The move by Gareth Evans from the House of Unrepresentative Swill to the House of Representatives shows one of the defects in the federal single-member electoral system _ the seatless Minister.
It is a defect the Germans and Americans have overcome and the New Zealanders imagine they might overcome.
The seatless-Minister defect arises because each member of the Ministry in the House of Representatives has to win a seat which is based locally not nationally _ a constituency seat if you like.
It may well be that the people of the country as a whole want a Labor Government with Gareth Evans as Foreign Minister and Kim Beazley as Minister for Jobs. However, the people of a suburb of Melbourne or Perth might have a quirky reason for not liking Labor this time around and chuck two fairly highly regarded Ministers on the scrap heap.
Usually when a minister or even Prime Minister loses his or her seat the government goes, too. But not always. Gordon Freeth a Minister in the Gorton Government lost his seat in 1969.
In Britain Christopher Paton, a Minister in the Major Government, lost his seat at the last election. Ironically, he was so busy on the national Conservative campaign that his local electorate spurned him.
Similarly, Gareth Evans might be so busy making “”peace” in Cambodia, signing oil treaties in the Timor Gap and doing the other national tasks that the good burghers of some inner Melbourne slum who want their drains fixed might vote for a Liberal or an Australian rules-playing Independent.
As the Governorship of Hong Kong is already taken, there would be nowhere else for Gareth to go _ at least that you can mention in a family newspaper.
As it happens, Evans has found the nice safe seat of Holt in Dandenong. It requires a 10 per cent swing for Labor to lose. A white rabbit could stand for Labor and win. But the deal required an extraordinary amount of factional shuffling which seems to play scant regard for rank and file Labor members who vote in pre-selections, the odd local who has aspired to represent that area in the national parliament or, indeed, the wider electorate.
In the mid-1970s and 1980s the Germans similarly had a long-serving Foreign Minister in Hans-Dietrict Genscher. Hans did not have to worry about winning a local seat in some Ruhr industrial hell-hole.
The Germans have an electoral system that gives security of tenure to leading figures in the main three or four parties.
They have the standard system like our House of Representatives and then have a number of seats nationally elected on a separate ballot paper. In the national seats the parties list their candidates in preference. Candidates can stand for both sorts of seats. If elected to a constituency seat, they take the constituency seat and are rubbed off the national list and the next available national candidate gets the national seat.
In Australia, for example, there might be 100 constituency seats and 50 national seats. A party would get one of those 50 seats for each 2 per cent of the national vote. So after the votes are added in the national ballot Labor might be entitled to 22 national seats.
Labor’s national ticket might read: Keating, Howe, Evans, Beazley, Willis and so on. If, say, Keating, Howe and Willis won their local seats and Evans and Beazley lost theirs, then Evans and Beazley would get the first two national seats for Labor. And so on.
That way all the factional fighting can be concentrated at the national level.
Further, the “”good local member” need not be on the national list. Further a Keating, Evans or Beazley might (ital) only (end ital) be on the national list, so they do not have to turn their attention from national trade policy to the drains in Blaxland, Swan or Holt. This would prevent some electorates have absentee members, as is the case now.
True, Evans has said he will look after his electorate, but surely he would turn down an invitation to the Dandenong Serbian Bowling Club if it clashed with an address to the UN on chemical weapons.
It may be that the Constitution would require the national list to be broken into six state lists, otherwise, there would be no need for constitutional change. Indeed, the Constitution envisaged the possibility of having a state list of candidates with the state as one electorate.
The Parliament could enact such a scheme.
The Democrats would like it. They might pick up a couple of seats in the House of Representatives. At present their five to 10 per cent of the national vote only reflects in the House of Unrepresentative Swill.
The United States does not have the problem of the seatless Minister. Indeed, its Constitution prohibits a Cabinet member from being a member of Congress. The President can pick a used-car dealer off the street, if he’s rich enough.
The New Zealanders are introducing a similar system as the Germans next election. But they have muffed it with a really dumb rule. The end result of the parliament (national and constituency seats totalled) must be in exact proportion as the national ballot, irrespective of how many constituency seats a party wins. Every “”extra” constituency seat over its national vote that a party gets results in one less national seat.
New Zealand foibles aside, the German mix of national and constituency seats presents a solution to the seatless-minister defect and the factional squabbles that go with it.