The Electoral Matters Committee of the Victorian parliament has launched an inquiry into the structure of the Legislative Council.
The inquiry is not seeking submissions on group voting tickets, but the inquiry is related to the push to abolish GVTs because such a change would likely stop a number of small parties from winning seats. A change in the regional structure could allow for a broader range of parties to win.
The previous inquiry into the 2022 state election produced a report that endorsed the abolition of group voting tickets, but also opened the door for further discussion about reform to the current structure of eight regions of five members each. While the Labor, Liberal and Greens members of the committee endorsed the abolition of GVTs whether or not there was reform to the regions, the minor parties in the upper house have indicated that a package deal of reform to the regions and group voting tickets would be more acceptable.
I previously analysed the likely outcomes under the current region structure but without group voting tickets. A magnitude of 5 creates a reasonably high barrier to entry, and a number of small parties have been able to get around that solely due to group voting tickets. A continuation of the current region structure but without group voting tickets would see a narrower range of parties winning seats – not just Labor, Liberal and Greens, but other parties would need to do quite well to win a seat.
The committee has published a discussion paper presenting a number of options that could change the structure. It includes a single statewide electorate, either all elected at once or split over two elections with members serving eight-year terms ala New South Wales. It also suggests 4 regions of 10, 7 regions of 7, or merging the five metropolitan regions while leaving the three regional regions intact.
They also propose something I had not considered previously, where the current structure would remain intact but top-up seats would be added for parties with a certain share of the vote.
I will be making a submission, and I encourage others to do the same. I won’t try and make my full argument here, but I wanted to make a few general points.
Firstly, I think you need to consider the purpose of the 5-member regions. A low magnitude tends to limit party fragmentation and lead to a chamber with a smaller number of parties. That seems important for a house of government, where low-magnitude PR (the electoral sweet spot) can ensure that governments are held accountable and don’t have to include too many different parties. You could argue that this has value for an upper house (so governments don’t have to wrangle a bunch of separate individual MLCs but instead can have a few parties work together) but I think the value is much less clear.
The other value of the regions is to ensure local representation, and I think it fails on that front. They cover vast areas and there isn’t that much community of interest for each region. And that would be even more true if they were made even larger. If you were to remove any local representation by having a single statewide electorate, the evidence suggests regional areas with a strong identity would still have strong representation.
So I don’t think 4×10 and 7×7 really do much for increasing proportionality, and provide poor local representation. I also think the idea of having 5-member regions in rural parts of the state and a 25-member region in the city is also unacceptable, since it creates very different contests in two parts of the state – in the city, minor parties will be much stronger, but in the bush the major parties will remain dominant.
I do think there is a good case for a single statewide electorate. But if you were to make that switch, I don’t think the single transferable vote system would work for such a system. I explain my logic in this post, but in short: preferences play an important role in low-magnitude elections, but as the magnitude increases, the preferences make less of a difference, but the burden of the preferences (both for the voter and the administrators) increases. A simple list PR system using D’Hondt or Saint-Lague would be vastly more simple to administer, and much easier for voters to use. And the seat outcome wouldn’t be much difference. Indeed D’Hondt slightly favours the larger parties, which could allay concerns about the very low threshold you’d get from a 40-magnitude district.
The very novel top-ups proposal feels like it would violate votes having equal value if it were to be implemented. Voting 1 for a party that qualifies for a top-up seat would make your vote worth more than others, as your other preferences would still transfer at equal value (ignoring any issues with transfer methodology that have yet to be fixed in Victoria, idk if there are any) for the STV regions.
The problem with big lists in say a statewide seat is that the lists get full of party hacks who basically represent everyone and no one. If there were 40 seats you would need a minimum vote of 5% or it just becomes a rabble. At least with the current system, the MLCs represent somewhere identifiable. 4 divisions of 10 maybe.
Hi Ben, thanks for this article. Can I ask two things?
1.
Can I please ask what evidence can be found to test the question of whether it is easier to pass legislation when there are either more or fewer parties involved?
It appears to me that the ease of making legislation is much more a matter of how willing parliamentarians are to negotiate, rather than how many parliamentarians are sitting around the negotiation table.
For comparison:
– NSW has a minority government, and policies are being passed through successful negotiations
– Australia has a majority government, but many policies are being held up through failures to negotiate*
*I’m not blaming any one party for this, because it takes two to tango.
There’s also a related question as to whether better quality legislation is made when there are either more or fewer parties involved? There appears to be lots of general evidence that greater diversity leads to better decision-making.
Anyway, back to the first question, if negotiation is more of a political issue than a structural one, then there shouldn’t be any barriers to arguing for the most representative parliament structure in Victoria.
So I agree with you that there is a good case for a single statewide electorate, but see no need for any favoritism for larger parties.
2.
Where does Hare-Clark sit relative to the PR systems you mention here? Why not propose to use Hare-Clark in Victoria’s upper house?
Redistributed, I think those concerns also apply under the current structure!
I think the main difference between NSW and Federal right now is the federal government doesn’t have that many options in the Senate – their potential allies only have a slight majority, so the Greens have a veto. No-one has a veto on the government in the NSW lower house, because there’s lots of different crossbenchers Labor can work with.
I don’t think Hare-Clark will work for an upper house with such vast regions.
To be clear, I don’t think D’Hondt would be favourable for the large parties. The minimum vote would be very low. It would just not be quite as favourable as above-the-line STV or Saint-Lague. Remember there is no parliamentary chamber with a magnitude of 40 in the country. The highest now is 21 in NSW, with WA jumping to 37 next year.
^not quite as favourable for the small parties as STV or S-L.
The current structure with top ups is clearly ridiculous. If it is a serious proposal, I can only think it is designed to keep one or two of the existing members in their seats. But most likely it is a stalking horse for one of the other options, probably the 20 or 40 statewide.
Normally I am sceptical of very proportional systems, as a lot of very small parties tend to be single issue so you get a double whammy – they can want to add their pet issues into every piece of legislation, and outside their pet issues they can be very fluid in how they vote.
However, at 20 or 40 there are enough smaller parties/indies to be able to have multiple paths to get legislation through.
Hello Ben,
Thank you for sharing your thoughts on reforming the Legislative Council region structure and voting system. This is an issue I’ve concerned myself with for quite some time.
In a previous post you mentioned alternative voting systems for a statewide electorate, and briefly mentioned optional preferential single transferable voting. I personally regard such a system preferable to alternatives, since it provides for a desirable amount of voter influence over the composition of the upper house, and alleviates concerns for minor party voters that their vote may not contribute at all. Also, with the condition that candidate lists could be viewed upon request at the voting centre, closed party lists would keep ballot papers reasonably succinct.
If such a voting system were to be implemented, I was wondering if you had any thoughts about instantly distributing the preferences of all parties receiving less than two percent of the primary vote. This would ensure crossbench diversity is achievable without excessive fragmentation, since parties with small surpluses after attaining quotas wouldn’t have their final possible candidates just barely lose to unpopular parties that didn’t remotely receive a single quota. Thanks again!
That’s certainly an option. It would be quite different to our history but could make sense.
But I don’t think it’s actually unfair if a party with a small primary vote picks up preferences and wins. But it would definitely lead to more fragmentation.
Thank you for your replies Ben.
Indeed, no elections in Australia have implemented thresholds, but neither would we have ever had such a large district magnitude, at least until the Western Australian state election next year. New Zealand has a rather high minimum primary vote of five percent though.
Admittedly I didn’t intend to imply that electing unpopular candidates would be unfair, but, upon review, that’s certainly the reasonable interpretation of my words. Ironically though, my suggestion for an immediate runoff of micro parties is explicitly unfair. My concern is merely of the potential for a fragmented crossbench to attempt to amend bills in divergent directions, possibly leading to frequent failures of passing legislation.