The upcoming Western Australian state election will feature quite a change to WA elections, with the upper house being elected at large as a single 37-seat election.
This has prompted a lot of uncertainty about what might play out. But actually there is quite a lot we can know about what is likely to happen. In particular, how well the various parts of the state will be represented in the new upper house.
The old upper house had a severe malapportionment in favour of the non-metropolitan parts of the state. The state was split into six regions, with each region electing six members to the upper house. But the three non-metropolitan regions only make up about a quarter of the state’s population, yet chose half of the Council.
The new upper house didn’t simply redistribute the regions to equalise the population (listen to last Friday’s podcast for an explanation of why that wasn’t an option) but also abolished any local representation in the electoral structure.
This creates the potential for concerns about whether there will still be representation of particular parts of the state once the electoral boundaries are wiped away.
Indeed Liberal leader Libby Mettam has been playing up these concerns, yesterday saying that the regions had been “disenfranchised” by the changes, and promising to restore the old regime.
But at this point we actually know a lot about what is going to happen, and the non-metropolitan parts of Western Australia look set to have quite a large share of upper house representation – not half of the chamber, but quite a bit more than their proportion of the state’s population.
I identified candidates who seem to have a good chance of winning election, and identified which old upper house region they are connected to. It was easy for incumbent MLCs, but otherwise I used data on whether candidates are sitting councillors, or which areas the candidates contested at previous elections.
If you look at the tickets for the three biggest parties, there are some interesting trends.
Labor’s ticket is very city-dominated, barring two regional candidates in the top three. The Liberal Party appears to have used the old upper house regions for their preselections, producing a ticket with three regional candidates out of the top six. I haven’t listed the Nationals here – the top two are definitely regional, and I assume all are.
The Greens’ regional representation depends a lot on their vote. Their top three are all from Perth, but the next three in the marginal seats are in regional areas.
I came up with two different scenarios for vote shares, and thus a certain number of seats per party. The first scenario was based on the 2017 upper house election. The two-party-preferred polling right now is similar to 2017. The second scenario is based on recent polling, with the “others” vote split in a similar pattern to the 2021 election. The former was better for the Nationals and One Nation, while the latter is better for the Greens.
In both scenarios, the result produces a split of 24 metro MLCs and 13 non-metro MLCs, which equates to 35%. This is less than the 50% of the old system, but still a lot higher than the non-metropolitan share of the state’s population.
The ALP’s seat split is the most city-dominated, but it’s not actually far off the proportional share. In the first scenario, the city makes up 80% of seats. It makes up 75% in the second scenario. In reality, Perth contains about 76% of voters.
The Greens have a very different regional split depending on whether they win three or five seats.
The Liberal Party comes close to 50% non-metropolitan representation, and the Nationals are completely non-metropolitan.
The other parties have a range, but generally non-metropolitan areas are over-represented.
This strikes me as completely consistent with analysis I did about the NSW Legislative Council, which is the closest comparison to the new WA upper house.
And this all seems perfectly fine to me.
Not all voters treat geographic location as the most important factor when deciding their vote. It makes sense that some parts of the state where voters have more concern for this factor would tend to have more local representatives. Voters elsewhere can choose to prioritise other factors. The new WA upper house allows for regional representation, if the voters choose to prioritise it and parties respond to that. But it doesn’t lock it in and force it on voters. None of this is bad.
You should not represent acres or sheep but people. If the libs want more people from non metro areas they need to either poll better or preselect people from regional areas higher on their party ticket.
If looking at non metro representation then look at both houses of parliament
The real impact of this change will be felt over time, not immediately. It will be increasingly easier for major parties to pick another Perth-based candidate when a regional one retires.
I think a state wide vote is appropriate but not the whole house at one otherwise the quota is real low and you get lots of minor parties diluting democracy. Need to be a half house election like nsw
@North by West – that’s total speculation and not borne out by the facts as the example of NSW shows. If regional voters start to not care whether they are represented in parliament by a local, then yes it could happen. I suspect the outer suburbs of Perth will be woefully under represented but my method doesn’t account for that.
John, I don’t see how accurately representing vote share in parliament “dilutes” democracy. It does fragment the political system. I wouldn’t support it for a house of government but I think it will produce a chamber that will be independent of government but not totally hostile.
What does dilute democracy, and can produce such a deadlock, is having half the chamber sitting on a four-year-old mandate after there has been a fresh election, and serving an absurdly long term.
It’s not about it remaining the same or similar – it’s like saying, ‘Let’s vote for the Australian Senate based on the whole population, and you’ll get more NSW or VIC representation’. While these parties may have similar numbers, they’re more likely to be dominated by metro interests because that’s where the votes are. In this scenario, Labor and the Libs might have similar Senate seats, but they’d all be based in VIC and NSW and not WA, TAS, or SA. At least the Libs preferenced their upper house based on the regions still. Labor is likely to move all of their regional offices to metro areas now because most are from the metro area. It’s about having accessible regional representation. The Upper House is not supposed to function the same as the LA. Parties might have similar numbers, but regions will not really get a say under a non-LNP Gov. “And this all seems perfectly fine to me.” It might do. But you won’t get it until you have lived in the Kimberley or Kalgoorlie. They need accessible representation focusing on their needs. THAT’S what the LC was for. It’s not supposed to be dominated in a similar way to the lower house (which is driven by metro seats, with another regional seat abolished this election). It’s for review. It’s to keep fairness in our state.
The regional split of the Liberal ticket follows: North Met, South Met, South West, East Met, Agricultural, Mining & Pastoral, and repeats this formula. Therefore the 12th placed Liberal is actually from Mining and Pastoral, the 13th is from North Met, the 14th from South Met, 15th from South West, 16th from East Met, 17th from Agricultural. However the 18th and final candidate is from South West.
You might want to correct these few errors.
@ john
Nsw should be elected in 0ne group.
Having the upper house elected in 2 lots
4 years apart allowed Mark Latham to rort the system. He created his “own” casual vacancy which was filled by Onp.
He then recontested in the second group and won. Funny onp now has no members in the nsw upperhouse
Jeremy, please pass on your source for that and I’ll take a look at it.
I’ve mostly relied on where someone is a councillor or where they ran at the last election. If people have arbitrarily nominated for a different region I don’t think that’s necessarily the only factor to consider.
Olivia, I don’t think the severe malapportionment of the Senate is much of an argument. That was a fundamental part of the original Federation deal and can’t be changed. Doesn’t make it fair or democratic.
If you actually look at evidence from at-large elections rather than your own hallucinations, you’ll know that MPs do spread around, because voters are spread around.
The Legislative Council will not be the same as the Assembly, because it’s elected proportionally and will have more small party representation. There isn’t the pressure to form a stable governing majority which creates space for more views.
Ultimately people vote, not land. And all of those people are equal. Regional areas are not entitled to a more powerful vote.
Ben, All the wealth for Perth comes from Regional Areas Gold, Iron Ore, Gas, Agriculture etc. So why should they not have a greater representation of the Upper House. It is not a unique in Australia but WA is more pronounce. Is it ok to have 12 Senators from Tasmania with the same amount from NSW ?
Ben, of course it’s speculation. It’s never been done in WA before, and WA is not NSW. I, being a Western Australian, know how incredibly easy it is for everything here to be based in Perth, because the regions are unfathomably distant from the big smoke. Your own suspicions (which conform to your perception of how an upper house should be constructed) are no less speculative than my own. Your argument is the same old, tired argument from all ‘one vote, one value’ supporters, which claims to treat all people equally, but actually ends up favouring anyone who lives where the majority live.
Damo, read your history.
The Tasmanian example is not applicable to the context of Western Australia’s upper house. The equal number of senators for each original state was the price of federation. Tasmania doesn’t elect 12 senators because of their outstanding scenery, superior beer or abundant cheese. There was no way Tasmania, WA, SA or Queensland were participating in federation without equal representation in the senate. If you want to invent a time machine to go back to the constitutional conventions and give Barton and friends a bloody nose, go for it, but that’s the reality of the matter.
As stated elsewhere, Western Australia is not a federation of regions.
According to Ben’s analysis, the regions appear to be headed to over-representation anyway in the upper house; this time, a conscious and deliberate decision of the parties selecting regionsl candidates in winnable positions, not a function of an archaic system. This seems to me to be a better outcome overall for the people of WA.
We want a fair electoral system and we’ll you cannot get fairer than the current arrangements..all elected in one group via pr.
It is of course more difficult to represent larger areas.. but the solution is to provide
Greater resources for mps for the non
Metro areas.
Mick the problem is most the parts of WA that have very low numbers of people are here all the wealth is created and are taken for granted by the rest of the state/country. with FIFO workers being the main source of labor. they rely on this workforce due to the work being readily available to serivce the needs of this wealth generation if FIFO wernt availble people would be forced to shift there on a more permanent basis and the population would likely be higher.
Mark mcGowan and Labor simply took advantage of the people in the regions who gave them their majority in te upper house to change the rules so when the status quo returned they would reap the benefits still. labor will not get a majority in the upper house again so changing the rules means they will get more mps in the upper house. then they would have under the old system
@damo it was a result of the deal for australia to become a federation/country. it was designed so the bigger states Nsw/VIc where the majority of austraias population is couldnt wield power power over the smaller states.
Ben I am involved in Liberal Party candidate selection so am very much aware from which Region each Liberal candidate originates from. The Party held six selections using the old Regions (which still existed in law until this election). Each Region selected three candidates subsequently allocated on the State ticket according to the formula I described. South West had four candidates with the 4th moving up to 18th spot when a candidate dropped out.
I think the confusion has arisen from the fact that the 12th Liberal is working in the south metropolitan area, although his longstanding Party affiliation is with the Mining and Pastoral Region. The 13th Liberal ran in 2021 in Victoria Park but is a resident in North Metropolitan and was selected for that region.
PR for a single electorate is more democratic in the sense that because the quota to elect a successful candidate is lower, you get better overall representation for the overall electorate – in theory the most democratic electorate is every voter is elected to parliament, but obviously that’s unrealistic and impractical, not to mention we have representative democracy, not direct democracy. Yes, it’s true that from a wealth perspective, especially for WA, the regions produce a very large amount of it, especially the mining sectors, but deliberately wanting more malapportionment by its very nature is less democratic – even if the reasons for doing so are very understandable.
Imagine trying to argue that voters in some places should have more powerful votes because those areas generate wealth if those voters were in a city. Incomes are usually higher in cities, lots of jobs there. You could just as much make an argument that city voters should have more influence for that reason. It’s terribly undemocratic and if someone from the left tried to make that argument people would be outraged.
Those FIFO workers have votes themselves, most of them in the Perth area. I don’t understand why workers who live locally should have more valuable votes than those who fly home to Perth.
Thanks to the Large District Allowance, remote lower house seats already have more representation. North West Central (before it was abolished) had a pinch over 10,000 voters, compared to nearly 30,000 for Perth seats. It’s the reason slabs of near-uninhabited desert get kicked around every redistribution – area counts as phantom voters, to the tune of 1.5 “voters” per 100 sq km. Somewhat undemocratic, but it’s a way of dealing with the colossal sizes of single-member seats. It doesn’t need to be like that in the upper house too.
I reckon it’s high time the lower house was expanded. It went from 57 to 59 in 2008, and the last expansion (also by two) was in 1983. (It’s been at least 50 since 1901!) Only four more MPs despite the state’s population having doubled in 40 years, with most of that increase happening in Perth, is part of the reason why lower house seats in regional WA are getting so huge – every time a new seat is created in Perth, it necessitates one being abolished in the regions.
Absolutely right, bird – it is ridiculous that they didn’t start considering expansion as soon as regional seats starting getting awkwardly large.
The canary in the coal mine should’ve been when the LDA started applying to Central Wheatbelt and Roe, when it was only ever supposed to be for the remote seats. Seats containing mining towns in the middle of nowhere are obviously going to be huge, but seats with farming towns every 20-30 km shouldn’t be over 100,000 sq km.
As a long time resident of remote Western Australia I call bunkum on quite a few of the comments here around needing special representation, producing more wealth or concentration in Perth.
The previous system resulted in serious malapportionment – with those members representing the rural electorates based in large regional remote towns liked Kalgoorlie, Hedland and Broome. These people were elected on a minute number of votes, and any claim to representing regional areas has to be viewed in light of party loyalty and actual voting records.
All flavours of government in WA over invest in regional areas – often boondoggles and questionable projects – Royalties for Regions is a great example of wasteful spending to appease a vocal minority of politically well connected ‘locals’. If you want the levels of service provided in the metro area then you should consider moving there. You might find that access to things like health services are actually quite good in regional areas in comparison.
Hopefully the new LC arrangements will lead to much governance and more sane decisions about government investment.
If not, there is always the example in Victoria of the rural revolt that brought down the Kennett government and resulted in the Bracks Labor Government.
Okay so the final result by my reckoning is 12 non-metro, 25 metro. Whereas a proportional share would’ve been 9 non-metro.
So, as predicted, regional areas are over-represented.