Scott Bennett Politics and Public Administration Group
20 April 1999
Contents
Major Issues
Introduction
The Senate-perceived problems
What changes might be made?
House of Representatives-perceived
problems
Should changes be made to the electoral
system?
Can Australia establish a perfect electoral
system?
Endnotes
Appendix: Non-major party House of
Representatives victories 1946-98
Table 1: First-past-the-post in 1998
Table 2: The 'winner's bonus'-House of
Representatives elections
Major
Issues
National electoral systems are often the subject
of debate and controversy-as has been the case in New Zealand and
the UK throughout the 1990s. In Australia, possible changes to the
electoral system in use for Commonwealth elections have also come
under discussion. Senators Helen Coonan (Lib, NSW) and Meg Lees
(AD, SA) have recently made recommendations for reform, prompting a
debate which has discussed wide-ranging issues such as the role of
the Senate and the principles of representation, as well as the
narrower issue of what is the most appropriate voting method for
either house of the national parliament. In addition to Coonan's
and Lees' considered contributions, there have been briefer
comments by One Nation leader, Pauline Hanson, and the journalist,
D. D. McNicoll. This Current Issues Brief outlines
these views, as well as discussing the possible problems involved
in making significant changes to the Commonwealth Electoral Act
1918.
Introduction
Electoral systems
provide the practical means for translating votes into
parliamentary seats. In a political system like the Australian,
this has two major outcomes. The electoral system has a direct
impact upon who shall govern-the party (or parties) that win a
majority of lower house seats is commissioned to form the
government. The second consequence of the operation of the
Australian electoral system is that it also allocates seats in an
upper house, a body that is usually seen as having some functions
that are different from that which is sometimes called the 'house
of government'.
How well does the Australian system meet
Australia's needs? There is no doubt that in regard to the central
function of providing the nation with stable government, the system
has worked satisfactorily, but recent public criticism suggests
that some people, at least, would like to see various changes
made.
Senate
power
As a backdrop for the discussion that follows,
it is relevant to talk first about Senate power.
In his work on comparative government, Alan Ball
of the University of Portsmouth has observed that 'most second
chambers are politically unimportant'.(1) Of all upper houses in
existence, the Australian Senate is in fact one of the most
powerful, a point that must be appreciated in any discussion of the
voting method used for our upper house. It has been noted that
its:
power to reject supply and some of its other
legislative powers are not shared by most upper houses operating in
the parliamentary executive system. Indeed, the Australian Senate
is a far more powerful upper house than is normal in most other
countries which have systems of parliamentary government.(2)
It is because the Senate is so powerful and,
hence, so much of a prize for the parties, that there is any
serious discussion of its voting system. If it were to be as
relatively insignificant as most other upper houses, such as the
French or the Japanese, there would be little to contest. The power
to block Supply legislation that was a matter of controversy in
1974-5, is clearly central to this question of Senate power.
Despite the Constitutional Commission's recommendation in 1988 that
this be removed by constitutional amendment,(3) there is unlikely
to be any agreement between the parties over the question, despite
this being a change that would probably suit both the Coalition's
and Labor's long-term interests. Laurie Oakes has described Howard
Government frustration with the Senate as '[reinforcing] the
argument for Senate reform by demonstrating how the Upper House has
frustrated both major parties.(4)
An even more drastic way of tackling this
question would be to amend the Constitution to strip back all
Senate power to a position where the upper house had little more
than a delaying power, much like the House of Lords since the
Parliament Acts of 1911 and 1949. In Britain this matter
is currently being reconsidered by the Royal Commission set up to
investigate proposals to alter the place of the House of Lords
after the removal of the hereditary peers. The British have
realised that there is a basic dilemma involving the relationship
between upper and lower houses in any legislature. If there is too
much pruning of upper house power it can leave that body as largely
redundant. This is the old dilemma posed about two hundred years
ago by the French politician, the Abbe Sieyes, when he asserted
that 'if a second chamber dissents from the first, it is
mischievous; if it agrees with it, it is superfluous'.(5)
Australians are well aware that this is a conundrum not easily
solved.
The Senate-perceived
problems
An
unrepresentative upper house? (1)
It has been argued that the Senate is
unrepresentative in at least two ways. The first is part and parcel
of the original federal compact, namely the equal number of Senate
seats given each original state, described in a recent paper by
Liberal Senator Helen Coonan as making 'a nonsense of the notion of
one vote, one value'.(6) Coonan has also stated that
nearly one hundred years after the creation of the Commonwealth of
Australia:
it is reasonable to ask whether the smaller
States need to be protected by a Federal structure requiring equal
representation of Senators, irrespective of population, when party
discipline and national politics have made the prevailing concerns
of the founders at the time of Federation, redundant.(7)
It is a measure of the frustration of the major
parties that a Liberal Senator should express a view that would
once have only been heard from a Labor politician.
An
unrepresentative upper house? (2)
The other aspect of this matter of Senate
representativeness relates to the fact that the balance of power is
so often held, and is exploited, by minority party or independent
Senators. To win a Senate seat at a half-Senate election, a 'quota'
of 14.3 per cent of first and later preferences and surplus votes
needs to be gained. It is this low quota (when compared with the 50
per cent + one vote for House of Representatives seats), that makes
it relatively easy for a party or an independent with a moderate
amount of electorate support to win a Senate seat.
Coonan has asked whether it is in the best
interests of the broader community and good government, if 'for
practical purposes effective power [in the Senate] is concentrated
in the hands of the few, especially disproportionate to their
electoral support'.(8) This has been a constant complaint heard
about the Senate for many years, regardless of whether Labor or the
Coalition have been in power.
What changes might be
made?
Changing
Senate numbers?
The simple answer is for the major parties to
increase their popularity with voters. For both Labor and the
Coalition a vote of 42.9 per cent would almost certainly win three
seats per State, thus excluding minor party and independent
victories. This is a target that should be well within their
capabilities, yet in the most recent Commonwealth election in 1998
both sides were well below the 40 per cent mark nationally, and
only managed to share the six seats in Victoria. This latter result
has become quite rare, due to the marked decline in major party
Senate votes in each decade from the 1950s to the present.(9)
There have been some suggestions that the
reduction of the size of the Senate to ten Senators per State
would, by increasing the size of the quota to 16.7 per cent,
usually exclude even the strongest of minor parties. An
illustration of the effect of increasing a quota can be seen in the
1998 reduction in the size of the Tasmanian House of Assembly. The
quota for the five seats was increased from 12.5 per cent to 16.7
per cent, and despite the Tasmanian Greens' 1998 vote being similar
to that in 1995, their representation fell from four members to
one.(10) While the major party vote remains stagnant, though,
half-Senate elections for five Senators would probably see the
major parties still well below the 50 per cent needed to win three
of a State's five seats. The chances of a prominent minor party,
such as the Democrats, winning the final seat in each State would
thus still be high.(11)
Coonan's criticism about the equality of Senate
numbers for the Original States is unlikely to be supported. There
would be little chance of any alteration of such a fundamental part
of the Constitution, even were the major parties to support it in
the national Parliament. There would be very strong opposition-that
would probably be bipartisan-in the smaller States. In any case, it
is likely that many federal Liberals and Nationals would also
oppose such a change. Overall, then, there would be sufficient
opposition to make the double majority of s.128 unlikely to be
achieved.
Altering
Parliamentary terms
Another way of changing the Senate would be to
revisit the 1988 effort to amend the Constitution to alter
Parliamentary terms. If all Senate members were elected at the one
time as occurs in Western Australian Legislative Council elections,
this would increase the chance of one party gaining control of the
body after an election. There would be no Senators who had been
elected 2-3 years before a general election, as is the case now. A
restoration of major electoral strength would make this scenario
quite possible, particularly if each State had an uneven number of
Senators (e.g. 11 or 13).
Attacking
the proportional representation 'problem'
A key target for critics is the proportional
representation (PR) voting method itself, which is blamed for the
continued failure of the major parties to gain control of the upper
house.(12) Suggested reforms seem to follow three main approaches:
replacement of proportional representation by preferential voting,
alteration of electorates, or imposition of electoral
thresholds.
Replacement by
preferential voting?
In 1994, press reports stated that Prime
Minister Keating was looking into changing Senate voting
arrangements so that there would be separate, single-member
electorates, with preferential voting the method employed.(13) No
detail was given but it seemed to involve a change similar to that
later suggested by former Liberal Party Federal Director, Andrew
Robb. Robb proposed a system similar to the Victorian Legislative
Council arrangements, whereby each State would be divided into six
regions, each represented by two Senators, one of whom would retire
every three years.(14) Malcolm Mackerras of the Australian Defence
Force Academy has claimed that s.7 of the Constitution only allows
the people of a State to vote for Senators 'as one electorate', but
he ignores the fact that in using the words 'until the Parliament
otherwise provides', the section also provides for Parliament to
make other arrangements at any time in the future.(15) The
importance of the Parliament having such a power was certainly the
view of some of the founders, who argued the case for making the
section flexible enough so that should the Commonwealth Parliament
'find that this method is unworkable, they will be able to alter
it'.(16) This would suggest that the introduction of single-member
Senate electorates would be quite feasible.
Because of the high quota of votes needed to win
a seat (50 per cent + one vote), this change to our electoral
arrangements would be very likely to work to the detriment of minor
party and independent candidates, particularly as the electorates
in each mainland State would be larger than they are in House of
Representatives elections. The larger the size of the electorate,
the more reliant would party candidates be on their party
organisation, a factor that would be of particular benefit to
Coalition and Labor Party candidates-New South Wales seats would
contain nearly 680 000 voters, for example, compared with the
average of 81 500 for the State's 50 House of Representatives seats
in 1998. According to Coonan, the Coalition would have gained a
Senate majority of between four and six seats in 1996 had this
system been in place.(17)
Alteration of
electorates?
Senator Coonan has suggested another option,
namely the establishment of three State electorates, each being
represented by four Senators, two of whom would retire every three
years. Such a two-seat contest would mirror the arrangements
currently in place for the Territory Senate elections.(18) The
quota of votes to win one seat would be 33.3 per cent, but double
that to win two seats, so that such an arrangement would virtually
guarantee that the seats would be shared by the major players, to
the exclusion of all other parties and candidates. Despite the
near-defeat of ACT Liberal Senator Margaret Reid in 1998, the
twenty ACT and Northern Territory Senate contests since 1975 have
seen half the seats won by the Coalition and half by the ALP. The
problem, though, is that if an even number of Senators is to be
elected in this way at each election, it is highly unlikely that
either major side could secure a Senate majority.
Electoral
thresholds?
A third method for tackling proportional
representation involves the imposition of an electoral threshold, a
device commonly used by major parties in other political systems to
protect their position from attack from minor parties:
Most architects of PR want representation to be
proportional for serious, pro-regime parties. They want to keep
trivial splinter groups and tiny anti-regime parties out of
parliament for fear that parliamentary representation might help
them destabilise the political system.(19)
Typically, the electoral arrangements that
include an electoral threshold will specify a minimum percentage of
the vote that a party or individual must achieve to be able to
participate in the allocation of seats. Coonan's paper canvasses
four threshold levels: five per cent (the German figure), 7.14 per
cent (50 per cent of a Senate quota), ten per cent (no rationale is
given for this figure) and 11.43 per cent (80 per cent of a Senate
quota).(20) Her paper shows that of the sixteen minor party and
independent Senators elected in 1993, 1996 and 1998, all would have
survived a five per cent threshold. Three would have been defeated
under a 7.14 per cent threshold, ten under a ten per cent figure,
and the 11.43 per cent threshold would have seen only four gaining
election (Stott Despoja and Kernot in 1996, Lees and Hill in 1998).
With the remaining dozen seats likely to be pretty evenly shared
due to the evenness of party strengths, even the use of the highest
threshold on the Coonan list would be quite likely to see the
balance of power in the Senate held by minority Senators.(21)
The simple answer might be that a higher
threshold than 11.43 per cent should be considered, but this would
have to be looked at very carefully, for a figure much higher than
the 11.43 per cent might have blocked the Liberal Party's David
McGibbon in 1987 (party vote 14.2 per cent), and the Nationals' Ron
Boswell (1990, 12.8 per cent) and Bill O'Chee (1993, 13.6 per
cent). Even the ten per cent threshold would have removed the
Queensland Nationals from the count in 1998. In all cases the
preferences of these parties would have flowed on to the Coalition
partner, but as Coonan herself notes about thresholds:
Obviously expert advice would be necessary to
conduct a thorough analysis of the impact of a threshold system but
conceptually it offers the possibility of a solution to the
rule of minorities that has so characterised the Senate in
recent years.(22)
House of Representatives-perceived
problems
Preferential voting has long seemed a settled
part of the Australian electoral system. Since the 1998 election,
however, there have been three public criticisms made of this
voting method.
The height
of the hurdle
An extremely difficult hurdle for minor parties
in Australia is the requirement for a candidate to gain 50 per cent
+ one vote to win a seat, something that non-major party candidates
find difficult to achieve. Only 14 such victories have been
achieved in House of Representatives seats since 1946.(23) The
hurdle is undoubtedly high, but it is also relevant to mention that
for most of the preferential voting elections since 1919 the sound
electoral health of the major parties has seen them able to get the
lion's share of the vote. If the 1998 House of Representatives
national votes for the ALP, Liberal Party and National Party are
tallied, we find that these parties secured nearly 80 per cent.
Such a figure does not leave many votes for non-major party
candidates. The major parties' reply to criticism of the height of
the hurdle is simply to reply that all candidates have an equal
chance to achieve it-the problem, in other words, is not with the
voting method but with the minor parties.
Despite this, the Australian Democrat leader,
Senator Meg Lees has recently criticised this aspect of Australia's
electoral system. According to her it denies representation to one
in five voters (based on 1998 figures), because it effectively
'minimises voters' effective choices to just two similar
parties'.(24) Her solution is an adaptation of the German and New
Zealand electoral systems that has been investigated by the Jenkins
Commission in its discussion of possible electoral changes in the
UK.(25) Lees has proposed the election of 80-85 per cent of MHRs by
preferential voting, where voters choose between
candidates, with the remaining 15-20 per cent of MHRs being
elected by a second, State-wide, vote where electors would choose
between parties. This latter, or 'top-up' vote, would be
allocated in each State to the parties that were the most
under-represented according to their popular vote. Lees' claim is
that if a 15 per cent top-up formula had been in operation in New
South Wales in 1998, 43 of the 50 seats in that State would have
been elected in single-member electorates using preferential
voting, and the remaining seven would have been top-up seats based
on voters' second votes.
Lees has described this model as fair compromise
between a desire to keep single-member electorates, and 'the need
to ensure that the growing number of Australians opting for third
parties is afforded representation in the Parliament.'(26)
A return to
first-past-the-post?
In the wake of her defeat in Blair (Qld),
Pauline Hanson described the voting method as unfair because, as
she had led comfortably on first preferences (36.0 per cent), she
believed she should have won the seat. The journalist, D. D.
McNicoll, echoed this criticism and called for the installation of
first-past-the-post for House of Representatives elections. He
pointed out that first-past-the-post is easier to understand,
something that is surely of great importance in a democracy, and is
much quicker to count.(27) There is no doubt about McNicoll's
claims, for the first-past-the-post method is simplicity itself,
requiring just the single vote against one name, and in Britain,
for example, the results in a great many seats are known by the end
of polling day.
The problem with first-past-the-post, though, is
that it is far more prone than preferential voting to throw up
anomalous results. In Britain, for instance, the Labour Party won
49 per cent of the vote in 1951 yet failed to win office; in 1997,
by contrast, Labour won 44 per cent of the vote and gained a huge
majority of 179 seats. Labour twice won the highest share of the
vote in the 1950s yet lost both elections.(28) Preferential voting
in Australia is also unlikely to produce the startling Canadian
general election result of 1993, when the Conservative Government's
numbers in the House of Commons fell from 155 to just two members.
Anomalous results like these have seen New Zealand replace
first-past-the-post with multi-member proportional,(29) and Britain
set up the Jenkins Commission (see above), to investigate the
possibility of replacing the British system.
If a particular Australian electorate cannot
produce a candidate with an absolute majority, then the allocation
of preferences is designed to find the most preferred
candidate. One can argue that in Blair the Liberal candidate,
Cameron Thompson, was preferred by more voters than was
Hanson who had, after all, been well below a 50 per cent vote on
first preferences. Certainly the system treated other candidates
more harshly than her: five of the seven candidates who led on
first preferences but lost after the distribution of preferences,
received a higher vote than did she. Warwick Smith (LP, Bass)
actually received 45.7 per cent while Eoin Cameron (LP, Stirling)
gained 41.7 per cent.(30) The major parties have said little about
such results in the past, presumably because they see these as part
and parcel of preferential voting, and a recognition that
every voting method produces strange results from time to
time. If first-past-the-post had been used in 1998, the result
would have been as follows:
Table 1: First-past-the-post in
1998
|
Preferential voting
|
First-past-the-post
|
LIB
|
64
|
67
|
NPA
|
16
|
14
|
ALP
|
67
|
65
|
PHON
|
-
|
1
|
IND
|
1
|
1
|
The 'wrong'
winner
Lees has also criticised the voting method for
allowing the 'wrong' party to win office. She has noted that in
five post-1945 elections (1954, 1961, 1969, 1990, 1998) the party
with the lower two-party preferred vote has been able to form a
government on the basis of having won a majority of House of
Representatives seats.(31) The problem Lees is pointing to is a
consequence of using what is generally called a 'majority' voting
method in single-member electorates.(32) In such an arrangement it
is impossible to guarantee that the party with a majority of votes
will actually win a majority of seats.
In fact, it is theoretically possible for a
party to gain 49.9 per cent of the first preference vote in every
House of Representatives electorate yet fail to return any members
to the House. Although most majority systems do manage to allocate
parliamentary seats to parties in rough proportion to votes won by
each, nothing actually guarantees this.(33) This helps explain why
it is possible for a party to receive a majority of votes yet fail
to win government, as occurred in 1954 when the ALP won 50 per cent
of first preferences, yet won only 57 of 121 electorates and
remained in Opposition. It also explains how the Coalition retained
office in 1998 with just 39.5 per cent of first preferences and
only 49.0 per cent of the two-party preferred vote. To an important
extent, such results depend on which side of electorate boundaries
that votes fall, rather than the total number of votes a party
receives.(34)
The lack of
proportionality
Lees' other criticism of preferential voting has
been the tendency for the voting method to produce
'disproportionate representation of the Government in terms of
seats won'. This was especially obvious in the landslide elections
of 1966, 1975, 1977 and 1996 when the winning party gained a much
higher proportion of seats than votes.(35) In 1996, for instance,
the Coalition won 63.5 per cent of House seats on a first
preference vote of just 47.2 per cent.
It might be supposed that an electoral system
should allocate half of the parliamentary seats to the party that
wins half of the vote-or as political scientists would put it,
there should be a high degree of 'proportionality' in an electoral
system. A number of studies have shown, however, that electoral
systems are very crude instruments for ensuring
proportionality:
There is no easy way in which electorates can be
divided so that a vote of 50.01 percent of the populace will be
guaranteed always to produce a majority of seats for the group
scoring the majority of votes.(36)
In his famous study of the impact of electoral
systems, Douglas Rae observed that a high degree of proportionality
is hardest to achieve in single-member electorates, of the type in
use for House of Representatives elections.(37) This phenomenon is
exaggerated by what has been noted about the way in which all
voting methods-and not only majority systems-
tend to award more than proportionate shares of
parliamentary seats to parties with large shares of the vote, and
to award less than proportionate shares of seats to parties with
smaller shares of the vote.(38)
The largest seat-winner tends to benefit most
from this phenomenon, often gaining what has been called the
'winner's bonus'. This is usually seen most clearly in
single-member electorates where majority methods are in
use:(39)
Table 2:
The 'winner's bonus'-House of Representatives
elections
|
Winning party/coalition-proportion of first preference
votes
|
Winning party/coalition-proportion of seats
|
|
1977
|
48.1
|
69.4
|
+21.3
|
1980
|
46.3
|
59.2
|
+12.9
|
1983
|
49.5
|
60.0
|
+10.5
|
1984
|
47.5
|
55.4
|
+7.9
|
1987
|
45.8
|
58.1
|
+12.3
|
1990
|
39.4
|
52.7
|
+13.3
|
1993
|
44.9
|
54.4
|
+9.5
|
1996
|
47.3
|
63.5
|
+16.2
|
1998
|
39.5
|
54.1
|
+14.6
|
Source: Scott Bennett,
Winning and Losing. Australian National Elections,
Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 1996, p. 60; Scott Bennett,
Andrew Kopras and Gerard Newman, 'Federal Elections 1998',
Research Paper No. 9 1998-99, Department of the
Parliamentary Library, 1999, p. 14.
There is actually no solution to this which will
satisfy all people. Each individual's judgement of what is 'best'
depends upon the results one wants to achieve. If the aim is a
locality-based system that is highly likely to produce a lower
house majority and, therefore, stable government, there is no doubt
that since 1919 preferential voting has produced clear results in
all elections except that of 1940. If one is concerned to maintain
some relationship between voter and local MHR, single-member
electorates should be retained. On the other hand, if one seeks a
voting method that guarantees some representation of the ideas of
significant pockets of the people-such as supporters of
environmental issues or the followers of Pauline Hanson-then the
aim should be to establish a proportional representation
system.
Should changes be made to the
electoral system?
The answer to this question is a matter of
political judgment. Typically, such changes are made because
parties and politicians judge that they will be of direct benefit
to them, and because of this, sometimes mistakes are made. Some of
the more obvious pitfalls are discussed briefly here.
Lack of
understanding of the method being altered
Altering voting methods can be an uncertain
business, often because of a lack of understanding by those making
the changes. We have already seen this three times in relation to
Senate elections in this country.
Senate
elections-first-past-the-post
(1902)(40)
The first method chosen for Senate elections was
first-past-the-post, a method that only works satisfactorily in
multi-member electorates when candidates stand as independents.
With parties contesting an election, many multi-member results are
likely to be highly distorted, as occurred in some early Senate
results. After three uncontroversial elections in the first decade,
in the 1910 election all 18 Senate seats were won by Labor, and in
1917 the eighteen were all won by the Nationalists. In the double
dissolution election of 1914 the ALP won 31 of the 36 seats.
Senate
elections-preferential voting
(1919)(41)
The change to preferential voting for the 1919
Senate election indicated that people had not realised that this
method, also, was not suited to multi-member electorates. In that
first election the Nationalists (46.4 per cent of the vote) won 18
of the 19 seats, while Labor's 42.8 per cent of the vote returned a
solitary seat. More often than not Senate results between 1919-1946
gave bizarre results: Labor was unable to win any of the 18 seats
in 1934, for instance, while the opposition parties failed to win a
single seat in 1943.
Senate
elections-proportional
representation(42)
The change to the Single Transferable Vote
variant of proportional representation for the 1949 election also
showed a lack of familiarity with what was being proposed. As with
the earlier use of first-past-the-post, the consequences were not
immediately apparent, but from the time the Democratic Labor Party
gained the balance of power following the 1964 Senate election, the
game had changed. By the time the Australian Democrats, the Greens
and Brian Harradine had entered the picture, the major parties had
come to resent the impact of proportional representation on party
representation in the Senate.
The increase in
Senate numbers
Another example of a lack of understanding
occurred when the Representation Act 1983 increased the
number of each State's Senators from ten to twelve, a change that
added to the difficulty for parties attempting to gain control of
the upper house. Before this change, the fact that five were to be
elected in half-Senate elections meant that it was always possible
that one party could gain a majority of Senate seats decided in a
particular year-in 1955, for instance the Coalition won 17 of 30
seats across the nation. At the extreme, if the one party were
successful in all six States in two consecutive elections, then
that party would have a 36-24 majority. Of course, a majority might
not be achieved due to differing results in each State, plus the
fact that only half of the Senate was elected on the one day, but a
majority was still quite possible. The key to such a result,
clearly, was having an uneven number of seats decided in each
State.
The increase in Senate seats to 12 left the
position where Senate results (assuming the absence of minor
parties) was highly likely to be 3-3, as occurred in New South
Wales in 1993 and Victoria in 1993 and 1998.(43) For a 4-2 result
to be achieved in any State Labor or the Coalition would need to
secure an almost unprecedented 57.1 per cent of the vote-since 1949
this figure has been achieved only once, in 1975 when the
Coalition's Queensland Senate vote was 57.3 per cent. Clearly, even
if minor parties could be pushed from the scene (barring a major
collapse on one side of politics), no party could expect to win
more than half of the Senate seats over the period of two
half-Senate elections. A Senate in which the Coalition and the
Labor Party each had one-half of the members, would probably be
more rigid than when the government of the day is able, by
negotiation, to construct majorities on particular pieces of
legislation. Indeed, it might be argued that a government is
actually better off in that position than if the Senate seats were
neatly halved between the Coalition and Labor. At least it has the
option of negotiating with a party or individual Senator(s) who
control the balance of power. As Gerard Henderson has noted,
Whatever its complaint [about the Senate], the
first Howard government did get most of its programme through the
Senate-with the help of the Democrats and Independents.(44)
It can be argued that introducing changes to the
current Senate voting method should be handled with care lest
unforeseen consequences produce something worse than the
arrangements that have now been in place for fifty years.
Voter unpredictability
One uncertainty associated with voting method
alteration is that voters are unpredictable-and prone to change
their minds. Politicians can make alterations, but they cannot be
certain just how voters will behave when it comes to the act of
casting a ballot. One unanticipated consequence of the 1948 change
to proportional representation for Senate elections, has been the
propensity of many voters to vote for one party in lower house
elections and for another for the upper house. Typically, the major
parties win fewer votes in Senate than in House elections, while
the reverse applies for the Australian Democrats. Since 1949, the
major party Senate vote has on average been 4.4 per cent lower than
for House elections, with the gap climbing to 7.8 per cent in the
four elections of the eighties. The nineties figure has been 3.9
per cent.(45)
Reasons for this have been discussed in the
literature. One theory is that voters do not want to 'waste' votes.
We have seen how the method of voting used for House elections
makes it very difficult for non-major party candidates to win House
seats. Many people who vote Democrat in the Senate may follow such
a vote with a vote for a major party in the concurrent House of
Representatives election. It has been theorised that such voters
are seeking not to 'waste' their House votes.(46)
A second possibility is that there are voters
who actually seek to produce an upper house with a political
balance different from the lower house. It has been suggested that
these voters see merit in the existence of a strong upper house, on
the grounds that it 'represents a strategic way' for voters 'to
express issue-based grievances or to put a brake on major party
dominance'-even if they support a major party in the lower house
election. According to Bean and Wattenberg such strategic voting
that seeks to curb executive power, 'is a significant factor in
explaining different patterns of party strength' between the two
houses in Australia.(47)
Whatever the reasons for this, vote-splitting of
this type plays a part in reducing the chances of a major party
gaining control of the Senate, but was not predicted by those
instituting the change in 1948.
Interfering
with the logic of an established voting method
Many voting methods have been created by
mathematicians, concerned to produce a method that has an internal
logic, and which produces a planned type of result-the creators of
preferential voting saw it as having particular benefits not
possessed by the first-past-the-post method, while those who
developed different methods of proportional voting sought to
achieve a certain type of proportionality in election results. An
Australian example of a piecemeal change that ignored a system's
internal logic occurred in regard to the first ACT elections after
the achievement of self-government.
The first two elections for the ACT Legislative
Assembly used a modified form of the d'Hondt method of proportional
representation. An electoral threshold, such as those discussed
earlier in this paper, was inserted into the legislation, as was an
arrangement concerning the distribution of preferences which was
uniquely Australian in its concept. The threshold was designed to
eliminate all parties and candidates from the count if they failed
to reach one quota (5.6 per cent) on first preferences. The
'modified d'Hondt', as it was called, was in fact the result of
deals done between parties in the national parliament, rather than
a carefully-applied modification of this well-tried European voting
method. The Australian Electoral Commission was very critical of
this distortion of the d'Hondt system, and the Electoral
Commissioner concluded that 'any plausible justification for it in
terms of underlying principles is now invisible behind the veil of
compromises and trade-offs'.(48) The altered method certainly
pushed many candidates out of the count, for in the 1989 election
49 per cent of the candidates (57 of 117) were eliminated after the
count of first preferences. Quite unexpectedly, however, the
proportionality of the final result was lessened in an unfortunate
fashion. The Australian Electoral Commission noted that three of
the excluded parties and one excluded independent
were denied seats which, but for the initial
round of exclusions, they would have won-an occurrence which at the
same time reduced from 84.67 per cent to 66.28 per cent the
percentage of voters represented by the party or independent
candidate of their first choice.(49)
Another threshold problem relates to an apparent
lack of understanding in reform suggestions of the way thresholds
typically are used elsewhere. Most operate in systems where
election quotas are very low and there is a great likelihood of a
massive splintering of the party system. Australian Senate quotas
are much higher, and parties need a significant share of the
popular vote to get a candidate elected. It has been claimed that
the purpose of the imposition of thresholds for Senate elections
would be 'to skew the system in favour of candidates from larger
parties', rather than to achieve the degree of representation that
proportional representation can achieve.(50)
The message might be to leave properly
functioning voting methods well alone-or else introduce a
completely different method.
Can Australia establish a perfect electoral
system?
A discussion such as this implicitly raises a
simple question that is extremely difficult to answer: 'What is the
best voting method?' Despite the claims that are made by advocates
of different methods, there is, in fact, no 'best' method, because
the functions of particular elections may well be different for
different legislative bodies.
Despite controversies that often surround
national electoral systems, it is a fact that they are rarely
changed in liberal democracies. When changes do occur they tend to
be minor technical adjustments such as registration questions,
refinements to the provisions for the drawing of boundaries, or
alteration of polling-day arrangements, rather than significant
alterations of the type recently spoken of in Australia. Even
incoming governments rarely break the pattern: 'Particular
electoral systems are maintained even when the elites forming the
government change'.(51) A major factor in this seems to be the
recognition of a point made earlier in this paper, that changes to
electoral systems are often unpredictable in their consequences. An
obvious example has been the unstable parliamentary situation in
New Zealand that is the direct consequence of the establishment of
a new electoral system. Since the first MMP election in 1996, no
party has been able to gain an absolute majority in the national
parliament, and there has been a high degree of parliamentary
instability. It is already clear that the difficulty of predicting
the consequences of voting method change for the British House of
Lords is likely to be the problem that is most likely to wreck any
sort of consensus on the question of reform of the Lords.(52)
When the question of altering the nation's
electoral system arises, is it best to leave well
alone-particularly if appears to be working adequately, and is
accepted by the great mass of the population? University of Western
Australia political scientist, Bruce Stone, has noted that:
An intriguing feature of electoral systems is
that small, apparently insignificant changes to their constituent
rules can have important consequences.(53)
As Professor Don Aitkin has argued, Australia
may have the balance of party and public needs just about right,
claiming that he is yet to see another national electoral process
that is 'as fairly conducted, as universally supported and as
decisive'.(54) A British commentator on voting methods has asserted
that:
To meet the canons of democracy, an electoral
system should perform two functions. It should ensure, first, that
the majority rules and, secondly, that all significant minorities
are heard.(55)
It so happens that in the past fifty years the
Commonwealth electoral system, as well as the systems in New South
Wales, Western Australia and South Australia, have adopted the
pattern of a majority system for the lower house and a proportional
method for the upper (Tasmania has this in reverse). Has Australia
stumbled on a reasonable compromise?
Endnotes
-
- Alan R. Ball, Modern Politics and Government,
Macmillan, Basingstoke, 5th ed 1993, p. 160.
- Report of the Advisory Committee on Executive Government
June 1987, Canberra Publishing and Printing, Canberra, 1987,
p. 22.
- Final Report of the Constitutional Commission, AGPS,
Canberra, 1998, vol. 1, pp. 218-47.
- Laurie Oakes, 'Case for Senate reform crosses the political
divide', Bulletin, 9 February 1999, p. 32. For a Labor
view that makes the same point, see John Faulkner, 'How to really
fix up the Senate', Age, 9 February 1999.
- Quoted in Eric Edgar Howitt, Cameral Government. Unicameral
and bicameral legislatures, Viridia Books, Melbourne, 1992, p.
187.
- Helen Coonan, 'The Senate. Safeguard or Handbrake on
Democracy?', address to Sydney Institute, February 1999, p. 23.
- Ibid.
- Ibid., p. 20.
- Scott Bennett, 'The Decline in Support for the Major Parties
and the Prospect of Minority Government', Research Paper No. 10
1998-99, Department of the Parliamentary Library, 1999,
p. 4.
- See Department of the Parliamentary Library Research Notes,
'The Reduction in the Size of the Tasmanian Parliament' (no. 2,
1998-99) and 'Tasmanian Election 1998' (no. 6, 1998-99).
- This change would also require a complementary reduction in the
size of the House of Representatives. s.24 of the Constitution says
that the number of MHRs 'shall be, as nearly as practicable, twice
the number of the senators'.
- Scott Bennett, Winning and Losing. Australian National
Elections, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 1996, pp.
48-51.
- Ibid., p. 82.
- Australian Financial Review, 12 June 1997.
- Australian, 25 February 1999.
- Mr Higgins (Vic), Official Record of the Debates of the
Australasian Federal Convention Sydney, 2nd to 24th September
1897, Government Printer, Sydney, 1897, p. 371; see also Mr
McMillan (NSW), p. 369.
- Coonan, op. cit., p. 24.
- Ibid.
- Martin Harrop and William L. Miller, Elections and Voters.
A Comparative Introduction, Macmillan, Basingstoke, 1987, p.
65.
- Coonan, op. cit., pp. 25-7.
- For more on thresholds for the Senate, see Margaret Healy and
Gerard Newman, 'An Electoral Threshold for the Senate?', Department
of the Parliamentary Library, Research Note 1998-99,
forthcoming.
- Ibid., p. 27.
- See Appendix.
- John Cherry, discussion paper prepared for Senator Meg Lees,
January 1999, p. 5.
- See John Warhurst, 'Changing the British Voting System? The
Jenkins Commission Report', Research Note 1998-99,
Department of the Parliamentary Library, forthcoming.
- Cherry, op. cit., p. 8, see also table pp. 12-13.
- Australian, 8 December 1998.
- Bill Coxall and Lynton Robins, Contemporary British
Politics, Macmillan, Basingstoke, 3rd ed 1998, p. 138.
- Geoffrey Palmer and Matthew Palmer, Bridled Power. New
Zealand Government under MMP, OUP, Auckland, 1997, pp. 22-4.
- Scott Bennett, Andrew Kopras and Gerard Newman, 'Federal
Elections 1998', Research Paper No. 9 1998-99, Department
of the Parliamentary Library, 1999, p. 10.
- Cherry, op. cit., pp. 2-3.
- The elections of 1954, 1961 and 1969 were also affected by an
electoral inequality that is no longer permissible under the
Commonwealth Electoral Act. There was no requirement for
regular redistributions, and the quota variation was 20 per cent
(today ten per cent).
- Martin Harrop and William L. Miller, Elections and Voters.
A comparative introduction, Macmillan, Basingstoke, 1987, p.
51.
- Bennett, Winning and Losing, p. 59.
- Cherry, op. cit., p. 3.
- David Solomon, 'Elect the government!', in Michael Coper and
George Williams (ed), Power, Parliament and the People,
Federation Press, Sydney, 1997, p. 51.
- Douglas W. Rae, The Political Consequences of Electoral
Laws, Yale University Press, New Haven, rev. ed. 1971, pp.
19-21.
- Ibid, p. 70.
- Bennett, Winning and Losing, pp. 59-60.
- Commonwealth Electoral Act 1902.
- Commonwealth Electoral Act 1918-1919.
- Commonwealth Electoral Act 1948.
- The Tasmanians had long been aware of this. After the 1955 and
1956 elections for five six-member electorates produced 15-15
results in the House of Assembly, the parliament was increased so
that each electorate had seven members. The 1998 reduction was to
five-member electorates.
- Courier Mail, 4 February 1999.
- Figures calculated from Gerard Newman, 'Federal Election
Results 1949-1998', Research Paper No. 8 1998-99,
Information and Research Services, Department of the Parliamentary
Library, 1999.
- Bennett, Winning and Losing, pp. 174-5.
- Shaun Bowler and David Denemark, 'Split Ticket Voting in
Australia: Dealignment and Inconsistent Votes Considered',
Australian Journal of Political Science, vol. 28, no. 1,
March 1993, p. 30; Clive S. Bean and Martin P. Wattenberg,
'Attitudes Towards Divided Government and Ticket-splitting in
Australia and the United States', Australian Journal of
Political Science, vol. 33, no. 1, March 1998, p. 35.
- Scott Bennett, The 1989 ACT Election, Political
Science Department, The Faculties, Australian National University,
Canberra, 1989, pp. 6-7.
- Commonwealth Parliament, Inquiry into the ACT Election and
Electoral System, Government Printer, Canberra, 1989, pp.
81-2.
- Geoffrey Goode, Proportional Representation Society, letter to
Age, 9 February 1999.
- Andrew Reeve and Alan Ware, Electoral Systems. A
comparative and theoretical introduction, Routledge, London,
1992, p. 4.
- Modernising Parliament-Reforming the House of Lords', Cmd 4183,
http://www.official-documents.co.uk/document/cm41/4183/ref-01.htm,
12 February 1999, ch. 7.
- Bruce Stone, 'Small Parties and the Senate Revisited: The
Consequences of the Enlargement of the Senate in 1984',
Australian Journal of Political Science, vol. 33, no. 2,
July 1998, p. 211.
- Canberra Times, 4 March 1993.
- Vernon Bogdanor, What is Proportional Representation? A
guide to the issues, Martin Robertson, Oxford, 1984, p.
157.
Appendix: Non-major party House of
Representatives victories 1946-98
Year
|
Successful candidate
|
Minor party
or independent
|
Division
|
First preferences
|
Background
|
1946
|
Jack Lang
|
Ind
|
Reid
(NSW)
|
33.7
|
Former Premier
|
1946
|
Doris Blackburn
|
Ind
|
Bourke
(Vic)
|
26.7
|
Widow of former
Member
|
1949
|
Lew Nott
|
Ind
|
ACT
|
30.9
|
Prominent local doctor
|
1966
|
Sam Benson
|
Ind
|
Batman
(Vic)
|
21.6
|
Sitting MHR, expelled from ALP
|
1990
|
Ted Mack
|
Ind
|
North Sydney (NSW)
|
44.5
|
Former mayor,
MLA
|
1992b/e
|
Phil Cleary
|
Ind
|
Wills
(Vic)
|
33.5
|
Local
sportsman
|
1993
|
Ted Mack
|
Ind
|
North Sydney (NSW)
|
35.3
|
Sitting MHR
|
1993
|
Phil Cleary
|
Ind
|
Wills
(Vic)
|
29.4
|
Elected 1992 but election voided
|
1996
|
Peter Andren
|
Ind
|
Calare (NSW)
|
29.4
|
Local television
presenter
|
1996
|
Graeme Campbell
|
Ind
|
Kalgoorlie (WA)
|
35.1
|
Sitting MHR,
disendorsed by
ALP
|
1996
|
Paul Filing
|
Ind
|
Moore
(WA)
|
34.1
|
Sitting MHR,
disendorsed by
Liberal Party
|
1996
|
Allan Rocher
|
Ind
|
Curtin
(WA)
|
29.4
|
Sitting MHR,
disendorsed by
Liberal Party
|
1996
|
Pauline Hanson
|
Ind
|
Oxley
(Qld)
|
48.6
|
Disendorsed Liberal
candidate
|
1998
|
Peter Andren
|
Ind
|
Calare (NSW)
|
40.5
|
Sitting MHR
|
Source: Australian Electoral
Commission
Note: Hanson nominated as
Liberal but lost party endorsement prior to polling day, but too
late to have the party label removed from ballot papers. The
Australian Electoral Commission includes her votes in the Liberal
total, but counts her as an independent in the tally of seats
won.