One should always be skeptical of charities that proclaim that less than 10 per cent of donated money goes in administration.
Often those charities put the wrong sort of food on the wrong trucks and the 90 per cent of good money is wasted anyway.
Clearly, there is an optimal amount to spend on administration: too little and the rest of the money is not well spend and too must is just direct waste.
A similar argument can be mounted about representative government.
Every now and then the argument arises about whether the ACT should have more members in its Parliament. At present 17 MLAs represent 330,000 people or about 19,500. At the beginning of self-government the 17 represented 270,000 people, or about 16,000 each.
That of itself does not warrant an increase. After all, federal parliamentarians represent about 90,000 people each.
Rather the problem has been having enough MLAs to provide a reasonably good Government, Opposition and representative system. Chief Minister Jon Stanhope is right to point out that we do not have enough. Once you provide four or five ministers, their shadows, a Speaker and some committee chairs there is not much of a back bench. Given the Government usually has only between seven and nine members, selecting a ministry can be difficult. Every party deals up some lemons who are not capable of running a Ministry. Add in factional requirements (and both side have them) and the Chief Minister often has no real choice. At best he or she can shuffle portfolios.
The ACT would probably be better governed with some extra MLAs. Stanhope wants eight more. The Greens and the Liberals want four more. But the real fight here is not about how many extra MLAs there should be, but how those MLAs should be elected. A parallel fight is over who should determine how many MLAs we should have.
Now the Hare-Clark system has matured a little and the ACT voters’ flirting with a lot of shrapnel candidates has come to and end, a pattern is emerging which suggests that it is getting harder for a minor-party candidate or independent to win a seat in a five-member electorate.
At present we have two five-member electorates and one seven-member electorate. To win a seat in a five-member electorate you need 16.6 per cent of the vote after preferences. The Greens, an independent and the Democrats have done it but not in the past two elections.
To win a seat in the seven-member electorate of Molonglo you need just 12.5 per cent after preferences. A minor-party candidate – a Green — has won a seat at every election. On a couple of occasions both and Green and an independent won a seat in Molonglo.
So you can see why the major parties do not like seven-member electorates. Those pesky Greens and independents could deny them majority Government. Labor especially thinks this way, because the Liberals are seen as trailing and would therefore rather be in Opposition to a minority Government where it can use numbers to embarrass the Government in committees and on the floor of the House, even if they cannot get support to form government.
Another reason the Liberals will tolerate seven-member seats is because the electoral system has been favourable to them in the past two elections in Molonglo. Each time they got three of the seven seats, or 43 per cent of the seats, when they got about 10 percentage points less primary vote than that. Labor, on the other hand, also gots three seats but with a much higher primary vote.
Because minors and independents can get over the threshold in Molonglo it makes it too hard for a major party to get a fourth seat. On the other hand, getting a third seat in a five-seat electorate is easier. It can be done with a tad over 40 per cent of the primary vote. For that, the major party gets 60 per cent of the seats in that electorate.
So you can see why Stanhope wants 25 MLAs – five electorates of five, with Labor favoured to get three seats in several if not all. That would give it a majority. Certainly that configuration would give it a better chance at majority than three electorates of seven. Labor would likely get just nine of 21 seats, no more than it gets now in a 17-seat Assembly.
The snag for Stanhope is that any change to the number would require a change to the Self-Government Act, which is an Act of the Federal Parliament.
The Howard Government has stated it will not either increase the size of the Assembly or hand over the power to increase the size to the ACT.
What about a Rudd Labor Government. No joy for Stanhope there, either. After the election, the Senate stays put until 30 June, 2008. The Coalition has a majority in the Senate and would veto any Labor legislation, even if Liberal ACT Senator Gary Humphries crossed the floor to vote to hand the power to the ACT, there would be enough other Coalition senators to block the legislation.
And after 30 June, 2008, Labor is unlikely to have a majority. The unlikely combination of the Greens and the Coalition would defeat any plan than would harm their interests in the ACT.
Remember, every seat in every legislature has staff members and money attached which can go to further the party’s interests.
Yes, the ACT should be able to determine how big its Parliament is. But in nearly all states and territories and federally there is some mechanism that prevents the Government of the day rejigging the numbers or method of election to favour itself.
If the ACT were to get the power to increase its Parliament it should require a two-thirds or three-quarter majority, or require approval by referendum, so that one party cannot create a system that favours it.
My guess is that we will be waiting a long time before the major parties come up with an acceptable way to increase the size of the ACT Parliament and to repatriate the power to change its size to the ACT.