A spat broke out this week over whether the ACT’s Hare-Clark electoral system discriminates against women.
The ACT branch secretary of the ALP, Michael Kerrisk, said, “the Hare-Clark electoral system used here in the ACT, and the one chosen by the Liberal Party, is a brutal one. . . . Increasing at the level of female representation in the Assembly will not be easy. . . . The Hare-Clark electoral system is all about promoting the individual at the expense of the party. And in any system like this, female candidates will often be unsuccessful.”
At present, there are only two female members of the Legislative Assembly out of 17. And we do have a Hare-Clark system. But the latter, of itself, did not cause of the former.
This election, women were pre-selected by each of the major parties to every or winnable seat except one. The winnable seats for the major parties are two each in the two five-member electorates (Brindabella and Ginninderra) and three each in the seven-member electorate (Molonglo). (Only one major party will actually win a third seat in Molonglo, however, it is still winnable by either of them.)
The Liberal Party has pre-selected three women to stand in Molonglo, two women to stand in Ginninderra but only one to stand in Brindabella. That is six women for seven winnable seats.
The Labor Party has pre-selected three women to stand in Molonglo two in Ginninderra, and two in Brindabella. That is seven women for winnable seats. unfortunately for Labor won female candidate has withdrawn from Brindabella and at the next most successful candidate at the pre-selection was a man. The party has yet to decide whether out the man, Trevor at Sandy, will have to give way to a female candidate.
In any event, it is fairly significant that the Hare-Clark system has enabled women to stand in so many of winnable seats. This is because of the multi-member nature of the Hare-Clark system and its prohibition of party-line voting through it the Robson rotation system.
The political parties are prohibited by the system from listing their candidates in any particular order. Rather, ballot papers are printed in batches so that each candidate appears at the top of the party list on an equal number of ballot papers. Thus one voter might get a ballot paper with the Labor Party column having a female candidate at the top followed by a male, female, female, male, male, male. And another voter might get a male at the top of the Labor Party column. In short, there is no pre-selection by the party to favour a male or female. It is up to the voters who to mark their preferences for each candidate within each party column and the order of the candidates within that column is random.
Compare this to a single member system such as the Federal House of Representatives. Under the single member system, some seats are safe, some are marginal and some are hopeless. It has been fairly typical for the major parties to give women marginal and hopeless seats to contest while leaving the plum safe seats for men. Take up the four most recent presidents of the ACTU for example. The blokes — Hawke, Crean and Ferguson — all got plumb safe seats. The fourth, Jennie George, did not. And take Cheryl Kernot, the star defector from the Democrats. She got pre-selected for the seat of Dickson one of the most marginal in the country. A Labor bloke like Kim Beazley, faced with his seat – Swan — becoming more and more marginal, was quickly found a nearby safer seat – Brand — to contest. The Liberal Party is not much better.
When left to pick candidates in a single member-system the major parties favour blokes. Females have to overcome two hurdles to get into Parliament. The first is to overcome sexism within the political party to get on to the ballot paper and then they have to get elected by the voters. The political parties can pay lip-service to sexual equality quite easily by pre-selecting a lot of women to hopeless seats.
The Hare-Clark system does not allow that lip-service to be so effective in excluding women from Parliament. Once political parties go through the lip-service of pre-selecting women to, say, between a third and a half of their candidates, there is no relegating them to unsafe seats. Rather, our system puts them on equal footing with the male candidates. It is then up to the voters to choose whether they want a woman member of their favourite party to represent them in the Parliament or a man. There is no need to change parties if you want to change gender. So it is possible under Hare-Clark for a voter to say I want a female Labor MLA rather than a male Labor MLA. In a single member system you get the gender the party gives you.
It would not be surprising if at the next ACT election in October that a lot of people look at the under-representation of women in the present Assembly and go out of their way to vote for women candidates — without having to change party allegiance.
Under Hare-Clark it is also possible for voters to favour women candidates in the major political party that is not their first choice. Labor voters can favour Liberal women and vive-versa. In a single-member system the preferences from up the major parties do not get counted because the two major-party candidates are invariably the last two left in the race. In a multi-member system, however, such as the ACT or the Federal Senate, some major party candidates get eliminated early. The preferences from those candidates can then flown to candidates from the other major party or to minor parties.
Thus, it is possible for a voter having put at the first five or seven preferences down for, say, Labor to then moved to the Liberal column and put all the Liberal women next, leaving at the Liberal men further down the list.
In short, under Hare-Clark, power is in the hands of the voters to enable more women to get into the Parliament. When, with single-member or party-list systems, power has been in the hands of the political parties they have been singularly ineffectual at promoting women.
Party machines, of course, prefer to have more control over who gets elected and so dislike the Hare-Clark system. Wayne Berry, when leader, made many unsuccessful calls to impose a party list system to replace the Robson rotation. And it is still Labor policy. Berry has become strangely silent on the matter since losing the leadership because under his party’s rules a party list would put Stanhope — a bloke — first and a woman would have to be placed second, leaving Berry in the cold.
It is true that at the last two Hare-Clarke elections in the ACT a total of five sitting women members lost their seats. However, two, perhaps three, of those losses can be put down to the Labor Party attempting to graft a pre-selection ticket on to the Hare-Clark system and the others were due to some unfortunate quirks of the Robson rotation system which the Assembly should fix before October.
Given the capacity of the system to empower voters to select more women to Parliament it would seem a good idea for the Women’s Electoral Lobby to help educate voters on how to do that.
Ultimately, the Hare-Clark system says the voters decide the gender mix of the Parliament. The Women’s Electoral Lobby was outraged at comments made by Liberal MLA and Greg Cornwell that voters obviously preferred men. Indeed, they created the annual Greg awards for sexist comments. The 2001 election will be an ideal opportunity to prove him wrong. There are three women Liberal candidates in Molonglo available for election before Cornwell.