We have a mixed system in our federal parliament. We have a lower house made up of 150 preferential, winner-takes-all electorates, and an upper house of multi-member electorates for each state and territory elected Hare–Clark proportional representation.
My topic of discussion today is whether we would benefit from altering the lower house, and what way would you alter it (or not).
I’m personally not a fan of making the lower house as proportional as the upper house, as many government functions are legislated to be controlled by government ministers, which necessitates the lower house forming a governing coalition. This is made much harder under high levels of proportional representation (see Tasmania & many european countries).
I’m only not a fan because I think the general public doesn’t like seeing slow moving government. I actually think it’s fine.
However, I personally think a pragmatic change would be to increase the lower house MPs by 50% from 150 to 225, and then have 75 electorates of 3 members each.
This way, you retain the local representation, while removing “safe” seats that parties ignore, as it’s likely at least one member is in doubt every election.
Keen to hear people’s ideas, and pet proposals.
(Note, I am not a political scholar so won’t have used the most correct jargon.)
I would love to see proportional representation in the lower house. The answer on how to solve issues with democracy usually are solved by adding more democracy.
Last election, the Nationals received only 3.6% of the popular vote. Despite this low vote, it won 10 seats, and that’s because Nationals voters are highly concentrated in a few low population rural seats, where there are fewer people controlling larger portions of land.
The Greens, by contrast, won 12% of the popular vote but only won 4 lower house seats. That’s because Greens voters, although most heavily concentrated in inner-urban seats, and are much more uniformly spread across the country.
To put it another way, Nationals won 52,000 votes per seat as compared to 448,000 votes per seat for the Greens.
Is that reflective of strong democratic values? I don’t think it is. Our current system is treating country voters as 10 times more valuable than inner urban voters.
Would you also remove the upper house. Otherwise what is the purpose of the upper house if it’s elected identically?
Yes. The upper house is supposed to be proportional and yet it suffers from the same unbalanced outcomes. Each state currently has the same number of senators despite population differences. This results in smaller states being overrepresented while larger states are underrepresented. Both Tassie and Victoria have 12 senators, yet a Tasmanian senator represents ~34,000 voters, while a Vic senator represents ~380,000, once again making a lightly populated state’s vote ten times more valuable than a heavily populated one.
Can agree with you on that point. Seems like a hangover from federation that the smaller states receive more representation.
Doesn’t really make sense in our modern, highly interconnected world to have some states have better representation per capita than others.
I think a unicameral system would not be popular in Australia though, because you’d largely remove local members (unless you switch to something like what NZ has, but with preferential voting for the local candidates). Hence why I advocate for local multi-member electorates in the lower house to improve representation of more parties, and retaining the senate.
Thanks for sharing your thoughts friend!
One change that could be good would be having two members per electorate rather than one; that would allow voters who were not in the majority to feel represented. Though that would work better in a system with more than two parties, so that you don’t have a stalemate with an equal number of centre-left and centre-right MPs.
I think under a preferential system people are free to preference who they actually prefer. I think the biggest reason we are the centre major parties (Labor and the LNP) is because we have single member, winner takes all elections. Meaning even if the 2PP (2-party-preferred) vote is 51% vs 49%, the winning candidate gets 100% of the control of that seat.
In the current climate where 2PP isn’t always Labor vs LNP in every seat, I think you would see many seats have a different mix to each other.
Out of curiosity, would you propose halving the number of electorates, or doubling the number of MPs to achieve 2 member electorates?
True; we’d get some Labor/Greens seats in inner-city areas, some conservative areas where the Coalition split it among themselves, some Tory/cooker seats elsewhere, and possibly other combinations. It may force the big parties to the centre to harvest the vote of those who don’t think that the Greens or One Nation represent them.
The Australian system currently has unusually many constituents per MP, so I’d double the number of MPs.
If I were designing a representative democracy from the ground up, I would have only one house with full proportional representation. I’m not compelled by any of the arguments I’ve seen in favour of multiple systems side by side like we currently have, they generally seem to sacrifice democracy in favour of convenience or “stability”
I’m strongly of the opinion that “government” as applied in the Australian political system (ie, cabinet) should not be a single party, but nominees collectively agreed by parliament (assuming ministers are necessary).
Going from where we are now, the lower house needs to change. Multi member electorates would be great. Otherwise, the smallest meaningful step we could take would be transitioning to a Condorcet method of counting lower house votes. That wouldn’t even require us to change the ballots!
