There’s been a lot of discussion over the last few days about the Labor preselection for my local federal seat of Parramatta, where sitting Labor MP Julie Owens is retiring after 18 years. Parramatta is a very diverse electorate, which large numbers of voters of Indian and Chinese heritage, but more generally including a very diverse range of communities.
Labor appears to be set to preselect former Kevin Rudd advisor Andrew Charlton for the seat. This has been criticised on a number of grounds: that the party should choose a candidate of colour for the seat, that Charlton is a wealthy executive living in a mansion in the eastern suburbs, and that the local branches should have a say in the preselection. These three criticisms do overlap but they are not the same thing.
This has then fed into an argument about the need to choose “quality” candidates for parliament, which is presented in opposition to the need to preselect a local, to preselect someone who isn’t white, and to preselect someone chosen by the local branches (which again are interrelated but not the same).
While I don’t necessarily agree with this dichotomy, I would like to draw attention to one of the big culprits in this dilemma: the single-member electoral system which constrains intra-party choice, both for voters and for the parties.
There is a real issue with the lack of ethnic diversity in parliament. Osmond Chiu has pointed out how far Australia lags in terms of representation of people of colour compared to the share of the Australian population who are not white, and how far we lag behind similar countries like the UK and Canada. This is an issue for all parties but it’s understandable that Labor supporters (like those in Parramatta criticising the Charlton move) will focus on their own party. It particularly sticks out like a sore thumb when Labor holds most of those diverse electorates in Western Sydney, but most of those seats are held by white MPs.
I don’t concede the dichotomy between “quality” candidates (someone who has potential as a future minister or prime minister) and someone who does a better job of representing their electorate. I’m also unconvinced that Charlton’s credentials would make him a good representative of the public.
Part of Labor’s dilemma is that their safe seats tend to be much more culturally diverse, particularly in Sydney and Melbourne, yet the party’s elite has not yet caught up.
But all of this would be far less of a problem if we didn’t use single-member electorates.
If we had proportional representation, either a system with multi-member districts, or an MMP-style system with a top-up list, this dilemma would be mostly mitigated.
Proportional systems tend to result in the election of more women and produce more cultural diversity in the parliament.
They also give parties more freedom about who they run. They can run candidates who match their electorates, while also having more room to elect people who may not be a particularly good fit for a local area but have something to contribute. While Charlton’s home in Bellevue Hill will never elect a Labor MP in a single-member district, he could be quite well suited to be a minority Labor representative in a multi-member north shore or eastern suburbs electorate.
Changing the electoral system is hard, and we shouldn’t use that as an excuse to not improve diversity, and to not look for ways to achieve both diversity and “quality” in the same person, but it’s worth acknowledging how much our electoral system hinders efforts to create more diversity amongst our elected representatives. When you don’t talk about it, it feels a bit like a fish not noticing the water it is swimming in.
Completely agree.
I had a very philosophical conversation with an associate of mine last night over a bottle (or several) of wine where we discussed the shortcomings in our public institutions and how we can go about improving them.
And my biggest gripe has been with the fact our political system forces us as voters to pick between two candidates who may not represent our interests as well as another candidate from the same party or a candidate from another party. We have inherited a system of government which no longer reflects the demands of the modern electorate and changing out voting system is one of the most effective ways of improving that.
Personally I prefer multi-member constituencies as they already exist in Australia in most local governments, at the state level in Tasmania, the ACT, Victoria and until recently WA, and at the Federal level with the Senate. It’s a system that can be relatively implemented into our democracy and doesn’t require teaching the electorate a brand new system they’ve never seen before.
The problem is that neither major party sees this as a problem and unless and until something changes from the viewpoint of one or both the major parties, we’re stuck with this archaic system.
Absolutely agree
With proportional representation the party that gets 10% if the vote will likely get near 10% of the representation
This is how democracy should work
I think lower-house STV works well for councils and for Tassie and the ACT, but I’m not convinced of its merits for, say, Queensland. Our outback electorates are already large enough as single-member districts, let alone as part of a 5 or 7 member district. (If you have multi-member in the cities/hinterland and single member districts in the outback, that’s distortionary.)
So I like MMP. It gives both higher proportionality *and* smaller districts than multi-member-district STV. You don’t even need party lists; just pick the best near-winners (after preferences).
Further, it’s completely compatible with preferential voting. Potentially even synergistic – with full preferential voting we could drop the second ballot. Proportionality votes would be counted for whichever preferenced group crossed the threshold. This also keeps ballot sizes reasonable – the Latte Sipper Party and the Pig Hunting Party probably aren’t standing too many candidates in the same electorates.
I think MMP would work really well for Qld’s unicameral state parliament, not that I expect it will ever happen. The only proportional representation Queenslanders currently have is our Senate delegation. (Some local councils might still be using at-large FPTP, which is almost proportional at times.)
It’s not necessary (and quite uncommon in PR countries) to have all districts return the same number of MPs, so long as the ratio of MPs to electors is reasonably uniform. There is no reason remote areas cannot have small magnitude districts, even single member districts.
You’d need rules to prevent a Tullymander—a fairly spectacular gerrymander in Ireland although it that effort backfired completely. https://www.irishexaminer.com/business/arid-20452565.html.
Well it also comes back to us voting smart.
The LNP had a tussle today sorted for NSW senate and the winning 2nd spot – but as a social conservative I’ll never vote for Marise Payne or NSW NP members so Molan and CF-W just need more smart voters not lazy ones .
https://www.tallyroom.com.au/45840#comment-765330
If single member electorate primary votes are used to determine proportionality, every party potentially large enough to get over any threshold is strongly incentivised to run in every seat to maximise the vote, meaning that the number of candidates per seat will be large.
I suspect the jurisdiction in Australia least unlikely to get some form of MMP is South Australia, probably 2PP or 3PP MMP, because the Liberals have an incentive to introduce it because of the SA ALP`s propensity for behind on 2PP electoral victories.
https://www.tallyroom.com.au/45840/comment-page-1#comment-765341
An even elector to MP ratio isn`t actually fair in a differential electorate size system (unless the number of seats is very large) because the quota for election differs. It takes fewer votes to elect MPs in smaller magnitude electorates than larger ones, because smaller magnitude electorates have a higher proportion of defeated candidate votes. Approximately equal quota systems* should be used where the enrolment per number of seats +1 is kept within the permissible tolerance.
*No need for a purely equal fixed quota system, like in the Weimar Republic.
I do think our Parliament should better reflect the cultural diversity of the country, though I don’t think proportional representation would actually fix this problem. Even in the proportionally elected Senate it currently has only 2 members of Asian ancestry (Penny Wong and Mehreen Faruqi) while 18% of the population is of Asian ancestry, so that suggests the problem is something other than the system of voting.
I would ideally like to see an MMP style system in the lower house with single member electorates preserved because there is value in having local representation, but also with seats allocated to parties in proportion to their vote so that Parliament is reflective of the broader vote. I think the problem in Australia is that it is so vast and the population is highly concentrated around the major cities and so we have some incredibly large single member electorates in rural areas that are difficult to represent (the largest seat in Australia is Durack in WA at a whopping 1.6 million sq km). To implement an MMP style system with party lists and still have single member seats that are no larger than they are now you would probably need to add another ~100 members to a total of 250 in the lower house and the Senate would need to increase by an additional 50 seats to comply with the nexus required by section 24 of the Constitution. As an aside the writers of the Constitution probably didn’t foresee or intend that parliamentarians would be in practice so tightly bound by party allegiance.
Can’t really see the major parties ever implementing this. It doesn’t benefit them politically and the Senate does allow minor parties to be elected and have some kind of influence. Even if they wanted to do the right thing and decided to implement a fairer electoral system it would require significant change in the way and/or the number of the MP’s elected which would be politically risky.
Tom –
I hear you, but as it stands only a handful of political parties are large enough to actually stand candidates in every state district. A literal handful; roughly five in any given state. If PR means we end up with more parties with large membership bases, that’s a good thing for democracy!
Any party that can stand candidates everywhere will (probably!) get across the threshold, sure. But if you have normal two-ballot MMP, what’s the criteria for getting on the party ballot? If it’s anything like our Senate ballots, well, we know what that looks like. Every micro party here is is strongly incentivised to run in the Senate and practically ignore the House. Same deal with two-ballot MMP, small parties are primarily running a list-votes campaign.
But proportional representation changes the game anyway because the number of successful parties goes distinctly up and I reckon they cover more of the political landscape as a result. For example, if we drew a political compass for Australia, with authoritarianism increasing on the vertical axis and economics for the horizontal access, I’d put both majors in the top half, Greens over near the middle of the left edge and the LDP somewhere in the bottom right corner. There’s almost no moderate libertarians in parliament with the exception of Fiona Patten, who seems to be able to make GVT elections work. That’s a big gap and there’s a bunch of micros in the space.
Whatever alternate model you propose isn’t going to solve the elephant in the room, which is that the major parties just don’t take the need for minority representation seriously. Lower house seats are divvied up as factional prizes, and the Senate is almost completely filled with factional schemers. So of course Parliament will continue to be staffed by rich and connected white people. If people want that to change then they need to change their voting habits, not just the constitution.
Agree with FL. MMP would just be window dressing and not really address or solve the problem of under representation of minority groups in Parliament.
For starters, Oswald’s article states Canada and UK both have more diverse parliaments. Neither of those have MMP.
NZ and US also have better representation. All 4 countries use First Past the Post and have non-compulsory voting.
And in the case of UK and Canada, don’t even have elected Upper Houses.
Don’t know if implementing MMP improves things or alternatively tricameralism.
The issue will continue to be political parties, whether that be Labor, Libs, Greens or the Voices of Karens, not sufficiently providing winnable positions for candidates of colour, even though they provide a large proportion of fundraising and volunteering.
It was interesting to see both Jason Clare and Chris Bowen get stroppy when the media questioned the suitability of Andrew Charlton in Parramatta. Must have hit close to the nerve given the same criticisms about their own positions in their electorates.
The Senate is proportional and is filled with Casual Vacancies yet the parties continue to fill with either advisors, failed MPs, Union Bosses or party hacks.
The quality of candidates comes from both diversity in ethnicity and experience. There seems to be a ruling hegemony on both sides which dominates the preselection process.
I don’t think I argued that it is entirely down to the electoral system. Indeed I blamed the Labor elite for being disconnected from their voter base.
New Zealand does not use first past the post, it has a PR system.
@Ben yes NZ does use FPTP for their electorates. The MMP PR is the entirety of the system of the 5% threshold for the List MPs.
Ardern is in parliament because she won her seat of Mount Albert on plurality via FPTP
Yes they use FPTP for one element but it’s not a FPTP system. The PR element changes it totally.
Part of the diversity problem is the parties themselves are becoming smaller and smaller and less representative of the community as a whole. A Tasmanian type Hare Clark system with a Robson rotation is truly democratic as there is no #1 position and candidates within a party have to fight all comers for votes. The problem with long MMP lists is that those members both represent everybody and nobody at the same time. They have a theoretically huge electorate – in NZ the whole country – but you can have a high position through being a party hack – not dissimilar to many senators or the Victorian or NSW upper houses. The other aspect of the NZ MMP system that I find repugnant is that an MP can lose their single seat constituency but stay in parliament because they are on the list. In a single seat system they are OUT. In 2007, John Howard lost his seat – it would not have happened because in a PR or MMP system.
An aspect of the diversity debate is that ethnic communities have to put their hands up – newer arrivals may see it much more important to put down their economic roots and see their children educated rather than play politics. Politics is to some extent a game for the secure.
Another aspect of the diversity issue is the political environment of where people come from. I was discussing with two colleagues – one a Filipino and the other married to a Filipina – about why a large community had such a low profile politically. They both agreed that in the Philippines, politics is a dirty game, is personality not philosophically driven and best avoided, and this sense of avoidance has been brought to Australia. Other communities would be similar. It will take time though say the Greek community were active poltical participants early as they came from a highly charged Greek poltical environment and brought that commitment with them.
“An aspect of the diversity debate is that ethnic communities have to put their hands up”
I feel like the recent Labor preselections have proven this fault – there are plenty of credible people of colour putting up their hands for these seats.
I think there’s pro’s and con’s in the majoritarian vs representational trade-off but I totally reject this ethno-nationist argument. Why would I want politics represented primarily via race and ethnicity?
At the start you use and example of an electorate with a large Indian demographic… but what if the national statistics demand that seat to someone else for those statistics to line up, who are they representing the electorate demographics or the national demographics? and what about multiple dissecting metrics and geography’s?
Given that there are many metrics that we can categorize humans, about all of them of more substance than race, why not education or age? here’s a radical idea, political philosophy? I have often seen people who talk about ‘diversity’ turn and call people race traitors when their political philosophy doesn’t line up, e.g. Jacinta price being called a coconut by the greens candidate, for this reason it often rings hollow.
I’d be more open to an argument that the system doesn’t represent the interests of Australians proportionally of political ideas but I’m not a race or ethnic essentialist that presupposes politics on those vectors.
When it comes to political diversity it’s important to consider seat size too. Both the UK and Canada had about 50 thousand voters per district on average at their most recent elections. And they have more seats than we do. That’s naturally going to result in more variation that our 150 member, 100,000+ voters per seat House averages out.
MMP can be done without a list, and is in Baden-Württemburg 🙂
https://www.tallyroom.com.au/45840/comment-page-1#comment-765353
There are a number of reasons that the proportion of Senators of Asian ancestry is 2.6%, rather than the same proportion as the general population, with similar reasons for other non-Anglo-Celtic immigrant groups:
Party preselection issues.
Immigrants have tended to favour settling in Sydney and Melbourne, with their strong jobs markets (among other factors), which are under represented in the Senate.
Non-citizens can`t vote or stand for the Senate (with the exception of the remaining several hundred thousand pre-1984 enrolled “British Subject” voters, a comparatively white demographic), so ethnic groups that are disproportionally recently immigrated have a lower percentage of voters and thus lower likelihood of representation. Countries of origin with anti-dual citizenship policies are a contributing factor to this by punishing their emigrants for naturalising.
Ethnic groups that are disproportionately children are also likely to be under-represented, compared to their proportion of the population, because children don`t vote and parents don`t get extra votes for their children.
In conclusion, the success of proportional representation in the Senate in representing Australia`s ethnic diversity can only be fairly assessed against the ethnic diversity of the state-equally-weighted diversity of the adult citizen (and pre-1984 enrolled “British Subject”) population.
https://www.tallyroom.com.au/45840/comment-page-1#comment-765354
Minimum party membership sizes are all multiples of the number of candidates in every seat so if individual seat candidates were required to maximise ballot access and therefor votes for the proportional count, even minimum party membership sized parties would be strongly incentivised to run candidates, even if they were just names on the ballot paper who otherwise kept on with their normal lives.
I think an important distinction to make is why our Parliament lacks diversity in respect of gender, colour, religion, experience and politics, and that comes down to the fact our voting system systemically entrenches a two party system. The two major parties keep fielding the same candidates and we keep electing them, partly because we still vote in large numbers for them, but partly because our voting system demands that we do.
So while changing how voters actually vote would impact that, that would require a considerable change in voting behaviour that rejects the status quo and embraces a new system. And this has been attempted numerous times by various groups including the Democrats, One Nation, the Greens, Clive Palmer, Nick Xenophon and so forth. These groups present alternatives for voters and while many did attract large followings, they never had a major impact on the House.
The Democrats and One Nation never won a House seat, the Greens only won their first House seat in 2010, Clive Palmer won a House seat in his first go but lost it quickly, Nick Xenophon won a House seat but abandoned his movement in its crib and they’ve failed to capitalise on their standing. That’s despite many of them having very large vote shares in some areas, but despite that they never had a significant impact on the outcome of an election.
So no, changing our voting system wouldn’t automatically solve the issues that currently exist in our democracy regarding diversity and representation, that change would need to occur within them major parties themselves. But at least when we as voters do decide to cast our lot for a new group, or we do cast our vote being conscious of issues of diversity, the possibility of that actually having an impact on our Parliament is substantially increased.
No longer do the Coalition and Labor have to focus on just a select few seats when every vote counts. No longer will we have seats where you can just drop in whoever you want without consequences. No longer will we have a Parliament where 75% of the electorate voted for one of the two major parties yet have 96% of the seats in Parliament. Sure, a voting system reform won’t change this overnight, but it will certainly make it much easier to see the change we do want to occur in our Parliament happen.
Yes the major parties need to change, but that is a fight that’s happening. They aren’t just unified forces against diversity.
Make Australia an mmp country please.
Personally, I think all of this discussion around how to make it better for representation of parties has missed something important…
The HoR is supposed to be a place where the electorate and their interests are represented. The problem is, we’ve paired that with a party system that is basically incompatible with this, where “representatives” represent their party, not their electorate.
I’d rather introduce a law that says no MP can be a member of a political party, or have been one for some period of time prior to election, and may not accept donations or other support from political parties.
Then, we can rebalance the senate so that they’re not based on state lines (but keep it multi-member per senate electorate with electorates having similar populations), and have government formed in the senate (and have the executive – the ministers – be appointed, like US’s “secretaries”).
The major parties are not providing MP’s that reflect the broader population in occupation or cultural background. It seems more a club than a representative body.
I do think that we should look at changes to electoral law in other respects, truth in political advertising, transparency in political donations, restrictions on money spent in campaigns etc.
But I think this line of communication has shown clearly that our democracy leaves a lot to be desired.
Glen
You advocate both the upturning of the Australian constitution and the Westminster system and you don’t say how a government can be formed. On one hand you almost advocate adoption of an American system – which has become totally disfunctional and nobody has responsibility to anyone – and on the other hand – a yearning for some sort of pre political party idyll – which of course did not really exist as the UK had Whigs and Tories for centuries and even in Colonial Australia MPs coalesced around various issues. As much as we complain now, we would complaining more about the lack of stability, accountability and continuity that would result from your chosen model.
https://www.tallyroom.com.au/45840/comment-page-1/#comment-765465
Full MMP may be possible at state level (the ease of introduction varies from state to state because of referendum entrench provisions in the various constitutions).
The Additional Member System used in Scotland, Wales and the London Assembly could be introduced at Commonwealth level but full MMP, with overhang mandates, would be extremely hard because it would require constitutional amendments that would (from time to time) diminish the proportionate representation of every state in the house that MMP was introduced in and therefor the required referendum would need to pass in every state (e.g. a majority of Tasmanian voters could veto it even if mainland voters supported it unanimously).
If the proposal is switching to MMP, this would abolish the Senate correct?
The Senate becomes a redundancy if MMP is brought in.
Or do you keep the Senate but make it appointed like the House of Lords or Canadian Senate, so that it becomes a general house of review?
And if democratic, would the 50% list be nation wide, state wide
or regional (Victorian/WA/US state senates).
Increasing lower house seats would lead to more diversity, I’d think primarily because of community enclaves.
All Hare-Clark and MMP does is let the party pad out winnable spots to the elite, chosen few and give the false impression because of the large list of names that the party is expanding the tent.
The Senate will eventually resolve itself in terms of diversity, as being a Senator from a major party is now becoming a false economy. Majors are only guaranteed to get between 4 to 6 Senators and that is declining.
The shemozzle with preselections is proof of that. Libs and Labor should be using the Senate to put high profile candidates in rather than Reps seats.
Firstly it maximises voter familiarity and brand popularity by having someone well known top the ticket.
Secondly, a lot of the higher profile candidates can focus on areas of expertise in policy rather than trying to be across every issue in a community, and it also allows them to freely campaign across a state- play into their strengths.
As a rough example, why isn’t someone like Stan Grant or Dylan Alcott or Rosie Batty in the Senate? Not that I am advocating anyone of these in particular but in that vein of high profile, policy specific individuals
https://www.tallyroom.com.au/45840/comment-page-1#comment-765506
No change to the electoral system would render the Senate redundant to the majority of Tasmanian voters, who would be required to approve such an abolition, so the Senate stays.
With all of the wistfulness about MMP, it should be remembered why NZ voters voted for MMP.
NZ between 1984 and 1993 was subjected to possibly the biggest ever economic shock therapy seen in a highly functioning democracy. The Chicago Boys reforms in Chile under Pinochet were similar but that was not a democracy. In 1984, NZ voters elected a Labour government that had to introduce radical reforms because the country was teetering on bankruptcy – a lot of the post war NZ consensus was overturned and Labour were seen as the economic reform party. In 1990, the National Party were elected in a huge landslide largely because they promised stability – disaffected Labour voters flocked to them – and the Nationals introduced even more radical reforms. By 1993, a large part of the population were shellshocked, disaffected and let down by both parties. Radical reform was able to happen because with no upper house, and first past the post voting, there were no checks and balances. There were third parties getting 20% of the vote but only 1 or 2 seats in parliament. None of the those conditions exist here – the last major systemic reform here was the GST – and that needed an election. And in the Senate it was heavily amended as much legislation is. The practicalities vis a vis the constitution are almost insurmountable. A short term way to improve representation would be to increase the size of the Senate and hence the House. And even if we had PR with multi member constituencies of say 5, how do you achieve an equitable balance without over or under representing a state when currently it is not near a multiple of five?
My favoured model for the House would be multi-member electorates with flexible sizes in the range of 3 to 7. Preferably combined with an expansion of the House, ideally with a referendum to break the nexus and avoid expanding the Senate.
The idea of different sizes is that you could avoid rural electorates getting too large (or at least keep them fully rural), while still getting the benefits of a closer alignment of vote share and seats in the metro areas. Even if the House did not expand, that would allow (for instance) SA to have a 3-member rural electorate and a 7-member Adelaide electorate. WA would probably have a 3-member fully rural electorate, and 5- and 7-member electorates covering Perth and immediate surrounds. Tasmania would just be a single 5-member electorate.
But I’m struggling to see a catalyst to allow it to happen. One possibility might be if “green liberal” independents become a regular fixture and you end up with a minority Liberal government trying to herd cats. They might decide that if their only path to future majorities is to embrace that part of the political spectrum, it would be better if they could deal with a party rather than independents. And of course the Greens would be on board, so there could be a path to a majority.
@Tom that’s why the Reps and Single Seats should remain.
In the same way the Senate protects smaller states, the Reps reflects the largesse of the populous. That’s why the PM has been from one of the major cities for the better part of the last half century.
I don’t think Senators or MMP members can adequately serve citizens with micro, front line issues particularly as it comes to arterial infrastructure, housing and early education. Both systems widen the separation between citizen and politician.
The Senate rather than the House should be reformed. With an additional allocation of 10-20 senators that represent Australia as a whole on top of the state Senators. That would greater address the proportion problem and allow for more smaller parties to enter parliament.
Even allowing a provision for Premiers and Prime Ministers to nominate 2-3 Senators each to address shortfalls in demographic representation similar to the Canadian Senate and House of Lords
Redistributed – yes, I’d imagine most serious reforms of how our government works would require a change to the constitution. And the Westminster system has clearly begun to have problems, whether due to the 24 hour news cycle, the internet, refinement of political technique, or an increasingly defensive political class. You can see it in every democracy that uses it or a similar variant.
But I also established how I’d form government – in the Senate, which would operate on multi-member electorates rebalanced to have each electoral region with roughly similar population, to remove the distinctly unbalanced senate we currently have (where ACT gets 2 seats, despite having a similar population to Tasmania, which gets 12 seats).
And once it’s balanced better, it elects a PM in the same way HoR does now. Meanwhile, the ministry is nominated in the senate and confirmed by the house, being open to experts rather than purely being a realm for politicians.
The failures of the US system are abundant, but most of these can be blamed on their electoral system being two party, their election of president being a highly manipulable system that Is 200 years out of date, and their judicial branch being co-opted (due to their obsession with raw democracy, even for positions that shouldn’t be democratically selected).
One of their few good ideas was having the important non-leader roles in the Executive being chosen based on the best person, not just someone from among those elected in seats. So people who understand the health system oversee the health system, for example.
Meanwhile, having true representatives in the HoR means that the interests of the electorate may actually get considered, and not just in the few seats where independents get elected.
Note that I don’t want to get rid of parties. Their clear ideologies and their visions and platforms are great when deciding who forms government… But when parties control both houses, anything other than party politics gets lost in the shuffle. So constrain it to one house, and get the best of party politics, while hopefully limiting the worst of it.
Obviously, it’s not perfect, but I honestly think it’s an improvement on the current system. It gets the benefit of more proportional representation in all respects, encourages multi-party coalitions, gives better voice to the electorates, and improves the chance of getting the right person in the right role, in my opinion.
https://www.tallyroom.com.au/45840/comment-page-1/#comment-765514
Separate nationwide senators would not get passed a referendum for 4 reasons:
1. Voters can be quite sceptical of additional politicians.
2. I doubt voters want to vote thrice at every simultaneous Commonwealth election, especially where that means 2 of the big Senate ballot papers (which would presumable also be a nightmare to sort for counting due to a massive increase in wrong ballot box ballot papers).,
3. Independent and parties that can win in half-Senate elections have some incentive to campaign against it because they would benefit (to various degrees) from lower half-Senate and DD quotas. For example, One Nation would be in a much better position for winning at a half-Senate election for 7 seats in NSW, WA, (at non-Xenophon elections) SA and (at non-Lambie elections) Tasmania.
4. As nationwide Senators would be an alteration diminishing the proportionate representation of at least the smaller states in the Senate, a majority of voters in each of the smaller states would have to approve it. Given the choice between being the sole voting power behind 1 in 6 additional Senators and a 48th of the voting power electing every additional senator, which do you think the majority of Tasmanian voters would choose?
Given that Senate election voters and referendum voters are the exact same people (give or take a small amount of turnout variation), appointed senators would be a heavily defeated referendum, in every state, if any government/parliamentary majority was politically cavalier enough to send such a proposal to a referendum. Addressing shortfalls in demographic representation would also require quite a strict mechanism to target appointments to fill the shortfalls, rather than just being political patronage (which has often been the case in the Lords and the Canadian Senate).
@ Tom I think when you continually look through electoral and representational reform through the prism of Tasmania and smaller states, you’ll find roadblocks at every reform.
Electoral reform is nearly impossible, and everyone who comments on this site has a wish list as to what they’d like to change.
Just as I know it would be very difficult to implement MMP into this country even at a state level. You’d perhaps be able to bring it in at Local Government.
I’d love to see FPTP and non-compulsory voting brought in but recognise that would be nearly impossible to achieve.
I’m not really interested in the whims of Tasmania and South Australian politics, I find them boring. And truth be told bringing the conversation to this point completely deviates from the core of Ben’s article which is about the lack of diversity in Australian parties and how to address this.
You could give Tasmania and SA 4 extra senators over the rest and I reckon the people there would still complain about a Sydney and Melbourne bias.
I don’t think the answer is structural reform, as this can still be gamed by the major parties to put their favoured candidates in and captain’s picks.
What will address it is the eventual collapse of membership bases to either strong, local independents (not talking about the Voices of Karens) and minor parties in the vein of Unity or the Canadian NDP.
I’d also encourage you to read about the reforms the Trudeau government had brought in to overhaul the Senate nomination process. As it stands now it is dominated completely by Non-partisan groupings.
Nominees are selected by an independent body and with the exception of some remaining Tory Senators, no Senators sit in government caucus.
You have nearly every group in Canada represented at some level.
I also think you dismiss the notion of nationwide Senators too hastily, especially considering no sitting Senator sits with their fellow state colleagues. It is no longer a state house, when Senators from every party vote along party lines not state ones. That is the case for Labor, National, Liberal, One Nation and the Greens. I’ll give you the 2 SA Senators and Lambie.
I can’t think of any sitting Liberal or Labor Senator that has crossed the floor on an issue impacting their state, especially the smaller ones.
https://www.tallyroom.com.au/45840/comment-page-1/#comment-765560
Reform of the electoral and/or parliamentary system to increase diversity is one potential way to increase parliamentary diversity. However, in order to do that, the reforms actually have to get implemented and failed referendums don`t implement reforms. Legislatable reforms, such as proportion representation in the Reps and/or expanding parliament, are potentially achievable reforms to potentially increase diversity. The Senate came up because the lack of ethnic diversity in the Senate was used to dispute the utility of proportional representation in increasing diversity (I pointed out the other factors in play more likely to be the cause in reply).
The current Trudeau government has created an advisory board to provide the PM with non-binding advisory opinions. The advice does not even go directly to the Governor-General, who actually makes the appointments. There are still 10 Senators appointed by the previous Liberal Government, many of whom used to be in the Liberal partyroom. The Conservatives are under no obligation not to recommence the government`s own preferred political appointments and/or resume appointing the winners of the Alberta advisory Senate elections in the likely event they return to power. I also don`t think the level of public opposition to unelected politicians is anywhere near enough to get the referendum needed to implement appointed Senators to pass in even a single state.
The Senate increases the voice at the table of the smaller states within the various parliamentary partyrooms.
How about we just get an upper house in Queensland and expand the House of Reps for the first time in 35 years before more complicated and controversial steps.
https://www.tallyroom.com.au/45840/comment-page-1#comment-766274
Restoring the Queensland upper house almost certainly requires a first term elected minority government (an older minority government would have a harder time getting the referendum passed, majority governments have a vested interest in unicameralism) doing a deal with a minor party (independents lack the ability to capitalise on the inevitably proportional chamber).
Because of the nexus clause, expanding the House of Reps requires the expansion of the Senate with significant potential to alter the balance of power therein. Technically, switching to the nexus to include the representation of the territories could increase the size of the house by 3-4 without expanding the Senate but that would require persuading the High Court to overturn the precedent of the matter and that probably would require a greater discrepancy between the include the territories nexus and the exclude the territories nexus, which can only be achieved by expanding the number of territory Senators (which however can be done in smaller increments with more predictable and less minor party friendly results).
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