Electoral systems are extremely important. They can change the fate of nations, or even the world. Ask Al Gore.
This week Gore picked up an Oscar for his documentary An Inconvenient Truth. In 2000 he won more votes than George Bush but Bush took the White House because the US has an odd electoral system under which each state gets a number of votes in an Electoral College equal to the number of representatives and senators it has in the Congress. Bush won enough states to give him a majority in the Electoral College.
The Australian Electoral system is similarly defective. In Australia the winner is the party which gets a majority of seats, not necessarily the party which is preferred by a majority of voters.
On four occasions since World War II a majority of Australian voters have preferred one party, but the other one won Government – 1961, 1969, 1990 and 1998. Three times the defective system cheated Labor and once it cheated the Coalition (1990).
You could well argue that on each occasion the nation would have been better off if the right party had won.
You could certainly argue that the world would be much better off if Gore had been elected instead of Bush. The sorry Iraq episode would never have happened. The war against the perpetrators of the World Trade Center attack might well have been confined to Afghanistan. We would have got further in addressing global warming.
In Australia, it might well have been better if Labor had won in 1961. Australia’s sorry participation in the Vietnam War might never have happened. Robert Menzies would have been pensioned off in his 60s, not his 70s and a better crop of Coalition leaders would have stayed around.
If Labor had won in 1969, we would have been spared Billy McMahon, and maybe the Coalition would have eventually beaten a Whitlam Government in a legitimate election.
In 1990, Bob Hawke should have been tipped out. By then his Government was tired and done its best work (nearly all by Paul Keating who would probably have become Prime Minister later, anyway).
But the electoral defect had its most unfortunate effect in 1998. True we would have had to put up with waffling Kim Beazley as Prime Minister but we might have been spared the mistreatment of refugees; infringements on civil liberties; failure to do anything about greenhouse gases; and possibly our tawdry involvement in the second Iraq invasion.
We might well contemplate the electoral system in this election year. There has been much speculation in the past couple of weeks about the possibility of John Howard losing his seat of Bennelong, including the possibility that he might lose his seat even though the Coalition wins the election overall. That would be a travesty.
If Howard leads the Coalition to victory, he should be Prime Minister, even if he does not win his seat. As it happens our Constitution does allow such a thing. Section 64 and 65 allow the Governor-General to appoint anyone as a Minister of State (or Prime Minister), but “no Minister of State shall hold office for a longer period than three months unless he is or becomes a senator or a member of the House of Representatives”.
John Gorton was Prime Minister for six weeks in early 1968 while not being a member of either House of Parliament. He was in the Senate when he won the Liberal leadership after Harold Holt’s death.
But it is still an unsatisfactory set-up. The leaders of the main parties should not have to muck about defending a local seat when the nation expects them to spend all their time dealing with national questions. Some people might find it highly entertaining to see Howard lose his seat, but it reveals a defect in the system when any number of hacks and drones have safe seats and someone who has earned the confidence of his party can be lost to the Parliament.
The same could happen to Labor. Indeed, Kim Beazley moved out of his seat of Swan for a safer seat before the 1996 election. Just as well. The Coalition won it.
Howard is in an invidious position. Due to a couple of redistributions and some changing demographics he now finds himself in a marginal seat. He can hardly swap to a safer seat because it will look like cutting and running.
We should borrow from Germany and New Zealand to fix both the problem of national leaders finding themselves fighting for marginal seats and the problem of the less preferred party winning an election.
New Zealand and Germany have a number of national seats as well as electorates like ours. We could have, say, 30 or 40, decided proportionately. Each party would put forward in order a list of candidates for the national seats. Howard would head the Liberal ticket followed by Costello and so on. Similarly with Labor. If a candidate missed out on a local seat, he or she could take a national seat if they were high enough up the ticket. So if Howard lost Bennelong he would take the first national seat. If he won Bennelong the first national seat would go to someone who did not win a local seat.
Having national seats would also give minor parties a chance of winning some seats in the Lower House. As they would be decided proportionately, it would make results like 1961, 1969, 1990 and 1998 – with their stigma of illegitimacy — much less likely.
I find it odd that a nation which spends zillions of dollars a year on home renovation is so reluctant to do anything about renovating its Constitution when the defects are so demonstrable.