Labor’s mauling of the Liberal Party on Saturday would have had more profound consequences if it had not been for the Hare-Clark voting system.
If there had been a single-member system, like the House of Representatives, Labor would have won every single seat in the ACT Parliament – all 17 of them.
The Hare-Clark system came in for a bit of sneering on election night. It was referred to as the “complicated” Hare-Clark system, the system that no-one understood and so on.
Well, even the most die-hard Labor supporter should be grateful for it.
Without it, there would be no Opposition in the Parliament – unless Labor decided to split into factions, with the Labor Left asking the Labor Right questions at Question Time. Or vice versa given that Labor’s left looks like picking up more seats than the Right (and perhaps the Centre as well).
The booth-by-booth results, as published by the ACT Electoral Commission with more than 90 per cent of the vote counted, show that Labor won 75 of the ACT’s 83 polling places, most of them very comfortably. The vast majority of people vote at the polling booth closest to their residence and so it is a fair assumption that votes in a single-member system would follow the booth-by-booth vote.
In Ginninderra, Labor won every booth except the tiny booth of Hall.
In Brindabella, only the toffs on the hill at Fadden and the booth of Gilmore voted Liberal, and even then the Gilmore would have gone to Labor after Green preferences. Those two booths are not adjacent. They could not be in the same electorate in a single-member system. And together they would not make up the numbers for form an electorate in a single-member electorate Parliament of 17 anyway.
In Molonglo, only Amaroo, Campbell, Deakin, Farrer and Red Hill voted Liberal. And Red Hill would have gone Labor after preferences.
The ACT has about 225,000 voters. If the 17 seats were decided on a single-member system, each seat would have 13,000 voters. The five Liberal booths in Molonglo do not quite make 13,000 voters. In any event they are kilometres apart.
In short, there is no way to draw an electorate of 13,000 with a Liberal majority. Under a single-member system, last Saturday’s vote would have given Labor every seat – a Singapore result. It would have made the ACT a greater laughing stock than the jibes about the Hare-Clark system – which after all is little different from the Senate system without above the line voting.
There was a similar result in 1998. Kate Carnell’s Liberals’ would have taken at least 15 of the seats, if not more.
The ACT is a fairly homogenous place. There are one or two pockets of dyed-in-the-wool Labor or Liberal, but under a single-member system you would expect the winning party to get all or nearly all the seats, and the place would never have an Opposition.
Even Chief Minister Jon Stanhope recognised the need for an Opposition. He said after the election that the fact there was an Opposition would make his majority Government accountable.
Liberals aside, last Saturday the Greens would not have got close to winning a seat either. In the inner north the Greens out-polled the Liberals in four booths – Turner (26 per cent to 17.5 per cent); O’Connor 23 per cent Green; Lyneham 21.6 per cent Green; and North Ainslie 19.4 per cent Green. Even so Labor polled in the high 40s in each polling booth and would have got over the line on the preferences of some Liberals and other parties. If those polling booths had been one electorate Labor would have won that one, too.
In short, if you want some sort of sensible parliamentary democracy in the ACT you have to have a proportional system, and Hare-Clark is about as good as it gets. Labor die-hards imagine Kate Carnell with a 15-2 majority. Tories imagine Jon Stanhope with all 17 seats. Greens imagine never getting a seat ever. All of you be grateful we have a good (even if not perfect) voting system.
So how well did the Hare-Clark system perform? Not bad overall, pretty well in Molonglo and not so good in Ginninderra and Brindabella is the answer.
Labor was richly rewarded (assuming the most likely 10 Labor, 6 Liberal, 1 Green result). It got 47 per cent of the vote and 59 per cent of the seats. The Liberals have no complaint. They got 35 per cent of the vote and 35 per cent of the seats. The Greens/Democrats have a legitimate gripe. They got 11 per cent of the vote and just 6 per cent of the seats.
The two five-member seats produced the least democratic result.
In Brindabella, Labor got 46 per cent of the vote and 60 per cent of the seats. The Liberals got 40 per cent of the vote and 40 per cent of seats. The Greens/Democrats got 8.6 per cent of the vote and no seats.
In Ginninderra, Labor got 50 per cent of the vote and 60 per cent of the seats. The Liberals got 32 per cent of the vote and 40 per cent of the seats. The Greens/Democrat vote of 12.3 per cent came to nought.
In Molonglo, Labor got 45 per cent of the vote and 57 per cent of the seats. The Liberals got 28 per cent of the vote and 33 per cent of the seats. And the Greens/Democrats got 13 per cent of the vote and 14 per cent of the seats.
In short, the seven-member electorate gives a more democratic reflection of voters’ desires.
But Labor has argued against seven-member electorates and proposed an increased Parliament of five five-member electorates. That way, in theory, meddlesome minor parties and independents can be shut out.
The federal Minister must change the regulations under the Federal ACT Self-Government Act before the Assembly can be increased, so in practice ACT Liberal support would be needed to convince the Federal Liberal Minister.
The Liberals may see merit in shutting out the minor parties. The danger for the major parties is that the five-member seats can yield aberrant numbers of seats compared to the votes obtained.
This time Labor got 47 per cent and so got three seats in those electorates, shutting out the Greens. But once the leading major party gets below about 44 per cent, it gets two seats (two 16.6 per cent quotas making 33.2 per cent) and its over-quota of about 11 per cent is not enough to shut out the Greens who with Democrat and other preferences would get more than 11 per cent and thus take a seat. Even in this election the Greens have come very close in Ginninderra.
If the Greens get a seat in a five-member electorate the result for the major parties becomes extremely unfair. One major party can get more than 10 percentage points of the vote than the other major party, yet they both get the same number of seats.
This election the high Green vote in the federal Senate race the week before did not translate locally. Maybe that Green vote for Kerrie Tucker was more anti-Howard, anti-Iraq, and pro-refugee than purely Green. Jon Stanhope’s record on social justice, human rights and the environment is better than Federal Labor’s maybe those people were comfortable with voting Labor.
But it would only take a small swing away from Labor for it to lose its third members in Ginninderra and Brindabella.
In fact, this, more than anything, will tend to keep a Labor majority government accountable – even one with a left majority as this one is likely to be.
The floor of the House also helps – Question Time, the Adjournment debate and the committee system can be used by the Opposition to keep a majority government accountable.
In any event, we have had virtual majority government for the past three years with the Green MLA support Labor on every significant matter. And the sky has not fallen in.