THE Leader of the Democrats, Meg Lees,has presented a fairly cogent argument that the House or Representatives, rather than the Senate, is unrepresentative.
She has responded to assertions by the Coalition that the Senate is unrepresentative and obstructionist and that its electoral system should be changed. Earlier this month, the Coalition’s Senator Helen Coonan argued that you should only win a Senate seat if you or you party got a set quota of first preference votes, perhaps as much as 14 per cent. That would wipe out many minor-party senators, strengthening the hand of the Executive Government.
Senator Lees chose the same forum as Senator Coonan, an address to the Sydney Institute, which she gave last night.
Senator Lees points out that the House of Representatives is in fact not very representative. In the past 20 elections, five have resulted in a party with less than 50 per cent of the two-party-preferred vote winning government ahead of the other party with more than 50 per cent of the two party-preferred vote: 1954, 1961, 1969, 1990, 1998. All but 1990 were won by the Coalition.
The present system has other quirks. Parties can concentrate on marginal seats which have a huge influence on who forms government. Safe Opposition seats can be largely ignored by Governments. Meanwhile, huge parts of the country are unrepresented. Sydney’s west has 200,000 unrepresented Liberal voters in 10 safe Labor seats. And the North Shore has 80,000 Labor voters unrepresented. There are no Liberals to represent Tasmania in the House and no Labor Members to represent virtually all of rural Queensland.
Senator Lees wants a system that gives some representation in the House of Representatives to minor parties, after all, about 20 per cent of people vote for them and she wants a system to give some extra seats to the losing major party so that the number of its seats more accurately reflects the percentage of its vote.
The system opted for by Senator Lees is based on a system proposed by a royal commission headed by former British Labour Home Secretary Roy Jenkins.
<>< DROP-LEG >Britain has a first past the post system. Voters just mark a cross beside one candidate and the candidate with the most votes gets elected. A candidate might get only 30 per cent of the vote and win because the three other candidates might get, say, between 20 and 25 per cent each. This results in the winning party taking much more than half the seats with much less than half the vote.
In Australia the preferential system takes away some of the anomaly, but not all. In 1996 the Coalition got 46 per cent of the vote and 64 per cent of the seats.
The Lees-Jenkins proposal <>< DROP-LEG >is a complex one, but complexity does not make it unfair. Indeed, simple voting systems are very often unfair.
Bear with me, while I explain. (Or you can skip this bit, if you like.) The House remains at 148 seats. At present they are elected by 148 electorates. Under the Lee-Jenkins model, 118 of them would be elected as now and the remaining 30 would be determined under a top-up system.
The top-up starts by dividing the number of seats each party won plus one into the number of votes obtained. The party with the highest <>< DROP-LEG >number would get the first seat. And the process would be repeated.
Take an example. Out of 8.5 million voters say the Coalition gets four million, Labor 3.5 million, One Nation 600,000, Democrats 400,000. Say the Coalition gets 68 seats and Labor 50 seats and no-one else gets any.
Then you do the Jenkins-Lees top-up to assign the remaining 30 seats.
One Nation’s zero plus one is divided into 600,000 to give 600,000. The Democrats zero plus one is divided into 400,000 to give 400,000. With the Coalition’s 69 (68+1) is divided in four million to give about 58,000 and Labor’s 51 <>< DROP-LEG >is divided into its 3.5 million to give about 69,000.
(The plus one is merely to avoid dividing things by zero and getting infinity).
One Nation has the highest result and gets the first top-up seat. In the next round it has one seat plus one equal two. Two is divided into 600,000 to give 300,000 leaving the Democrats with the highest figure at 400,000, so they get the second top-up seat. And the process is repeated.
The outcome would be 13 top-up seats to One Nation, 11 to the Democrats, four to Labor and two to the Coalition.Notice everyone gets some. That has the advantage of allowing all parties to <>< DROP-LEG >nominate a list from which top-up candidates are selected. If someone on the list has already won a constituency seat you just move to the next name. It would mean a significant member of a major party who lost a constituency seat would not be lost to the Parliament.
The plan has merit. It would provide a more representative House of Representatives. It would help enfranchise the 25 per cent of people who vote for minor parties. And we are supposed to have a representative democracy, after all.
But it would add to the difficulty of the Executive Government getting its legisla-<>tion through. Most of the time, the top-up system would result in a majority Government. But some of the time the Government would have to rely on the minor parties, much as in the ACT. That’s not such a bad thing. Minority Governments have worked fairly well at state level and in Europe. Government’s need ameliorating voices on occasions or they can become convinced of their own correctness and start abusing their power.
Lees argues that the Senate has not been obstructionist, citing the fact that the Senate has passed all but two Bills since the election of the Howard Government. I don’t buy that argument. The fact that the Government does not have a majority in the Senate hampers the very construction of its legislation. A lot of legislation arrives in a watered down way in the knowledge that if the Government put what it really wanted in the legislation it would have no hope. Moreover, a lot of legislation is significantly. Further, the two rejected bits of legislation were about the most significant on the Government’s agenda. And in any event, if Senator Lees and her Democrat colleagues had got their way, a lot more than two pieces of legislation would have been rejected. One Brian Harradine and Mal Colston got them through, and only then in the unusual circumstances of Colston being a Labor defector.
But that does not mean her electoral proposals are dud. Some might see them as just a scheme to get more Democrats elected. Sure, it has that effect. But having a few more voices than Labor or Coalition in the House can only help make the place less combative.
It would have to come as a trade off, or government would be very difficult. The Senate would have to surrender its power over Supply, and it would have to have it power over legislation reduced, perhaps to only delaying until the people approve it at the next election. To help stability it might also help to have fixed terms, as in the ACT where minority government is permanent.
The trouble here is that on one hand, the Coonan change poses a threat to democracy by giving the Executive too much power while the Lees plan makes it too difficult for the Executive without some significant give and take.