Understanding the doctrine of the Holy Trinity is a simple matter compared to the electoral process that faces the ACT in the next year.
Electoral authorities will be doing Trinity squared as they divide the ACT into three electorates. Not once, but twice. Once for the three ACT seats and once again for the three federal seats.
But the boundaries will have to be different. And they will be drawn up by two different sets of officials using some similar criteria and other dissimilar criteria. Many people will find themselves voting in the same electorate in both federal and local elections, but a good many will be in one electorate federally and a different one locally.
How did this extraordinary bureaucratic duplication come about?
First the federal seats. The Constitution and Commonwealth Electoral Act provide that seats in the House of Representatives be as near as practicable equal. No seat is to straddle a state boundary and the House is to have, as near as practicable, twice the number of Members as the Senate. The allocation of seats is done as follows:
Get the number of (non-territory) senators and multiply by two. Equals 144. Divide that into the number of people in Australia to get a quota. Divide the quota into the number of people in each state and territory and round anything over 0.5 up and anything under 0.5 down. The population statistics are the latest ones from the Australian Bureau of Statistics.
This exercise is done nine months after the first sitting of the Parliament after an election. (Perhaps the embryonic Parliament has to gestate.)
Using the latest available quarterly figures (September, 1992), it comes out as follows: NSW 50, Victoria 38, Queensland 26, South Australia 12, Western Australia 14, Tasmania 5, ACT 3, Northern Territory 1.
Tasmania gets an extra seat because each original state is guaranteed five seats. The total is 148, one more than at present, because the rounding exercise and the size of the territories can cause the size of the House to move up and down.
Notice that the exercise is done using the number of people, not the number of voters. “”People” include non-voting children and recent migrants. This has no doubt helped the ACT which has a comparatively high under-18 population. However, when it comes to drawing boundaries üwithin a state or territory, the Electoral Act provides that the number of üvoters must be as near as practicably equal. Thus when the ACT is divided into three seats there is no danger that the fecund electors of Tuggeranong will get unfair representation over the barren crones of inner Canberra.
The ACT’s third seat is a close-run thing. On my calculation using the September quarter figures (the latest on hand), we got the extra seat by a touch under 600 people. The ACT has the highest population growth of any state or territory in Australia, except the Northern Territory, so there is no danger of later population figures causing the ACT to slip under the magic quota for the third seat. At present the two ACT seats are the most populous in Australia with 96,105 and 94,273 electors. With three seats we would have about 63,500 electors in each, the least populous in Australia. Typical seats are 77,000.
The Northern Territory, incidentally, is close to a second seat. About 9000 more people on the September figures would see it over the line. However, it is a moving target. By the September quarter 1993, the rest of Australia’s population would have grown (though proportionately by less than that of the Northern Territory), so it would need perhaps 15,000 more people to get the extra seat. It is unlikely to get this until the election after next. It has 91,105 electors now, and will be the most populous seat in the 1996 election.
The ACT’s three federal seats must have an equal number of electors, subject to some minor qualifications. The commission aims at no more than 2 per cent difference either side of the state or territory average. It carries out a redistributions if a seat goes over or under by 10 per cent for three consecutive months; if a state or territory’s total entitlement is changed from its present entitlement at the calling of an election; or at least every seven years.
The Act provides that the commission must look at the community of interest in determining boundaries. So it would not slice Canberra into vertical electorates when clearly the geographic and township boundaries flow the other way.
In Tasmania, which also uses the Hare-Clark system, they very sensibly use the Federal boundaries for State elections. There are five federal seats. The state lower house has 35 members, seven from each seat.
In the ACT, however, we cannot do that. Our House of Assembly has 17 members. So we cannot use the three federal seats to elect them. I have tried several times, but three into 17 just does not go.
And thus we have the ludicrous situation of two electoral distributions in the ACT running virtually concurrently. The ACT electoral commissioner has to divide the territory into one seat for seven members and two for five members. The Federal commissioner is dividing the territory into three equal seats.
The ACT commissioner is in a difficult position. It is easy to just say let’s have one seat based on Belconnen, one on the centre and the other on Woden-Tuggeranong. However, the population figures are not so neat. If, for example, you make the centre the seven-member electorate you have to take a chunk of Belconnen or a chunk of Tuggeranong to build up the numbers to obey the one-vote-one-value rule. It doesn’t seem to matter what configuration you use, the natural townships have to be split, or at least a splinter from one or other will have to fall into an electorate centred elsewhere. Weston looks especially vulnerable to being carved up.
MLAs, bureaucrats and the power elite generally would argue that the way around the problem is to increase the size of the Assembly to a number divisible by three so we could use the federal seats. Of course, the would say we could not increase it by just one to 18 because then we would have an even number of seats which might result in a stalemate, so we would have to have 21 members. Hogwash.
The cost of increasing the Assembly by four members is far greater than doing a separate ACT distribution. We have an ACT electoral commissioner, Philip Green, and a personal computer doing to job for us. He has no support staff, and apparently does not need them _ certainly not full-time. There are some part-time commissioners to be paid, but these will be cheaper than four MLAs plus hangers-on.
Of course, we could cut the size of the Assembly to 15. However, present MLAs would scream about the extra work. A more cogent argument against a cut could be made. We are struggling to get enough talent to form a government from 17 members, what would it be like with just 15?
There is an argument that a certain critical mass is required to create a workable administration. We need at least four ministries, a Speaker, a committee system and a reasonably sized Opposition. Without that you get erratic and idiotic government. Even with it, you can get erratic and idiotic government, as the first ACT experience showed.
However, Parkinsonian expansion must be resisted.
An easier and cheaper option would be to change the way the ACT’s local distribution is done. The three electorates should be six, six and five, not five, five and seven as the present ACT Electoral Act provides. This would make the local and federal boundaries at least somewhat closer to each other, especially if the five-member seat were in the centre. It would then be just a question of cutting a small piece from each of the six-member seats and giving it to the five-member seat.
Of greater long-term importance for Canberra, perhaps, is the nature of the third federal seat.
Although we now have two Cabinet ministers out of three Government members, this is no guarantee that the ACT will be well-treated. Indeed, they might have to be seen ünot@ to be favouring Canberra. Anyway, the Labor Government will not last forever.
What the last election proved were the benefits of being in a marginal electorate. John Hewson promised large bounties to sugar-cane growers in the Queensland marginals, and a new university campus. Paul Keating promised big loot to people in the South Australian marginals, and so on.
Canberra is essentially a Labor town. The trick is to get enough contiguous Liberals to carve out an even seat. The third federal seat, therefore, should embrace central Canberra with the tories of Red Hill, Forrest and the Grammar School and the yuppies of Kingston, balancing the Labor-Green inner north. A careful booth-by-booth analysis should be done and if it is still not right, precisely as much of nouveau riche (look-at-how-much-money-we-can-waste-on-bad-taste) North Lyneham and O’Malley-Isaacs could be added to make it the most marginal seat in Australia, attracting political promises every election.
It would be a reverse gerrymander. Instead of the candidate seeking artful boundaries to include supporters and exclude opponents for the benefit of the candidate, the electors would urge the commissioners to draw artful boundaries to exclude supporters and include opponents until the seat is even.
We might even get a good road to the coast.