The Victorian Electoral Matters Committee has today published their report into the last Victorian state election.
While the report covers a number of matters, the main point of interest is that the committee has clearly endorsed reform to the Legislative Council electoral system, which would see the end of group voting tickets and the adoption of the same electoral system used for the Senate.
They also indicate that there is a case for reducing the number of regions so that more members are elected in each region, but they don’t endorse a particular model. Importantly, the committee says that reforms to group voting tickets should not wait for reforms to regions. The former can be done through a legislative change while the latter requires a referendum to change the constitution.
This position fits pretty much perfectly with my recommendations in my submission and appearance before the committee.
There were minority reports issued by the three Coalition members and by Legalise Cannabis member David Ettershank. The Coalition report largely endorsed the main report’s approach to upper house reform, but also calls for an inquiry in the activities of Glenn Druery.
Ettershank has taken a different approach on a crucial question, saying that GVT reform must go along with upper house region reform.
I suspect Ettershank’s position could also be the position of some of the other small parties in the upper house.
If the parties were to vote in parliament like they did on this committee there would be a clear and large majority in parliament for GVT reform. But that was also true after JSCEM endorsed Senate reform following the 2013 election, yet Labor ended up opposing the final legislation. So this is not the end of the fight. But it’s a big victory for reformers.
It does not require a referendum to amend the Victorian Constitution, which is merely an Act of Parliament and can be amended by Parliament.
The EMC report literally says that a change to the number of regions would require a referendum.
It’s my understanding that certain clauses have been entrenched.
Section 18 (1B) lists a serious of clauses which require a referendum to change.
One of the sections that is entranced is Subdivision 1 of Division 5 of Part II, which amongst other things fixes the number of members of the Legislative Council and the number of regions they are divided into.
State referendums are very rare in Australia, and federal referendums are already rare these days. The last one was the 2016 Queensland term length referendum, where just 53.0% of voters backed introducing fixed four year terms for members of the Queensland Legislative Assembly, despite being backed by both major parties.
In fact Yvette D’Ath (Labor, then-Attorney General) campaigned with Ian Walker (LNP, then-Shadow Attorney General) in support of the Yes vote in the 2016 referendum and while it passed as expected, random electorates voted No and only 53% voted Yes so it only marginally passed.
KAP were the main parliamentary opponents of it but only one of their electorates voted No to it. In contrast, while the northern outback which is KAP heartland mostly supported it, the southern outback which is LNP heartland mostly opposed it.
On Group Voting Tickets – about bloody time!
On the regions – is that really such a big issue? I have no problem with upper house MPs representing a region. It does at least tie an MLC to representing someone whereas in NSW they represent all or no-one.
Mm I think state constitutional referendums are both more common and more successful than federal referendums.
The thinking about the regions is that the bar to success is not about whether it’s good to have people represent a region, but about the magnitude of the electorate and how easy that makes it for small parties.
In M5 regions you’d expect only Labor, Coalition and Greens to win most of the time, whereas if you merged some regions or abolished them entirely a lot of the parties in parliament now would maintain their place, but it would be tied to their actual vote and not wheeling and dealing.
SA, WA and NSW have no upper house regions now, so Victoria is the only state with regions for a PR upper house.
It’s about damn time Victoria abolishes these stupid group voting tickets. Glen Druery needs to get a life instead of messing around with electoral results.
“In M5 regions you’d expect only Labor, Coalition and Greens to win most of the time”
And for the purposes of stability quite rightly too as they get most of the votes. Seriously, if you had 40 candidates with a quota of 2.4%, are they really representative? Under GVT, candidates have been elected on ridiculously small votes. The danger is that you get something unworkable like Israel, Weimar Germany or the French 4th Republic. Not much different to what we have now, I hear you say. It is possible with 5 members that a candidate can be elected from 7 or 8%.
Redistributed, I would agree with you if we were discussing a lower house that forms the government, but that’s not the case here.
New South Wales already has an electoral system like this and is perfectly workable. The biggest issue with NSW is the 8-year terms mean that the upper house will sometimes have a different skew to the lower house. But if you elected the whole chamber at once you’d generally have a centre-left majority to a Labor government or a centre-right majority to a Coalition government.
In this blog post I modelled how the 2022 result would have turned out under other systems. In this scenario, Labor could stitch together a majority with Greens, Legalise Cannabis, Reason, Socialists and Animal Justice. They’d need 8 out of those 9. Yes, that would be a problem if you had to form a stable government, but I think it’s fine for passing legislation. And the difficulty Labor would face would be a direct consequence of their low vote share.
Ben
State Referendums may be more succesful than Federal ones but Queensland has a history of ignoring their results.
1910 Religious Instruction plus Bible reading on state schools- passed RI continues but Bible Reading not occurring.
1917 Legislative COUNCIL ABOLITION Rejected but ALP went ahead and abolished a few years later
1920 Prohibition rejected but three years later a second attempt with near identical wording also rejected
1991 4 Year Term Rejected but a few years later put up again and passed
2016 Daylight Saving Rejected but a noisy minority can not shut up about it.
In effect Referendums need to be the end of a matter and certainly the Bible Reading and Legislative Council Referendums display a complete contempt for referendums and the willingness to try untill you get the desired result is contempt of democracy.