Double dissolution favour majors not minors

THE Greens would be the biggest losers in a double dissolution. Perhaps that is why there was a bit of muttering about the possibility among Ministers in the past week. But the talk was quickly dismissed. Undermining Green power is one matter, losing government in the process is another.

The arithmetic of a double dissolution election would hit the Greens hard. At present they have 10 Senators out of 72. That is if you leave the territory senators out of the equation because each territory always elects one Coalition and one Labor every three years and the knock each other out. So we will ignore them for the rest of this article.

The Greens got those Senate seats by winning a seat at every half-Senate election in nearly every state. At a half Senate election six senators are elected from each state so after preferences you need win one seventh of the vote plus one vote to get a seat – 14.3%. The Greens’ 8 per cent or so of the primary vote in most states most of the time was enough.

Labor usually gets easily enough primary vote for two seats (28.6%) but usually not enough for three (43%). The vote beyond 28.6% usually spills to the Greens.

So here is the myth-buster. The usual political wisdom in Australia says that at double dissolutions it is easier for minor parties to get a Senate seat because the quota is just 7.7 per cent after preferences. So if you want to avoid all those pesky minor parties, the theory goes, do not have a double dissolution.

Yes, hitherto there has been some truth to that proposition. But more recent history suggests another view.

With the collapse of the major-party vote, major parties find it a struggle to get three Senate seats in any state at a half-Senate election. So over two half-Senate elections the major parties end up with just eight of the 12 Senate seats in any given state.

But in a double dissolution, a major party has a reasonable chance of getting five out of 12 seats after preferences. Five times the 7.7% quota is 38.5%. In short the major parties together have a sporting chance of getting nine or 10 or the 12 seats, leaving only two or three for minor parties. Whereas over a two-election cycle of half-Senate elections, the major parties typically get only eight or nine seats.

So forget the old view that double dissolutions favour minor parties. These days they in fact favour the major parties.

Looked at another way, the minor parties collectively after preferences have to score just 14.3% of the vote in each of two half-Senate elections to have two senators per state, but in a double dissolution they need 15.4%.

Okay, it is only one percent, but that often makes the difference between election and missing out. And there is another factor.

At the last Senate election we saw all sorts of shrapnel parties with tiny first preferences get a seat. They got the seat on the trickle down of preferences on back-room deals which saw nearly all the shrapnel parties agree to put each other higher up the preference pole than any major party. That way the last shrapnel-party candidate standing got the last seat ahead of a major party or the Greens.

Logic tells you that you can only have one last shrapnel-candidate standing. So if there are two consecutive half-Senate elections you can get two last sharapnel-party candidates standing being elected in each state. If, on the other hand, there is just one double-dissolution election to elect the 12 senators, there can only be one last sharpnel-paty candidate standing elected in each state.

We have seen this effect. We now have 17 non-major-party Senators. Of course, that may be no bad thing – a brake on the tyranny of the majority and all that.

But if the major parties accept that neither will ever get a majority in the Senate ever again, they should never rule out the double-dissolution proposition purely on the basis that it will give minor parties more senators. It won’t.

On the Senate more generally, something needs to be done to fix the bizarre voting system that permits people with tiny real electoral support getting elected. And something needs to be done to fix the hugely cumbersome double-dissolution system to deal with impasses between the Senate and the House of Representatives (in effect the Government of the day).

My guess is that despite all the hand-wringing and tut-tutting, nothing will be done about the electoral system.

It was agreed upon by the major parties because it gave them extra power. Voters at Senate elections either had to number every box for every candidate down to typically more than 50 and sometimes more than 100 or they could put a 1 against the single party box which would determine every last preference according to a myriad of backroom deals.

Those deals now include preference swaps between minor parties which ensure that the last one of them gets elected over any major-party candidate.

There are a couple of obvious fixes. The first is to allow voters to vote preferentially above the line. For example, 1 Green; 2 Liberal; 3 Warm Tomato Party; 4 Labor; 5 Raving Lunatic Party.

The second is to require a minimum first preference vote of, say, 3 or 4 per cent. On the first count all party groups or independents with fewer than 3 or 4 per cent of the first preference vote would be excluded.

But do not expect the obvious to happen. Rather, expect, say, the “I Love Political Paralysis Party” to get 0.004 per cent of the vote in, say, Victoria and get a senator elected.

As for double dissolutions, wouldn’t it be easier to have an automatic joint sitting of Parliament after every election to vote on all bills that were twice rejected by the Senate in the previous term. After all, the voters would have seen the exact detail of the legislation and would know the consequences of voting for the party that promoted it.
CRISPIN HULL
This article first appeared in The Canberra Times and Fairfax Media on 21 March 2015.