A butterfly flaps its wings in Peru and Cairns has a summer of devastating floods. This is chaos theory. It happens with weather, and it happens also with electoral systems. There have been some good examples in recent times: the fall-out from last year’s election in Fiji; on-going strife in Papua New Guinea; the tussle over the seat over the federal seat of Hume; and earlier we had the Thatcher and New Zealand experiments.
An Australian Parliamentary Library paper published shortly after last year’s Fijian election shows how the new electoral system in the new 1998 Constitution laid the groundwork for this year’s coup. The new Constitution imposed Australian-style preferential voting. There were also 23 reserved indigenous and 19 reserved Indian seats to ensure some ethnic balance. It was done with the best will in the world. In theory it would weaken racially-based parties and help develop a two-party (or at least two-coalition) system. It was thought that the preferential system would allow an exchange of preferences between the SVT party led by the 1987 coup leader and Prime Minister, Sitiveni Rabuka, and the National Federation Party, the predominant Indian party. The Federation Party pleaded for co-operation, despite the coups.
The electoral butterfly delivered unpredicted chaos. The Constitutional framers had forgotten the intense rivalry within the indigenous parties. It was so intense, that the bulk of the minor indigenous parties gave preferences to the Fiji Labour Party, a multi-racial party, led by Mehendra Chaudhry. This was the party which led the Government that Rabuka overthrew in the 1987 coup.
The result was that Labour won 18 of the 25 openly-contested seats and all 19 of the reserved Indian seats. The indigenous reserved seats were shared among six parties as were the remain seven open seats. Because of the preferential system, Labour won 37 of 71 seats (52 per cent of the seats) with just 32.3 per cent of the first-preference vote.
Fiji also had an above-the-line vote so people could just tick a party box and be deemed to vote for the preferences lodged by the party. More than 90 per cent of the voters did that.
The result was an absolute majority for Chaudhry who set about imposing an economic and social justice program without opposition. This frightened the indigenous majority. The indigenous Fijian parties got 52 per cent of the first preference votes and 40 per cent of the seats. They felt cheated. The coup was inexcusable, but that was its genesis.
The preferential system in Australia has almost equally imbalanced results, but they are ameliorated by other factors that are absent in Fiji.
Last election in Australia, the Coalition got 39 per cent of the first preference vote and 55 per cent of the seats. A Chaudhry-style win, but no-one expects a coup. This is primarily because Australia does not have an ethnic divide and has a long history of democracy. Further, the feelings of “”we wuz robbed” by Labour voters is ameliorated because the Howard Government, unlike Chaudhry, Thatcher and the Lange-Douglas Government in New Zealand, could not push ahead untrammeled. It had to deal with the Senate, elected proportionately, and the states which give expression and power to other opinions.
In the ACT, the proportional prevents Kate Carnell from doing whatever she likes.
Our single-member system creates chaos for some individual members from the butterfly wing flutter of electoral boundary changes. At various times senior members of major parties (Curtin, Beazley and now Finance Minister John Fahey) have found themselves in marginal seats. Their party might win, but their won seat is vulnerable to be won by the other party, especially if an electoral redistribution has taken loyal voters away and added hostile ones. Half of Fahey’s seat has been taken to the next door seat of Hume held by Alby Schultz. Large numbers of notionally Labor voters have been added to it. Fahey wants to contest Hume, where so many of his supporters have gone. Enter the butterfly wing. The new Hume comprises 38,677 voters from Macarthur and 41,821 from old Hume. Just 1600 voters the other way and the new seat would have been called Macarthur and Fahey would be out of strife. As it is, he will have a damaging (even if ultimately successful) battle to oust Schultz from Hume. If Fahey loses pre-selection in Hume (unlikely) or loses the seat through Schultz spoiling as an independent he will feel like indigenous Fijians in 1999 – cheated and with nowhere to go. A German party-list system added to the single-member constituencies would have seen Fahey stay in notionally Labor Macarthur and pick up a party seat if he lost it.
The Fahey situation is unusual in Australia. In PNG it is normal. Once again an electoral system imposed at independence with the best will has caused chaos. Tick a box by one candidate was thought to be the easiest and best system. But most seats are contested by a dozen or more candidate. People can win with just 10 per cent of the vote. Up to half of PNG’s MPs lose their seats each election. The small number of votes needed to won a seat engenders big-man, local politics, pork-barreling and bribery. A strong party system has not developed and fluid majorities cause instability. The same system in Britain, on the other hand, has delivered strong majority government (often excessive) for decades.
A small thing like an electoral system (or a butterfly wing flap in Peru) can spell chaos or at least vastly different fates for countries, parties and individuals.
The most important lesson is that if chaos is engendered by an electoral system it should be changed (as the chaotic Australian Senate system was in 1948) and changes should tend towards diluting power, not concentrating it.