NUMBER to the bitter end, I say. The electoral roll for the 15 October ACT election closed this week. As voters make up their minds, the experience of the recent Senate and Northern Territory are instructive.
We’ll come to the Northern Territory later. But first to the Senate which has a similar proportional multi-member system as the ACT but with significant differences that make voter attentiveness even more important.
The really salient lesson from the Senate vote is that voting for only enough candidates to fill the seats available (12 in a Senate double dissolution; six in a half-Senate election or five in an ACT election) will result in a voter not having a full decision as to who gets elected.
In the ACT, a large number of ballot papers with just five numbers on them will exhaust before the selection of the fifth candidate in an electorate.
The tussle for the last seat will very likely be between two candidates that have not been numbered by our 1-to-5-only voters.
This is especially true if a voter restricts themselves to the five candidates of a major party.
The 1-to-5 voters will most likely not have a say in whether, for example, the fifth seat goes to the Greens or, say, a right-of-centre minor party.
Many people voting 1 to 5 Labor candidates might well prefer the Green. Many people voting 1 to 5 Liberal candidates might well prefer the right-of-centre minor party. But they would have absented themselves from the decision.
This is not some hypothetical construct. It is a statistical certainty.
The 2016 Senate result in Tasmania proves the point. The last (sixth) seat was a tussle between the Greens and One Nation. It was won by the Greens over One Nation by 141 votes. At that stage of the count, 9531 valid but exhausted votes lay idle on the counting-room floor, expressing no preference between the two.
This effect could be more pronounced in the ACT because, unlike in the Senate, the ACT does not have above-the-line party voting.
In the Senate in the states, the Electoral Commission advises that you must mark 1 to 6 above the line or 1 to 12 below the line. Given most parties field 12 candidates in a double-dissolution election a 1-to-6 vote would typically embrace 36 candidates and increase the likelihood of that vote being live at the last stage of the count.
Fortunately, ACT voters are more engaged and more likely to preference more candidates than their state and NT counterparts.
Nonetheless, in past elections, the exhausted vote has often been higher than the margin between the last two candidates.
So it is important to go the distance and preference every candidate to the bitter end if you want to make sure your vote is in there at the time of deciding who is to be the last candidate elected.
And even then, there is a further nuance.
A lot of major-party voters work on the basis of “I don’t like the other lot so I will put them last.”
That may work in the states in the Senate, but it is a disenfranchising approach in the ACT.
Voters for the major parties should recognise that at the next ACT election most likely at least two of “the other lot” will be elected in each electorate. Two quotas is just 33 per cent of the vote after preferences. That should not be difficult for even on-the-nose major parties.
So, it means that Labor voters (and Green voters for that matter) should look closely at the individual Liberal candidates and work out which they would prefer.
In the ACT, the political party does not do that for you. In the ACT ballot paper the order in the party columns is randomised. There is a different order on different ballot papers. It is called Robson Rotation.
So Labor and Green voters should ask, “Do I want a lock ‘em up; no abortion even in rape cases; bring back corporal punishment Liberal Member, or should I pick and choose which of the Liberal candidates sits closer to my beliefs.”
Conversely, Liberal voters should look at the Labor candidates and ask, “Do I want a card-carrying commie or can I find a more pro-business pro-family Liberal.”
On this front Labor and Green voters should look closely gender equity in the Liberal Party. Last election, six male Liberals and two female Liberals were elected. Labor had an even 4-4. (The balance has changed since the election through resignation and countback,) But the Liberals do not have an even-handed policy on candidate selection.
So an intelligent Labor or Green voter, after giving their first preferences to Labor and Greens, should then move over to the Liberal column and assess gender equity. If it is not there, they should give the female Liberals a higher preference than male Liberals.
That would be more constructive than just whingeing after the election about gender imbalance.
The ACT has a far more democratic system than any other in Australia. You get a say as to which of “the other lot” gets a seat.
Now to the Northern Territory. In the lead up to ACT self-government in 1989 and in subsequent debate about electoral systems for the ACT, this newspaper argued persistently and consistently for proportional representation.
Most of its columnists (including me) argued the same way. Our fear was that the ACT being fairly pro-Labor would, under a single-member system, elect an overwhelmingly Labor majority and there would be no effective Opposition. That is not good for democracy.
In a broader jurisdiction – such as the whole of Australia – that is less likely. But in our small, more homogeneous jurisdiction, a single-member system was likely to deliver the result we have seen in the Northern Territory. The less-than 45 per cent of the Labor vote delivered more than two-thirds the seats.
The Opposition was reduced to an ineffectual rump.
In the ACT, on the other hand, the Opposition has always had at least just enough MLAs to populate the committees and share the frontbench load.
On any count, the ACT’s democracy has been far more effective, accountable and workable than that in the Northern Territory.
And the best way for that to continue is for ACT voters next month to go the distance and preference every candidate to the end of the ballot paper.
This article first appeared in The Canberra Times and other Fairfax Media on 17 September 2016.