a year early Those two Liberal MHAs stood for re-election in their divisions, but they fell well short of being re-elected. A major point of difference they had with the Rockliff Government was their opposition to its support for a new, large and very expensive stadium for Hobart for the Australian Football League. Results:
The election analyst for the
Australian Broadcasting Commission, Antony
Green AO, detailed the
outcome of the 2024
election for the House of Assembly, which
is shown on the Tasmanian Electoral
Commission website and
is also summarized in Table 1 below.
Table 1: Overall Tasmanian
2024 election results by parties In
Table 1, it can be
seen that no party or grouping won
an absolute majority of seats in any
of the five divisions. Their
divisional totals ranged from 2 to 3
for the Liberals, were 2 in each
division for Labor, and ranged from
0 to 1 for each of the other
groupings. Table
1 shows that there was
only one more male MHA elected than
there were female MHAs. The previous
25-member House had thirteen female
MHAs compared with its
twelve male MHAs. Hare-Clark lets
such ratios be more
democratically decided by the many
voters rather than being cosily
stage-managed by
a small number of political
party pre-selectors. As Table
2 below shows, the usual pattern was
noted, where most or all of the only
candidates to receive over a quota
of first
preference votes were
Party Leaders or their Deputies, who
were obviously the better-known
candidates for their party. Ben
Raue comments further on that
pattern.
Table 2:
Four candidates exceeded a quota of
first preferences
The
outgoing Liberal Premier, Hon.
Jeremy Rockliff MHA, was one of the
14 Liberal candidates elected. He is
expected to obtain a written
assurance on support for supply and
confidence votes from four new MHAs,
who could be the three Jacqui Lambie
Network candidates elected and one
of the three Independents, Craig Garland, the seventh
member elected for Braddon. That
assurance would enable Mr Rockliff
to advise the Governor of Tasmania,
Hon. Barbara Baker AC, that he had
the support of a majority of MHAs so
she could then
Professor Anne
Twomey’s video on that
assurance of support explains very
thoroughly how pacts like that can
operate, and also their limitations.
Mr Rockcliff is expected to lead a
cabinet made up
entirely of Liberal Party Members of
Parliament. In Franklin, the former
Federal Minister, and Leader of the
Abbott Government in the Senate,
Hon. Eric Abetz, was the sixth
candidate elected, and the second of
the three Liberals elected. A former
Tasmanian Liberal Minister, Ms
Jacquie Petrusma, was the third
candidate elected, but Mr Abetz won
over 9% more first preference votes
than she did. Mr Abetz gained
just under 74% of a quota of first
preference votes. His substantial
experience as a Senate Leader and
Minister is expected to lead to his
being appointed as a Senior Minister,
and also becoming the Leader of the
House.
Denman
Prospect's Musidlak Rise sign in the
Click on the
photograph to enlarge it.
The street sign at the left of the
photograph above points to Musidlak Rise,
a recently-constructed street, in Denman
Prospect, a new ACT suburb. It is in
the ACT Legislative Assembly electoral
district of Murrumbidgee in western
Canberra. The naming of
this new street is a fitting reminder to
new ACT residents of the life and work of
the late Bogey Musidlak, who had been the
President of the Proportional
Representation Society of Australia from
01 January 1994 to his unexpected death
on 27 August 2017 at the age of 63. Tributes to Bogey
included speeches in the House of
Assembly, a letter of condolence from
the Chair of the Federal Parliament’s
Joint Standing Committee on Electoral
Matters, and an obituary in The
Canberra Times by Malcolm
Mackerras AO. Brisbane City Council's 2024 elections The
elections for Brisbane City Council’s Lord
Mayor, by direct and popular city-wide
election, and its 26 ward councillors from
single-councillor wards by optional
preferential voting, occur every 4 years. The result
of the elections
on 16 March 2024 for councillors was
significantly distorted, although less so
than at the 2020 election,
as the Liberal National Party (LNP) won
69.2% of the seats (18 seats), but with
only 45.9% of the first preference votes. The results for
the ward councillor elections are
summarized in Table 3 below:
As
can be seen, the LNP is significantly
over-represented and the Greens are
significantly under-represented. A further
absurdity of the single-councillor ward
system is that the LNP could increase its
vote by 1.1%, but lose one ward, whereas
Labor lost 6.0% support but won the same
number of wards it had won in 2020. How
would this have looked under PR-STV? To
give an idea, Brisbane City could be
divided into six Regions, four with five
councillors each and two outer Regions
with three councillors each. A better
scenario would have each Region with an
equal number of councillors, say 5 or 6
five-councillor Regions, but the scenario
in Table 4 below is used here as it is
based on existing actual data.
Table
4:
Multi-member Regions possible for
Brisbane
In 22 of the 26 wards, there
were just three candidates, from the LNP,
Labor and Greens. The quotas for each
party in each of those 22 wards on first
preference votes only is shown in Detail
1,
and was as in Table 5 below:
Table 5:
Quotas on first preference votes in 22
wards above
Preference transfers are analysed
in Detail
2 and would have
decided the final position in only two of
those suggested Regions, Inner South and Outer
South. There the final position would have
been decided by the preferences, and the
transfers of surpluses and of the votes of
excluded candidates. The final result
calculated by PRSA Inc. would have looked
something like Table 6 below:
Table 6: Seats
estimated won if grouped in above 6 regions
Comment on what could well be the
final results for each Region in the PRSA
Inc’s scenario for such Regions is as follows: 1. North Region In this election scenario,
the LNP and Labor each received 2 quotas and
the Greens 1 quota on first preferences. An
estimate of preference transfers is thus not
needed. 2. Central Region Here, the LNP and Greens
would get 2 quotas and Labor 1 quota on first
preference votes. An estimate of preference
transfers is thus not needed. 3. East Region Here, the LNP received 3
quotas, and Labor and the Greens 1 quota on
first preference votes. An estimate of
preference transfers is thus not needed. 4. Inner South Region After the election of 2
LNP, 1 Labor and 1 Greens councillor with full
quotas, the surplus of the Greens (3,916) and
LNP (9,834) would likely favour the
Independent candidate. Thus the final result
would have been 2 LNP, 1 Labor, 1 Greens and 1
Independent. 5. Outer South Region After
the election of 1 LNP and 1 Labor councillor,
with full quotas and the transfer of
surpluses, the LNP were ahead of the Greens
for the final seat by 19,242 votes to 14,016.
PRSA Inc’s estimate of preferences assumes
that 45.7% of Labor preferences would have
been transferred to the Greens, 16.2% to the
LNP and 38.1% become exhausted, as Ben Raue’s
web website shows. The LNP would thus get a
second seat. 6. West Region Here,
the LNP received 2 quotas and the Greens 1
quota on first preference votes. An estimate
of preference transfers is thus not needed.
A postal ballot of its
members - who are now asked to join
PRSA Inc. -
In
March 2024, under Rule
10 of the Constitution of the
unincorporated Proportional Representation
Society of Australia, which was
established in 1982, its
National Secretary, Assoc. Prof. Stephen
Morey, conducted a postal ballot of all PRSA members on
the motion, “That the Society be wound
up and its assets transferred to PRSA
Inc”. He emailed the 65 members on
the membership lists that the Branch
Secretaries had provided, and he received
no messages of emails that bounced or
failed to be delivered. He also posted
surface mail to 9 members, a total of
74. Four of those he sent by
surface mail were returned to him marked
as “Left address, or not at this address”. Dr Morey received 20 email
ballots and 1 surface mail ballot, each of
which recorded a vote of YES to the
proposal. He thus declared the motion to
have been carried, with the result that
the unincorporated PRSA has been wound up,
with Proportional Representation Society
of Australia Inc. replacing it. PRSA Inc. now hopes please
that the members of the former branches of
what is now the defunct unincorporated PRSA - other
than those members of the former
PRSA(V-T) Inc. - will use the form at www.prsa.org.au/p3prsavt.pdf to join
PRSA Inc. That form is also accessible
at the home page of the PRSA Inc.
website above.
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