Some of the Members of the ACT House of Assembly may have felt slightly nervous in their seats as the Electoral Bill came before them last night. For some, it could spell doom.
As approved in the referendum, the Bill provides for three electorates. One will have seven members and the other two will have five.
From now on we can expect the 17 MLAs to regionalise themselves, taking greater interest in “”their area” to identify themselves among the electors of it.
At present, this of utmost interest to the 17 sitting members and of only marginal interest to the rest of us. However, the question of whether any independents win seats is crucial to how Canberra will be governed after 1995.
It has been widely assumed that the seven-member electorate will be in the centre of Canberra and the two five-member electorate will be in Belconnen and Tuggeranong. But this simple will not work. Therein lies as lose-lose situation for Independent Michael Moore and some advantage for Abolish Self-Government MLA Dennis Stevenson.
The booth-by-booth figures provided by the Australian Electoral Commission for the last election show how the assumed split cannot work. The booths in central Canberra had only 28,600 voters.
Given the number of voters in the whole ACT, the electorate seat will require 57,000 seats and the two small ones will be 41,000 each. This is required by the Act before the Assembly last night.
Clearly, some substantial chunks of Belconnen or Woden-Weston would have to be added to the central area to make the big seat.
This spells trouble for Michael Moore, and should help the Liberal Party.
At the last election, Moore just scraped over the 5.6 per cent cut-off require by d’Hondt. With only that number of votes how could he expect to get the 12.5 per cent quota in the large electorate or 16.6 per cent in a small electorate required by Hare Clark? It has been assumed he has a good chance for two reasons. First, Hare Clark allows preferences to be counted towards the quota; d’Hondt does not. Secondly, Moore’s vote is concentrated in the centre and under Hare Clark he needs to obtain his quota in one area, not in the whole of Canberra as with d’Hondt.
When you consider those factors, you can safely add Moore’s and the Democrat vote together. At the last election, Moore-Democrat polled 12 per cent in central Canberra. That would be enough for his to get a seat in a seven-member electorate.
But here comes the crunch. If the seven-member electorate (the one with the easier quota) is based on central Canberra, where Moore’s supporters are thick on the ground, it will have to include either chunks of Belconnen or Woden Weston. The Moore-Democrat vote in Woden was 8.2 last time. If you add all of Woden to central Canberra the Moore-Democrat vote slumps to 10.3 per cent. Moore would be struggling to get the quota. Even adding all of Woden would not provide enough voters to justify the big electorate. If chunks of Belconnen are added, his position gets worse.
Indeed, the regional difference in Moore’s support is so substantial, that he might be better off if the central area were contained in on of the small electorates. Though the quota would be higher, his support base would make his election a better prospect.
Moore will stand for the electorate which embraces the inner north. The lose-lose for Moore is that if that electorate is the seven-member one, he will be sitting in an electorate where is support is diluted. If, however, that electorate is a five-member one, it means he have to obtain a higher quota.
Further, Moore has a difficulty with geography and policy. He has made great issue about planning and development. In the first two Assembly elections, the big planning/development issue was Civic, which affected the people in his central base. Now, however, the planning-development issues are more disparate. In-fill can happen anywhere. Or the focus has shifted to the periphery, take West Belconnen for instance.
Gerry Mander himself would have difficulty creating an electorate containing both West Belconnen and Reid.
On his side, however, is an element about Hare-Clark voting. Under Hare-Clark, there will be some preferences left over from the Labor and Liberal Parties after the bulk of their vote is allocated to the first four seats to be declared; these are wasted under d’Hondt. Moore is much more likely to get the bulk of these than Stevenson. At the last election Stevenson showed a distinct inability to get preferences from excluded minor candidates as provided under d’Hondt.
The possibility of the large central electorate encompassing Woden helps the Liberals. Their support is weak in the inner North. However, if that is mixed with their stronger Woden vote they might have a chance at a third seat in the seven-member electorate, with perhaps Labor getting four.
Like Moore, Stevenson also has geographic concentration. He did far worse in inner north (4.3) than in Tuggeranong (8.6). In fact, it is less geography than socio-economic factors. He got a quarter of the vote in the Oaks Estate, and a higher vote in the poorer suburbs of Tuggeranong than the better suburbs. Stevenson would be doomed if the seven-member electorate embraced Tuggeranong. It would need nearly all of Woden added to it to satisfy Electoral Act conditions. Woden gave Stevenson only 5.6 per cent last time. The watering down effect of his support would be fatal.
Stevenson is in trouble under Hare Clark anyway. Tuggeranong on its own does not have enough voters to make even a five-member electorate. His next best support area is in the poorer areas of Belconnen. Once again presenting even Gerry Mander with an impossible task. Anyway, Stevenson tends to be attractive to his own supporters and an anathema to those who don’t. That augurs badly for picking up preferences.
One of the difficulties of making this sort of analysis is that at the last election about 25,000 voted for shrapnel groups outside those represented in the Assembly or the Democrats, and one simply cannot even guess where they might go.
Further, the issues between now and the election will obviously sway the vote. Moreover, a new electoral system is likely to attract another raft of hopeless hopefuls. On the other hand, ACT politics since the election has been a placid affair. Wild voting shifts are therefore not as likely as, say, in Victoria.
With the passing of the Electoral Act that was presented last night, the new Electoral Commission it creates will, Solomon-like, have to carve the ACT into three. Over the past few weeks it has also been made clear that the Labor Party has accepted the referendum result and will put what is known as the Robson rotation into effect without any hocus-pocus. Robson rotation was not part of last night’s Bill. It, along with other machinery matters will be detailed later.
The Robson rotation means that the party’s preferred order of candidates does not appear on the ballot paper. Rather, a fifth of the ballot papers, for example, in a five-member electorate, would be printed with the order: Follett, Ellis, Wood, McCrae, Connolly. Another fifth would be printed with the order Ellis, Connolly, McCrae, Follett, Wood. Another fifth would have Connolly at the top, and so on. The Liberal Party’s candidates would be similarly treated.
It means, of course, that a candidate cannot rely on a pre-selected position on the ballot paper. Candidates will have to work the electorate to earn their seat. They will be competing against members of their own party as much as other parties.
As one MLA remarked ruefully last week: more sitting members and Ministers lose their seats in Tasmania (the home of the Robson rotation) than anywhere else in Australia.
So do not be surprised if sitting members get the jump in the next two years by strongly identifying themselves with a particular area: Tuggeranong, Central or Belconnen. And then when the boundaries are more clearly defined, they will start working any areas they have missed.
Of more import, when all the electoral laws are through, let’s hope MLAs lift their performance in the recognition that under Robson rotation, the people, not the party machines, determine who is elected.