QUOTA NOTES
Newsletter of Proportional Representation Society of Australia Inc.

QN2025C           September 2025 www.prsa.org.au

Unexpected Tasmanian Assembly election left
the Liberals still being the Government

More comment on Tasmania's Assembly result

Use of STV to elect the latest Chancellor of
a university founded in 1209 A.D.

Samoa's 2025 general election for its Legislative Assembly

Ella Haddad, MHA for Clark, to be Guest Speaker
at PRSA Inc's2025 online Annual General Meeting

List of Issues of Quota Notes

Unexpected Tasmanian Assembly election left
the Liberals still being the Government

On 05 June 2025, in Tasmania’s now 35-member House of Assembly, the then Labor Leader of the Opposition, Dean Winter MHA, moved a successful motion of no confidence in Tasmania’s Liberal State Government. That Government was appointed after Tasmania’s 2024 House of Assembly election.

The motion led to the Premier, Hon. Jeremy Ratcliff MHA, deciding not to resign as Premier, but instead to advise the Governor, the Hon. Barbara Baker, to dissolve the Assembly, and to issue writs for a general election, which was held on 19 July 2025. The results, in each of Tasmania’s five seven-member divisions, are shown in Table 1 below.

Divisions	Sex	Liberal	Labor	Greens	SFF	Indep.	TOTAL
Bass	M	2	-	-	-	1	3
	F	1	2	1	-	-	4
Braddon	M	4	1	-	-	1	6
	F	-	1	-	-	-	1
Clark	M	1	1	1	-	-	3
	F	1	1	1	-	1	4
Franklin	M	1	1	-	-	2	4
	F	1	1	1	-	-	3
Lyons	M	2	1	-	1	-	4
	F	1	1	1	-	-	3
TOTALS	M F	10	4	1	1	4	20
		4	6	4	-	1	15

Table 1: Overall Tasmanian 2025 election results by parties

Balance in seats was maintained: The three largest parties each had the same number of MHAs elected as they had in 2024, although the first preference votes for Liberal and Greens candidates increased by 3.20 and 0.55 percentage points respectively, whereas for Labor candidates they decreased by 3.13 percentage points.

Table 2 below shows that Labor candidates benefited more than other candidates from vote transfers. There was no change in the numbers of MHAs in the three largest parties.

Jacqui Lambie Network: The Jacqui Lambie Network stood no candidates in 2025. Of the three MHAs in that Network elected in 2024, two were expelled from the Network three months after they were elected. They were Rebekah Pentland, who stood in Bass, as an Independent, and Miriam Beswick, who stood in Braddon, as a National. Neither was elected. The Network’s third MHA, Andrew Jenner, in Lyons, stood as a Nationals candidate, but was also not elected.

Crossbench: For the first time in the 116 years that Hare-Clark has been used, there were more crossbench MHAs than Opposition MHAs. They consisted of the five Greens MHAs; the re-elected Independents, Craig Garland, in Bass; Kristie Johnston, in Clark; and David O’Byrne, in Franklin; Carlo Di Falco, the first ever MHA in the Shooters, Fishers and Farmers Party (SFF); Peter George, an anti-salmon-farm Independent, in Franklin; and Professor George Razay, a Bass Independent.

Professor Razay, with 0.27 of a quota in first preference votes, narrowly beat a Shooters, Fishers and Farmers candidate to win the seventh seat in the division of Bass.

Sex ratio: In each of the five divisions, voters for the two largest parties had a small preponderance of male candidates to choose from, but voters for those three largest parties could choose from at least two candidates of either men or women. Table 1 above shows that 15 of the MHAs (43%) are women. That compares with the 17 female MHAs (49%) elected in March 2024.

Party	First Preference Votes		Seats
	No.	%	%	No.
Liberal	139,586	39.9	40.0	14
Labor	90,563	25.9	28.6	10
Greens	50,545	14.4	14.3	5
SFF	10,159	2.9	2.9	1
Independents	53,600	15.3	14.3	5
Nationals	5,668	1.6	0.0	0
TOTALS	350,121	100.0	100.0	100.0

Table 2: Seats versus votes at Tasmania’s 2025 Assembly elections

Proportionality: Table 2 above shows the close relationship between the percentage of the seats won by the candidates of nearly all of the various parties, and the first preference votes they gained. If Labor candidates had instead won only nine seats, and a National Party candidate one seat, that would have given Labor’s candidates 25.7% of the seats, and the National Party candidate 2.9% of the seats. That would have been closer to the percentage of first preference votes for both such candidates.

The Assembly’s verdict: When the newly-elected House of Assembly met on 19 August 2025, the Opposition Leader, Dean Winter, a Labor MHA for Franklin, moved a motion of no confidence in the Liberal Government that the Governor had re-appointed, and of confidence in the Labor alternative government that his motion had foreshadowed. Mr Winter’s motion was lost, with only the ten Labor MHAs in favour. He later resigned as Leader of the Opposition, and was replaced by Josh Willie, one of the two Labor MHAs for Clark.

More comment on Tasmania's Assembly result

The 2025 Tasmanian election above produced a House of Assembly that very accurately represents the will of Tasmania’s voters. As Table 2 above shows, the percentage of the voters that supported each of the groupings, or parties, that were elected does very closely match the percentage of seats those groupings now have in the House of Assembly.

Only 65.8% of voters cast their first preference vote for candidates of the two largest parties, and 34.2% preferred other candidates, yet there was a very critical response by commentators from both those parties. PRSA Inc. has collected some quotations from print and broadcast media that demonstrate what some of the supporters of the two largest parties have said about the result.

On the Labor side, the podcast Socially Democratic ran a discussion led by Stephen Donnelly, a former Labor staffer. It included a former senator for Victoria and MHR for Batman, Dr David Feeney; and Ms Jessie McCrone, a former advisor to a Victorian Premier, Hon. Daniel Andrews AC.

A few quotes from the podcast are accessible at https://podcasts.apple.com/au/podcast/ep-308-feeney-files-with-jessie-mccrone/id1462750948?i=1000718904659.

Dr David Feeney at 41’17”: “(We should) rewrite the Tasmanian Constitution so you don’t have this Weimar Republic system of elections.”

Ms Jessie McCrone at 41’24": “Like the whole Hare-Clark system is just terrible …”

Dr David Feeney: “(Hare-Clark) shreds party discipline … In Tasmania ALP candidates all head into the safe areas and fight with each other for the base vote”.

Stephen Donnelly: “Whole bunch of numpties that have got into parliament … (leaving the) Premier … negotiating with absolute crazies”.

Stephen Donnelly at 44’30”: “Let them have four years of insanity … and then watch the voters come flowing back to Labor and say ‘what a disaster … and then when you get into Government, get rid of Hare-Clark and go back to running it properly.”

On the conservative side, sentiments opposing Hare-Clark were expressed in an article in The Australian of 05 September 2025, by Matthew Derholm:

“… Tasmania’s Hare Clark system makes it easier for independents and minor parties to get elected. And after non-stop drama, businesses have had enough…”

“Tasmania’s business community wants to scrap the state’s electoral system to end entrenched political chaos …”

“The Tasmanian Chamber of Commerce and Industry said that after three consecutive early elections it was time to rethink Hare-Clark proportional representation, which makes it easier for independents and minor parties to get elected.”

“I would really question whether Hare-Clark is the right mechanism for us now,” the Chief Executive Officer of the Tasmanian Chamber of Commerce, Michael Bailey, told The Australian. “It does make things very difficult and I’m not certain that Hare-Clark has delivered in the last few decades the results that Tasmania wanted when they went to the polls.”

The question that PRSA Inc. considers should be asked is, why have prominent supporters of each of Tasmania’s two larger parties decided to so strongly disparage the Hare-Clark system, a system that far better represents the will of the voters than the single-member districts in the Australian Parliament and Lower Houses of other states?

One obvious reason is self-interest. The biggest party in this election, the Liberals with 39.8% of the vote, did not win a majority of seats. In stark contrast, in the last elections in each of Victoria and New South Wales, the governing Labor parties won - as Table 3 below shows - either a very large majority, as in Victoria, or very close to a majority, as in NSW, each with a significantly lower percentage of the votes.

State	Victoria 2022	New South Wales 2023
Winning party	Labor	Labor
Winning party’s two-party-preferred vote (%)	55.0%	54.3%
Winning party’s 1st preference votes (%)	36.7%	37.0%
Winning party’s seats (%)	62.5%	48.4%

                  Table 3: Vote percentages in nearby States at the most recent polls

By any analysis, the Tasmanian result is a much fairer result than those results above. For respected commentators supporting both major parties to be disparaging the fairest electoral system operating anywhere in the world - just because the result is not to their liking - is a sadly misguided approach for them to take.

Neither major party’s candidates won a majority of seats in Tasmania’s House of Assembly for the very clear reason that Tasmania’s voters did not want that outcome. The Weimar Republic’s party-list PR system was much inferior to Hare-Clark, which is a much fairer PR-STV system of direct election.

A voice of reason in support of Hare-Clark by Malcolm Mackerras AO supports Hare-Clark: https://switzer.com.au/the-experts/malcolm-mackerras/tasmania-escapes-from-its-political-mess.

Use of STV to elect the latest Chancellor
 of a university founded in 1209 A.D.

The results sheet for the election for a ten-year term, from ten candidates, of the Chancellor of Cambridge University, in the United Kingdom, shows how the use of the single transferable vote - for a single vacancy, with fully optional marking of preferences - elects the candidate preferred by an absolute majority of voters (over 50.0%).

The voters elected a Labour Life Peer, the Rt. Hon. the Baron Smith of Finsbury PC. He gained 18.0% of the first preference votes. The runner-up, with 19.3% of first preference votes, was a notable economist, Dr Mohamed Ali El-Erian.

The use of transferable voting, based on giving effect to the voters’ order of preferences, showed after the last transfer that Lord Smith was preferred to Dr El-Erian by 55.6% of the 25,054 voters.

The ancient university had used for a long time the unsatisfactory plurality system still being used to elect members of the UK’s House of Commons. If Cambridge University still used that noticeably unrepresentative system, the new chancellor would have been Dr Mohamed Ali El-Erian, whose 19.3% of the first preference votes cast was the highest first preference vote for any of the ten candidates.

Samoa's 2025 general election for its Legislative Assembly

The Independent State of Samoa has been a member of the Commonwealth of Nations since Samoa achieved its independence from New Zealand, as a parliamentary republic, in 1962. Samoa held a general election for all the 51 single-member constituencies in its unicameral Parliament, the Legislative Assembly, on Friday, 29 August 2025.

Samoa uses plurality counting to decide which candidate is elected in each seat. Five of the MLAs elected were women, so a sixth female MLA will be appointed, as required by the Constitution, which requires that there must be at least six female MLAs.

That general election followed a political crisis that began in January 2025, where the then new leader of the FAST party, Mr Schmidt, faced criminal charges. He was a Government Minister that had been a party in his government's decision in that month to replace that party's former leader with him.

That former leader had been, until that removal, Samoa's first female Prime Minister. Table 4 below shows that Mr Schmidt's FAST party had, in 2025, won 58.8% of the seats, but with only 40.9% of the vote.

Party	Votes (%)	Seats (%)
FAST	40.9	58.8
HRPP	36.8	27.5
SUP	8.6	5.9
Independents	12.5	7.8

Table 4: Percentages of seats versus votes at Samoa’s 2025 polls

Samoa has long had a pattern of political turmoil that the use of single-member electoral districts does not appear to have helped allay.

Ella Haddad, MHA for Clark, to be Guest Speaker
at PRSA Inc’s online Annual General Meeting

Non-members of PRSA Inc. that would like to hear the address to the Annual General Meeting by Ms Ella Haddad, one of the two Labor MHAs elected for the seat of Clark in Tasmania's House of Assembly at the 2025 general election, should email info@prsa.org.au to obtain details to enable them to attend. Non-members can, of course, not vote on any motions at the meeting, but the Chair could let them ask questions.

© 2025 Proportional Representation Society of Australia Inc.

ABN 31 010 090 247    A0048538N Victoria

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