Draft:Proportional Representation - Party List would create a different political culture in Australia

"Proportional Representation - Party List would create a different political culture in Australia".

The Westminster legacy in Australia is based on Single Member Districts. What that means currently: in many seats the Member does NOT represent the majority - and the minority is often NOT represented by the Opposite party either. And the national or state majority is often not even represented by the Government! It is also doubtful to claim that a local MP represents all voters in an electoral district while the adversity of the major parties is on display daily! Overall, the Single Member District system, inherited from the UK, results essentially in a two-party adversarial system. Minor parties and Independents usually won't be elected. Independents mostly emerge by breaking away from a major party - only AFTER they have gained recognition as an effective politician. Even the Greens, receiving between 9% and 14%, have only had two MPs in the Federal Parliament: Michael Organ and Adam Bandt, separately (until the 2022 federal election, when they gained four seats in the lower house). Clearly, the desire for the representation of diversity has grown steadily. Judith Brett found that "Since the 1990s the number of seats decided by preferences has increased markedly. Thirty-one in 1983, sixty-three in 1993, eighty-seven in 2001, in 2016 an astonishing 102 out of 150 seats." (1). In 2019 only 18 seats out of 151 seats were declared on first preferences! A report on first preference percentages tells a similar story: Coalition 41.44%, ALP 33.34%, Greens 10.40%. Neither major party has an overall mandate. The political establishment is still divided into Government and Opposition in spite of the National Cabinet to meet the Coronavirus crisis. Soon the adversaries will blame each other again for not being able to govern the country. Much energy will again be spent on criticising each other, on fault finding. The new ALP leader Anthony Albanese has initially adopted a different approach in that he has dropped the combative style on a number of occasions and has advised his front bench to do likewise. This may be seen by some as undesirable compromise, but Albanese has indicated that, while his party disagrees with most of the Coalition's precent draft legislation, there is little point in drawn-out combat. Really, the ALP should start campaigning on PR - Party List! Australians are looking for new and bold policy from the ALP but only very recently, in his reply to the budget speech (October 2020) has the Opposition leader shown that he is ready to tackle real policy weakness in that Budget. But Labor will have to open up the Pandora Box of opportunities to reconstruct the Australian political and constitutional system. In Albanese and Labor ready for that? Is it ready to move beyond the traditional Labor policy concerns?

The massive loss in trust in the political system and politicians in Australia over the last decade has been well established by the research of three academics of the University of Canberra. They found that "Australians' trust in politicians and democracy was at an all-time low". Part of the abstract reads: "Australia is currently experiencing a culture shift from an allegiant to a divergent democratic culture (Dalton & Welzel 2014), with an increasing number of citizens searching for a new politics to represent their values and defend their material needs and aspirations for the future. This chapter draws on data derived from a national survey of 1021 Australians in July 2018 that sought to explore the relationship between trust in the political system and attitudes towards democracy. We understand political trust as a relational concept that is about ‘keeping promises and agreements’ (Hetherington 20015: 1). This is in keeping with the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s definition of trust as ‘holding a positive perception about the actions of an individual or an organization’ (OECD 2017: 16). The survey questions were designed by the authors and included some questions that previously had been asked of similar samples in 2014 and 2016, allowing for time series analysis (see Evans, Halupka & Stoker 2014; Evans & Stoker 2016; Stoker et al. 2017). "

But why is it so? This question is rarely put. It is the adversarial parliamentary culture, inherited from the UK system, that produces constant antagonism. Australia could drop all of this Westminster baggage, specially its Single Member District system, which is the principal cause of that combative culture. But there are more major problems than the questionable majority and undemocratic representation; Green values and objectives are clearly diminished, even blocked by representatives of this system. The current plan of the Morrison Government is now to remove environmental issues to the states, away from the federal Government. Surely this is a major retrograde step Australia can do without. There are still other governance system problems. The Constitution is an archaic document. Federation is a costly, often dysfunctional form of state, actually preventing effective decentralisation. It has been a major obstacle during the pandemic.The requirement that Ministers need to be selected from these elected MPs from the victorious party only, a very small pool, instead of attracting them from the entire society. This is a severely negative practice. The result is ministerial amateurism, regularly on display especially at the federal level but increasingly also in the state of NSW. Furthermore, the claim, often heard, that the Westminster system guarantees the separation of the legislature, political executive and judiciary is quite incorrect. The Government sits in the Parliament and completely dominates the legislature. The conservative MP Edmond Burke defended this as a useful "buckle" but both the Americans and virtually all European systems never accepted that view. Australia should do away with this practice. It reduces the power of the legislature significantly. Simply put, we can do much better. Furthermore, at election time "pork barrelling" is the norm, another gross consequence the SMD electoral system. This is poor economic management. It involves much misuse of public funds. The dominant electoral system of Australia altogether generates the potential for corruption by donations from the major parties. The state of NSW has again demonstrated recently, and in the earlier ALP Government, the capacity for corruption, practiced by both major parties. Pork barrelling has been rampant during 2021 and 2022 and when it came to exposed the former NSW Premier, Ms Berejiklean declared that "everyone was doing it". What about branch stacking? It is also unknown in proportional election systems.

For all the lower houses, except Tasmania, the SMD electoral system strongly favours the two-party dominance. In contrast, in the 89 countries that have proportional representation - party list in the world, based on multi-member electorates, this problem does not exist. So, which are the parties here that favour proportional representation? Not the major parties! Could the ABC start educational programs that enlighten the public about democratic electoral systems? Neither parties, nor voters seem to know much about it. Is education about this also not a function of the Australian Electoral Commission? Does this Commission realise that PR - Party List is used in 89 other countries? Is it perhaps time to introduce Government as a regular subject in high schools?

The adversarial culture and language suggest there are only two sides of politics: rich and poor, capitalist and socialist, right and left. In other words, class politics is the norm. Parliamentary debate in Australia always reverts to that - as does "industrial relations". There is no democratic framework for industrial democracy to emerge as is common in most European countries. Australia is claimed to be an egalitarian society. Clearly, this is more an ambition or dream than reality. Income inequalities have grown dramatically in the neo-liberal period. In reality political life in multicultural Australia is far more diverse than that, increasingly so, but not expressed in diverse representation at all. However, the growing diversities still have to be sub-ordinated to the economic class image. There are other peculiarities. Politicians who are excellent Opposition leaders are often not suited to be good Prime Ministers. Abbott was a sad example of this. In foreign relations the Opposition leaders usually play a role - often much to the puzzlement of the foreigners; shadow PMs are travelling around globally as formal alternatives it seems.

The concept of ”multiculturalism” is often bandied about mainly for political purposes of the Anglo-dominated major parties. The representation of multi-cultural Australia in parliaments, governments, the upper echelons of the corporate sector, the judiciary, the public services, the universities, the police, is still grossly inadequate as a recent University of Sydney study has again demonstrated. https://www.humanrights.gov.au/our-work/race-discrimination/publications/leading-change-blueprint-cultural-diversity-and-0.

Often the effective Government is in reality the dominant faction of a major party in Government. Thus, this group may represent no more than about 30% of the electorate. Here too the recent failure of Turnbull as PM is a typical example. It was mostly due to the fact that he represented the minority Coalition faction. When an MP resigns or needs to resign on account of ill-health or family circumstances or dual citizenship issues, as in 2017/18, an expensive by-election has to be held. In stark contrast, in a PR system, the candidate who just missed out on the Party list at the most recent election, would be the automatic replacement. Inexpensive and logical!.

Australia needs to move away from this archaic SMD system but neither major party seems interested in pursuing that course. They seem to have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo. This system is still used particularly in some English-speaking countries: Australia, the UK, the US and Canada. If the Brexit disaster is anything to go by the Westminster system in the UK has little to offer that country either. Major renewal: Proportional Representation - Open Party List In Australia the SMD system was somewhat improved by the introduction of preferencing in 1918, made compulsory in 1924. This overcame the (winner-take-all), whereby seats can be won on quite small minority votes. Hence the "Australian vote" seemed attractive as a somewhat superior alternative. A recent referendum, initiated by the LibDems held in the UK to achieve that, failed. Unbelievably, the reformers did not look across the Channel where PR - Party list is common! Strangely, similar movements are now happening in the US and Canada, referred to as "rank voting" or "fair voting". However, a REAL improvement has happened in New Zealand when it held a Royal Commission into the voting system, in the mid 1980s, which recommended Proportional Representation - Party List with two votes, one national and one local (known as Mixed Member Proportional). That is proportional system similar to what is used in Germany, a major improvement indeed. It was first used in the 1996 election. It is encouraging that in recent years a movement favouring PR in the UK has gained ground. Its name is Make Votes Matteer/Sort The System).

Australia uses the Hare-Clark system for the Senate, Tasmania, ACT and the NSW Legislative Council. It is also based on multi-member districts. Hare-Clark was introduced first in Tasmania in 1907 and in the Senate in 1949. That system is used in very few countries. It requires extensive preferencing across candidates as well as parties, a serious drawback in large assemblies and modern states. Voters soon had major problems with the extensive preferencing. In 1983 the Senate system was changed in that "above the line" and "under the line" options were offered. Not surprisingly, 90% of voters opted for "above the line". However, the system was conducive to "gaming" by parties - about which the voting public knew little. A half-baked reform was introduced in 2016 which still requires 6 or 12 compulsory preferences to be made, making it possible for some Senators to be elected on very small primary votes. The Hare-Clark system is simply not suited to achieve fair and democratic proportional representation in modern societies operating with large modern parties. In the 2019 NSW Legislative Council election, also using Hare-Clark, only 2% of the voters voted below the line. Surely, the message should be obvious.

The superior remedy is introducing Proportional Representation - Open Party List. Voters have just one vote and can choose one (only) candidate from among several parties. Essentially a quota must be achieved by any party candidate, the total number of votes divided by the number of seats. A party that gains say 10 times the quota will be represented by 10 of its candidates. In most cases a party - or Independent - needs to achieve an entry threshold to gain representation: usually 3% - 5% of the total vote. This prevents too large a number of parties participating in the election. In the Open Party List System voters can select any candidate on the party's list they prefer. In the Closed system voters accept the rank order decided by the particular party they favour - mostly they'll vote for the number one on the list. If after the election an MP resigns, the one next on the list during the election will automatically be elected. There are no by-elections. There is no pork-barrelling either. A country won't end up with minority Government. What is Australia waiting for? What is the Australian Electoral Commission doing? To say that it is an effective administrator of the existing system is not enough! It is the quality of the system itself that is at stake here. The voters in a PR - PL country are democratically represented. After the election the larger parties will negotiate with smaller parties to form Government. There is no official Opposition, MPs are not positioned in Parliament in the Westminster style - opposite to each other. Furthermore, the Government is generally NOT part of the legislature. Some Ministers may sit in the legislature when draft legislation is discussed but they have no vote, are not members of the legislature, do not shout at their shadow opposites on the other side of the chamber. Above all, this is a system that results in Governments representing the broad centre of society. Also, the culture of this system is achieving effective Coalition Government as well as majority Government. This always requires a search for cooperation; that can take time sometimes. Whilst the negotiations are happening there is a caretaker Government in office until agreement has been reached. Researching a number of countries, the Brit Brett Hennig in his 2017 book The End of Politicians (23 found that the Dutch generally end up with the most proportionally elected parliament of all. Not surprisingly the Dutch-American political scientist Arend Lijphart is also mentioned there as the most convincing advocate of the system (4). A final comment here: we cannot do without representatives really. What we can do is ensure proper, diverse representation; and ensuring that we have competent, ethically reliable Ministers.

The Senate's electoral system problems need to be resolved in conjunction with those of the House of Representatives. Before dealing with the consequences of the 2016 electoral act amendments and the Double Dissolution election that followed a number of relevant constitutional conditions need to be explained. Australia was turned into a colonial federation in 1901 which provided the six states with equal representation in the Senate, presented as a "States House". At the time this made sense as it was a condition of the less populous states that they should have equal power with the other two, NSW and Victoria. However, over time the eastern states' populations grew much faster than the others. In 2018 about 60% of the total population of Australia live in NSW and Victoria. Secondly, already by 1910 it was obvious that the major party loyalty of voters and of Senators was much stronger than the state affiliation of the Senators. By that year a two-party system was already in existence, a loyalty that continued to grow. The reason for that was that the House of Representatives had developed on the basis of the traditional Westminster inherited Single-Member-District electoral system favouring a two-party adversarial class culture. This gradually turned into a larger problem in that it became increasingly difficult to amend the Constitution because referendum proposals required both a national majority as well as "a majority in a majority of the states" - meaning four out of the six (section 128). A further constitutional requirement was that only half the Senators would be up for election every three years. In the normal run of affairs Senators hold office for six years, except after a Double Dissolution. This means that half of the Senators are elected in circumstances which could be quite different from those three years later, including the composition of the House of Representatives and the Government itself. These three aspects are directly related to the lack of constitutional change. In addition, only politicians can initiate constitutional amendment proposals, obviously a serious additional limitation in itself and even more so in the adversarial two-party environment. The case for constitutional overhaul is powerful indeed! Furthermore, in 1949 the Australia Labour Party introduced the Hare-Clark system of Proportional Representation for the Senate, just prior to the 1949 federal election. The incoming Liberal Party PM, Robert Menzies claimed that they had done this to frustrate the incoming Coalition Government from governing. Certainly, after that change the Senate has frequently been an obstacle in the way of major parties' implementing their policy platform and programs, both Liberal and Labor. The Senate powers are undoubtedly significant in that it can block legislation passed by the House of Representatives. Various efforts to dilute or diminish these powers, again by both Liberal as well as Labor Governments, have been unsuccessful. However, one can add that nevertheless the Senate has often been a more representative legislative chamber than the House of Representatives; this is so because smaller parties and Independents have been able to gain minority representation in that chamber as a result of the proportional electoral system, e.g. the D. L. P., Australia Party, Australian Democrats, the Greens, Xenophon group and One Nation. The Hare-Clark system (also known as Single-Transferable-Vote or STV), is based on multi-member electorates (the Senate, 6 or 12); voters are required to engage in preferencing parties and candidates, originally compulsorily. However, there are problems with this system. Basically, it is more suitable for small assemblies, where voters have a reasonably good knowledge of the parties and candidates participating in the election, in contrast to large national elections. Therefore, in 1983 the Federal government divided the Senate ballot paper in "above the line" and "under the line" options. Voters clearly preferred to use the "above the line" option, by well over 90%. However, parties still had to complete Group Voting Tickets (GVT) which indicated how they would rank their preferences as groups to each other. This practice resulted in what came to be known as "gaming", enabling several smaller parties to combine to reach quotas and be elected.In 2016 the Turnbull Government, following a rather hastily organised public inquiry, produced an amendment to the Electoral Act which sought to eliminate the "gaming", but maintained more limited options for preferencing. The change resulted from recommendations from an Inquiry by the Joint Standing Committee on Electoral Matters (JSCEM) into the 2013 federal election. That Committee is entirely dominated by the major party politicians. The purpose was said to be to reduce the high number of candidates being elected to the Senate from small and unknown parties on very low first preference votes. Further details about this change can be found on the Internet, Parliament of Australia: aph.gov.au. There is view that PR - Party List would require a constitutional change, hence a referendum. (5). However, a careful reading of the Constitution does not support that. In fact, there are several clauses in the Constitution which state that the Parliament will decide on electoral systems. This is in fact what happened, in 1918 and 1924. No less than 66 political parties were registered in 2016, similar to 2013, not counting the separately registered state branches of the larger parties and some smaller ones as well. If there is one thing that speaks from this enormous interest in participating in parliamentary elections it is that the major parties are on the decline and the people want reform.

Concluding comments:

Clearly, there are major problems with Australia's electoral systems both in the House Representatives and in the Senate. Reforms need to be tackled jointly. Proportional representation - Party List is the superior system for larger societies. It is not something to be invented but reformers do need to look beyond English-speaking countries. Undoubtedly reformers need to consider major Constitutional reform as well (6 & 7). Australia's political system needs a MAJOR overhaul. This won't come from the Coalition but there is nothing in the National Policy document of the ALP either that points in that direction. Strangely, the Greens who actually favour Proportionally Representation, have done very little to bring it about. It would make perfect sense for them to educate the public and start a campaign on it. There is a common criticism of Proportional Representation - Party List, in Australia and the UK, that it results in instability. Critics tend to refer to a few examples, like Belgium, Italy, Spain, sometimes Israel as well. The criticism also refers to the time it can take before an electoral coalition is formed after an election. We should remember that this is actually a temporary problem. Of the 89 countries it can be said that more than 80 did not have any serious problems. Italy reverted to using Proportional Representation after five years experiment with the British first-past-the-post system. The principal advantages are a shift to a different political culture, from adversarial to cooperative, no more pork-barrelling, branch-stacking, no by-elections, more diverse representation, including for women, improvement of democratic representation and majority government. I rest my case. Frankly, it is difficult to overpromote it.

The next federal election is likely to be held in May 2022. Currently, the ALP is slightly ahead in the polls but both major parties are not in a strong position with primary votes in the low 30% range. Several Independent candidates, mainly those who have divorced themselves from the governing Liberal/National party coalition, are expected to do quite well. The Greens are expected to do well and could gain some seats on the basis of a large number of preferential votes. In 2019 they gained more than 20% of primary votes in nine seats. It is conceivable that the ALP could end up forming a minority Government, relying on the support of Greens and Independent MPs. Such a result could be the beginning of major, and long overdue, governance reforms in Australia..

References:

(1) Brett, Judith (2018) - From secret ballot to democracy sausage, Text Publishing, Melbourne

(2) Evans, M., Halupka, M and Stoker, G. (2018) - Trust and Democracy in Australia, Institute for Governance and Policy Analysis, Canberra University.

(3) Hennig, Brett (2017) - The End of Politicians - Time for a Real Democracy, Unbound

(4) Lijphart, Arend (2012) - Patterns of Democracy: Government Forms and Performance in Thirty-six countries, Second edition, Yale University Press, New Haven

(5) Muller, Damien (2018) - "The new Senate Voting system and the 2016 election"

(6) Woldring, Klaas (2018) - YES, we can........rewrite the Australian Constitution, BookPod, Melbourne

7) Woldring, Klaas (2020) - How to improve Australia's Democracy - Break the Vicious Cycle, BookPod/Amazon.

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Klaas Woldring, Ph. D. A/Prof. Southern Cross University (ret), Pearl Beach, NSW Ph. 02 4341 5170 Email: klaas.woldring@bigpond.com.