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Newsletter of the Proportional Representation Society of Australia Inc.


   QN2024B    June 2024    www.prsa.org.au

 


The aftermath so far of Tasmania's 2024
Assembly and Legislative Council elections
 

Unlike the 2021 early election for five MHAs for each of the House of Assembly’s five divisions, the new arrangement is a welcome return to seven MHAs for each of those five divisions. That return was to restore the larger, more workable, 35-member House that had existed before it was reduced to 25 members in 1998.

 

The date chosen for the poll also showed a return to Tasmania’s longstanding normal practice of separating the polling day for the House of Assembly from the statutory date in May for conducting the periodic elections for each of the fifteen Legislative Council divisions. That separation is not normal with mainland parliaments, although some Senate and House of Representative polls in the 20th Century were on separate dates.

 

As was expected in the article on the 2024 Assembly poll in QN2024A, none of the three parties in the outgoing Assembly gained a majority of MHAs for the next term. With 14 MHAs, the Liberal Party continued to have the most MHAs, so the outgoing Liberal Premier, Hon. Jeremy Rockliff MHA, could continue in office with the support of the three MHAs from the Jacqui Lambie Network and an Independent, Craig Garland, an MHA for Braddon.

The Jacqui Lambie Network has stated that it intends to renegotiate its written assurance of providing confidence and supply, once it expires in April 2025. The minority Liberal Government seems to have been operating successfully, possibly more so than it did near the end of its previous term, in which two dissident Liberal MHAs prompted Mr Rockliff to obtain an early general election.

 

There were separate polls for three Legislative Council divisions. In Hobart, the former Greens Leader in the Assembly, and the first woman to be a Greens Minister in any Australian Parliament, Ms Cassy O’Connor, became the first Greens Party Member elected to Tasmania’s Upper House. Mr Kerry Vincent - who was the only Liberal candidate in those three Upper House polls - won Prosser for the Liberal Party, which had held it prior to the poll. Ms Rebecca Thomas, an Independent, won a by-election for Elwick.

 

PRSA Inc's public meeting in Brisbane
on 'fairer elections' for Queensland

 

 

As noted on the PRSA Inc. website, the Society held a small public meeting in central Brisbane on Tuesday, 25 June 2024. The meeting followed the elections in March 2024 for the Brisbane City Council, and preceded the elections to be held on 26 October 2024 for Queensland’s Legislative Assembly, which is the only input Queensland voters have to the composition of its unicameral parliament for its four-year term.

 

The people attending included members of PRSA Inc, one of whom had recently joined, and three members of the Greens Party. Neil Cotter from the Greens said he had persuaded the Greens in Queensland to adopt a Nordic style party-list PR system as their preferred position. It appeared to be a modified version of PR-STV that would ensure the final result reflected the party vote percentages most closely, but one that would be predominantly party-based rather than candidate-based as PR-STV is.

 

There was also an overseas student from China, who is studying electoral systems, and Alexis Pink from the community radio station 4ZZZ, who recorded the meeting, and plans to make a program that includes highlights of it.

 

The PRSA Inc. Secretary, Assoc. Professor Stephen Morey, gave a presentation of about 35 minutes, followed by discussion that lasted a similar time. Several attenders later repaired to a nearby cafe for refreshments.

 

The two main questions in the discussion were:

(i) Why does PRSA Inc’s Constitution restrict it to advocating for a PR-STV system when other proportional systems exist? And

 

(ii) What would be possible ways towards achieving a PR system in Queensland?

 

Stephen Morey pointed out that the Society had made good progress in achieving PR-STV in different forms and in different jurisdictions across Australia over the last 50 years, except in Queensland. Alexis Pink helpfully raised the backward step in Local Government in Victoria.

      

 


Former SA Liberal Premier, Steele Hall, who died
aged 95, remembered for ending SA's 'Playmander'

At the State funeral of Mr Steele Hall, the Liberal Premier of South Australia from 1968 to 1970 - who died on 10 June 2024 - tribute was paid to his fine leadership on many matters, including major electoral reform mainly in SA, but also at the Federal level.

 

SA Parliament: On becoming Premier, Mr Hall succeeded the longest-serving head of any State or Federal government in Australia ever, Sir Thomas Playford GCMG, who had - for an unbroken 26 years - been South Australia’s Coalition Premier, from 1938 to 1965. Thomas Playford was knighted in 1957. Sir Thomas Playford could serve so long because he benefited from a similar electoral malapportionment that Queensland Labor had initiated. It had let the National Party Premier there, Sir Johannes Bjelke-Petersen KCMG, exploit it to become the second-longest-serving head of a government in Australia.

 

The third-longest-serving head of government was Tasmania’s Labor Premier, Sir Robert Cosgrove KCMG, but he was not assisted by unfair electoral legislation, owing to the Hare-Clark electoral system being in force State-wide from 1909 till the present.

 

South Australia’s marked malapportionment was legislated for before Mr Playford, as he then was, first entered SA’s Parliament, in 1933, when he was elected as one of the MHAs for the then 3-member electoral district of Murray. That poll was counted by what SA called ‘contingency’ voting, which had replaced plurality counting in 1929, and was identical to the little better ‘multiple majority-preferential’ counting used for the Senate from 1919 to 1946.

 

After Mr Hall became SA’s Premier, he convinced his Coalition supporters that the ‘Playmander’ aberration was no longer tolerable, and he successfully introduced legislation in 1968 to create less skewed electoral districts, even though he and his party knew that could well lose them the next election, which it did. Mr Hall later resigned from the Coalition, and founded a new reforming party, the Liberal Movement. He was the successful candidate for that new party in the State seat of Goyder in 1973.

 

Federal Parliament: Mr Hall became SA’s first Liberal Movement senator in 1974, but he rejoined the Liberal Party in 1976. He won the SA division of Boothby in 1981 and held it until 1996. His last major effort in electoral legislation was when - as the Liberals’ Shadow Special Minister of State - he unsuccessfully opposed Labor’s introduction of Group Voting Tickets for the Senate in 1983.




The 2024 general election in India


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Lower House: The world’s largest election so far, held on seven days between 19 April and 01 June 2024, was for the 543 members of India’s House of the People (Lok Sabha), the Lower House of its bicameral Parliament. The result was declared on 04 June 2024.

 

There were 968,821,926 registered voters, a 66% turnout, and 645,363,445 ballots cast, with 1% being invalid or blank. There was no postal voting.

 

Each State of India and each Union Territory is entitled to at least one MP, so some constituencies have far fewer electors than others.

 

At the 2024 polls, the electoral district with the fewest voters was the Union Territory of Lakshadweep, with 64,473 voters, and that with the most was Malkajgiri in the State of Telengana, with 3,150,303 voters.

 

When compared to Australia, it is worth mentioning that in 2022 the State of Queensland had 3,501,287 voters, who elected 30 MPs. All 543 Indian Lower House MPs are elected using single-member electoral districts with plurality (first-past-the-post) counting.

 

Candidates from more than 75 political parties, and many independent candidates, stood in the election, but most parties formed part of one of the two major alliances, which reduced splitting of the individual parties’ vote.

 

Those two alliances were the National Democratic Alliance (NDA), the most prominent part of which is the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), led by the Prime Minister, Narendra Modi, and the Indian National Developmental Inclusive Alliance (INDIA), of which the most prominent party is the Indian National Congress (INC). INC is well known for being led by four generations of the Nehru-Gandhi family.


The result of the election in terms of the alliances is not massively unproportional for a plurality election with single-member districts, as Table 1 below shows.

 

 

Alliance Designation

TOTALS

 

NDA

INDIA

Others

 

Leading Party

BJP

INC (Congress)

 

 

No. of parties

25

26

25

76

No. of seats

293

234

16

543

% of seats

54.0%

43.1

2.9%

100%

% of vote

42.5%

40.6%

7.5%

 

 

Table 1: Percentage of votes versus seats for the Alliances

 

Prior to the election it was widely predicted that the NDA Alliance would win a very large majority with more than 74% of the 543 seats, and that the BJP alone would have a significant absolute majority, but that did not happen. The figures for the two main parties in Table 2 below are quite telling.

 

 

Party

BJP

Congress

2019

Vote

(%)

37.4%

19.5%

Seats

(%)

55.8%

9.6%

2024

Vote

(%)

36.6%

21.2%

Seats

(%)

44.2%

18.2%

Swings

(%)

Votes

 -2.1%

 +8.7%

Seats

-20.8%

+90.0%

Table 2: Comparing seats vs. votes for India’s 2 main parties

 

This is a particularly stark example of one of the many problems with single-member electoral districts. A quite small swing in votes of -2.1% led to the loss of 20.8% of the BJP’s members in the Lower House.

 

An interesting feature of this election was the abolition - nearly 80 years after Independence in 1947 - of the two seats reserved for Anglo-Indians. The members representing them were nominated by the President of India on the advice of the Government of India, and hence usually were members of the governing party. India’s original Constitution of 1951 included a clause that these would be expected to be phased out after ten years. The number of Anglo-Indians is estimated to be no more than 150,000 so they have been significantly over-represented for a long time.

 

Upper House: The members of India’s Upper House, the Council of States (Rajya Sabha), are not popularly elected. They serve for staggered six-year terms, with a third elected in each even-numbered year by the members of the State legislatures using proportional representation with the single transferable vote (PR-STV) as stated in Article 80(4) of India’s Constitution ever since it took effect, on 26 January 1950.


That was some 20 months after the electoral system for Australia’s directly-elected Senate was changed to PR-STV by the Commonwealth Electoral Act 1948 receiving Royal Assent, on 18 May 1948.



Claims that the 2024 European Parliament elections resulted in its shifting to the right

 

The sudden decision by the French President, Emmanuel Macron, to dissolve France’s National Assembly and set early elections for it to be held on 30 June 2024 followed the 2024 European Parliament elections. Commentators have since suggested that Europe is heading to the far-right, and away from supporting the European Union.

 

Are those claims supported by the actual results of this election? European elections are difficult to report on because national provisions govern the electoral system of each member state and thus - unlike polls for Australia’s Senate - differ across Europe. However, the elections are broadly party-proportional. The large number of parties in the different Member States coalesce into groups. The numbers of seats major parties or groups won are shown here, and in Table 3 below.

 

Party or Group

No. of seats

Change +/–

Stance on Europe

European People's Party

190

  +3

pro-Europeanism

Progressive Alliance of Socialists and Democrats

136

–12

pro-Europeanism

Renew Europe

  80

–17

pro-Europeanism

European Conservatives and Reformists

  76

+14

soft Euroscepticism

Identity and Democracy

  58

–18

Euroscepticism

Greens–European Free Alliance

  52

–15

pro-Europeanism

The Left in the European Parliament – GUE/NGL

  39

  –1

soft Euroscepticism

Non-inscrits

  45

+17

 

Others

  44

+44

 

Total

720

+15

 

Table 3: Parties’ change in seats vs. stance on Europe

 

Wikipedia shows the position on 'Europeanism' of the various groupings, though a generalization is more difficult on behalf of the 89 members listed a 'Non-insrits' or 'others'. The four groups that declared themselves as 'pro-Europeanism' together won 458 seats (63.6%).


There were some losses for the left (Progressive Alliance), Centre (Renew Europe) and Greens supporters of ‘Europeanism’, while the other pro-Europe group, the more centre-right European People’s Party made modest gains. There were also losses for the ‘hard’ Eurosceptic ‘Identity and Democracy’ group, which includes France’s far-right ‘National Rally’ led by Marine Le Pen.

 

The big gains in the election were for the diverse groups that are not included in the seven main groups in Table 3 above. Most of those probably are ‘euro-sceptics’, given that that group includes the German AfD, and Fidesz from Hungary, though some are local parties representing minority groups, like Junts that stands for Catalan Independence, which are also included here.

 

The key message of this election is that around two-thirds of the voters backed groups that are committed to Europeanism.


© 2024 Proportional Representation Society of Australia Inc.

ABN 31 010 090 247    A0048538N Victoria

National President: Dr Jeremy Lawrence   pre@prsa.org.au