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A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE SOCIETY AND ITS
PURPOSE
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INTRODUCTION: The movement
in Australia
began; most strongly in South Australia,
Tasmania
and Victoria;
in the late 1800s. Vote counting in public elections
then, and up till 1919, was, except for Tasmania, by highly unsatisfactory
relative majority (first-past-the-post, or plurality)
procedures in single member, two-member or multi-member electoral districts.
From 1919 plurality systems were replaced by majority-preferential systems,
but Queensland's Legislative Assembly
retained a plurality system until the 1940s, and that still applies to some
municipalities there. Western Australia has,
most unfortunately, revived plurality counting for municipal polls. In the
1930s, South Australia became the last
mainland State to discontinue multi-member Assembly districts.
Where there was plurality
counting with more than one vacancy per electoral district, plumping (not
voting for all vacancies), allowed, in a haphazard way, some minority voice,
as it still does in many of the electorates of the world's oldest
continuously operating legislative assembly, the House of Keys on the Isle of Man. Plumping
was, however, often arbitrarily prohibited in Australian electoral systems,
and it was not allowed at pre-1919 Senate elections.
Hoag & Hallett's classic 1926 U.S. book "Proportional
Representation" has a good account of the foundation of early PR
history in Australia. The earliest
precursor date mentioned is the year after Governor Phillip's landing at
Sydney Cove. See electoral
system categories, and a summary of
current systems for public
elections in Australia . Australia's
electoral history has been generally progressive despite regressive
tendencies in ballot-paper design. Tasmania
and the Australian Capital Territory have
been the most progressive and, as shown below, have resisted those regressive
tendencies.
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UNITED KINGDOM : Our fellow society in the UK, under its original name of the
Proportional Representation Society of Great Britain and Ireland,
was founded
in 1884. It promoted the ideas of John Stuart Mill, and of Thomas
Wright Hill, whose "schoolboy
election" in the 1820s is a classic simple demonstration of the
principles of the Single Transferable Vote or quota-preferential
proportional representation, as it is known in Australia to distinguish
it from Australia's use of STV with majority-preferential counting, in
both single-member districts, and also multi-member districts as
unfortunately used for the Senate from 1919-46, and for a few years after the
Liberal Party Government of Victoria revived it in the early 1990s for
municipal elections.
The
PRSGB&I was the first society in the world that promoted the earliest forms
of the quota-preferential system of proportional representation allowing direct election
of individual candidates, which does not take place under the inferior
proportional systems known as party list systems, which have become the
predominant electoral systems for lower houses in continental Europe. The
first two words in its title changed to 'Electoral
Reform' in 1958. It published its history 'The Best System' [1],
in 1984. Its distinguished presidents have included the fourth and the fifth
Earls Grey (see its 1922 Council), and in
the 1980s the Hon. Dr Garret FitzGerald while Prime Minister of Eire. Its
president was, until his death in October 2004, Professor
the Earl Russell, a great grandson of the former Whig Prime Minister,
Lord John Russell, whose 1832
Reform Bill set the foundation
for representation of the general public in the House of Commons and, by
example, in other parliaments in the then British Empire.
It influenced the founding of Australian PR societies and
helped them by sending its Secretary, John
Humphreys, to Tasmania during World War I where his evidence [1]
to a Select Committee of Tasmania's Parliament helped defeat a proposed
change from the Hare-Clark
system of quota-preferential
proportional representation to a party list system, and also led to
Tasmania's Electoral Act 1918, which prescribed countback - the filling of casual vacancies in
the House of Assembly by the Electoral Office by re-examination of the
ballot-papers that formed the vacating member's quota. It ensures that
all MPs are directly elected. In 1948 the PRSGB&I
advised Australia 's Attorney-General on his
Bill for proportional representation for elections for the Australian Senate,
which began the Senate's still-prevailing PR system. The ERS works for, as
does the PRSA, quota-preferential PR, which they call the Single
Transferable Vote. STV now applies in Northern
Ireland for its Assembly and for elections to the European Parliament,
although sadly, despite strong opposition in the
House of Lords, elections in the rest of the United Kingdom to the
European Parliament are by a closed
party list system. In the mid-1980s, the UK's Social Democrat Party
produced an inspirational 10-minute
VHS video of John Cleese advocating
proportional representation for electing the House of Commons.
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United Kingdom Local
Government: From the first
establishment of local government in England, when William the Conqueror
granted a charter to the City
of London in 1067 until the passage of the Municipal
Corporations Act 1835, which introduced widespread election by
ratepayers, English municipal councils were not elected by the
citizens, but were self-perpetuating oligarchies with vacancies filled by the
council itself. Quota-preferential PR is still not used for used for local
government elections in England , but is used in Northern
Ireland, and the Republic
of Ireland, and is being considered
for Scotland
and Wales
.
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SOUTH
AUSTRALIA: Catherine Helen Spence's 1861 booklet, 'A Plea for Pure
Democracy' [2]
helped the early formation of a proportional
representation group called the 'Effective Voting League of South Australia'. Miss Spence
was the first female candidate at a public
election in the then British Empire when she
stood unsuccessfully at the 1897 election
(under the unfair first-past-the-post
multiple vote) for the 1897Australasian
Federal Convention.
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A statue
in Light Square
in Adelaide,
unveiled on 10th March
1986 by Her Majesty the Queen, commemorates Miss
Spence. The PRSA later launched its reprint of her booklet there. She is
remembered by her Autobiography,
and was depicted on the Australian $5 banknote
issued for the Centenary of Federation, in 2001. The PRSA's SA Branch (the Electoral Reform Society of South
Australia) influenced the replacement of the first party
list system used, briefly, for Australian parliamentary elections,
introduced by the Dunstan Labor Government in 1973, by direct election
using the present quota-preferential form of proportional representation that
the SA Electoral
Act 1985 prescribes for elections for SA's
Legislative Council. The SA
Constitution Act 1934 requires a referendum before either House can
be abolished, but it does not specify or entrench the electoral system, and
that oversight should be remedied.
South Australian
Local Government: Catherine Spence
recorded, in Chapter III of her Autobiography, her
witnessing, by an early form of PR in 1840, Adelaide
City Council's first election, as her father was the Town Clerk. It was
the world's
first public election conducted by PR, and Australia 's first public election, and was preceded by the
enactment, for the first time in the world, of a law for a PR electoral
system, a South Australian Act entitled an Act to Institute a Municipal Corporation for the City of Adelaid e. That Act resulted from a recommendation in the
Third Annual Report of the Colonization Commissioners for
South Australia, 1839 that the
election of the soon-to-be-created Adelaide City Council should be by a
proportional electoral system. That report was signed by all nine
commissioners, but was almost certainly drafted by the Secretary of the
Commission, Rowland Hill.
The PRSA's SA Branch successfully helped persuade the Olsen
Liberal Government when it enacted the Local
Government (Elections) Act 1999 to make quota-preferential
proportional representation the only electoral system to be used in
multi-member elections for local government in South Australia. Unfortunately
municipalities can be divided into single-member
and two-member wards, as in Victoria, and
there is no prohibition of an even number of councillors
per ward. Two-member wards are rather common, although Adelaide
and various rural councils are not divided into wards. Casual vacancies are
filled by-election polls (not countback). The
same faulty unweighted inclusive Gregory transfer
method used for transferring votes, by averaging, as is used in Senate scrutinies, applies. With
partial optional preferential voting applying, voters must mark, for a
valid vote, as many preferences as there are vacancies - it is optional after
that number. General elections are held every four years, with polls
being conducted by postal ballot.
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TASMANIA: Tasmania's
Attorney-General,
in the 1890s, Hon. Andrew Inglis Clark, who sat on the four-member committee of
the 1891 National Australasian Convention (see P. 588
of debates) [3]
that, on the S.S. Lucinda, drafted a Bill to Constitute the Commonwealth
of Australia, which was adopted by that Convention, spoke about
proportional representation (PR) then. Mr Clark did
not stand for election to the 1897
Australasian Federal Convention, but a Tasmanian Delegate, Matthew Clarke
MHA, spoke
there there in support of the Hare system,
which Tasmania's Hare-Clark
electoral system is based on. Tasmanian PRSA members are members of the Proportional
Representation Society of Australia (Victoria-Tasmania) Inc.
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Start of Hare-Clark:
Andrew Clark
achieved legislation for PR elections, with Hare-Clark's Single
Transferable Vote, for part of Tasmania 's
House of Assembly in 1896.
Under the Electoral Act 1907 (7 Edw. VI No. 6), Tasmania became Australia
's first parliament to use quota-preferential proportional
representation to fill all seats in one of its houses, and it has used it continuously
since then. See the official report of the first state-wide Hare-Clark
election in 1909. That Act also substituted majority-preferential voting
for the first-past-the-post voting used until then for the
single-member electorates that have always been used for the Legislative
Council. Tasmania thus also has the longest
record, among Australian parliaments, of continuous use of preferential
voting in single-member electorates. Tasmania's
Liberal Government in 1985 enacted the first consolidation of Tasmania 's electoral
laws since the Electoral Act 1907 in the Electoral Act 1985
(No. 46 of 1985) with unanimous parliamentary support. That Act has now been
replaced, again with unanimous support, by the Electoral
Act 2004 (No. 51 of 2004). The Act is administered by the Tasmanian Electoral Commission.
Section 231 specifies countback.
Countback, and the Defence and Spread of Hare-Clark:
Hare-Clark, improved by countback in 1918, for the filling of casual
vacancies, after the evidence given by John Humphreys in successfully opposing
a retrograde Labor Party proposal to replace Hare-Clark with a party
list system, (see
"UNITED KINGDOM" section above), is Australia's
longest-established electoral system. Hare-Clark so impressed Sir Gerald (later
Lord) Strickland, Governor of Tasmania from 1904-09, that he later, as
Prime Minister of Malta from 1927-34, successfully promoted it for the
election of Malta's MPs. Tasmania, unlike Malta [66(2)],
Eire
(Article 16.2), and the A.C.T.,
has unfortunately not yet protected its PR system by constitutional
entrenchment.
Recognizing that
Number of Vacancies to Fill Should be an Odd Number: In 1958, a
Tasmanian political scientist, Dr George Howatt, wrote his classic PR paper "Democratic
Representation under the Hare-Clark System - The Need for Seven-Member
Electorates", which the Government tabled in the House of
Assembly in support of its Bill that succeeded in correcting the flaw in the
original Hare-Clark system of having an even
number of seats per electorate, rather than an uneven number, to ensure a majority outcome
in any electorate where a party gained a majority vote, by changing the
number of MHAs per electorate from the original
number, six, to the recommended
uneven number, seven.
Avoiding Regimentation
of Voters: Dr Howatt's 1979 report,
similarly tabled, "Voting
- By Party Direction or Free Choice" was another PR classic.
Fortunately, Tasmania's
Parliament heeded its warning against the regimented ballot-paper
style that has developed for Senate elections. Tasmania has never had
that legislatively-enabled regimentation,
and the results of its freedom from that imposition can be seen by comparing
the relatively even concentration of first preference votes on individual
candidates in Tasmania's
Hare-Clark with the stage-managed skewed concentration on a tiny few
evident with Senate
outcomes. Tasmania 's unskewed spread ensures that
the larger parties do not unfairly reduce their own electoral prospects, as
can be seen for elections, like those for each of Australia 's six mainland Upper
Houses, where
Group Voting Tickets facilitate voters' regimentation. Unlike the Senate
system, Tasmanian Hare-Clark has never required voters to mark more
preferences than the number of vacancies and, as Dame Enid
Lyons pointed out in the 1948 debates on PR for the Senate, that has not
resulted in a high or unacceptable incidence of
exhausted votes. Group Voting Tickets were introduced for Senate
elections ostensibly to reduce the incidence of exhausted votes, but a much
more reasonable way to reduce them would be to adopt partial optional
preferential voting as Tasmania
's record shows.
Tasmania
has avoided adopting the Group Voting
Tickets that are now used for elections to the Senate, and the SA,
NSW, and WA Legislative Councils. That system has managed to persuade a large
majority of voters for those houses to take the relatively easy course of abandoning
individual consideration of the relative merits of a party's candidates, and
instead accepting the preference order for their party's candidates, and all
other candidates, decided by their party, which is generally not made very
evident to voters, and register an above-the-line vote.
Robson Rotation: A key part of
Tasmania's Electoral Act 2004, Robson
Rotation, is specified in Sections 97
and 98
and Schedule
3. It requires ballot-papers to be printed in different
batches, of equal size, so that candidates' names have an equal incidence
of appearance in prescribed positions down the columns. Applying also to
polls in the single-member Upper House electorates, it disarms organized
'tickets', and neutralizes the unintended effects of 'donkey voting'. Former Tasmanian MHA, Hon.
Neil Robson, now a PRSA Honorary Life Member, initiated it in 1979.
The 1992 Tasmanian book "Hare-Clark in Tasmania", by Terry Newman,
describes Robson
Rotation well.
Prior to the 1976 Assembly election, the order of candidates' surnames in
party columns on the ballot-paper was alphabetical. Tasmania's high incidence
of MPs with surnames like Abbott, Adams,
Agnew, Amos, Anderson, Batt etc. had started to
remind Tasmanians of the ALP's notorious four A's ploy in the
1937 Senate election in NSW, which led to the Menzies
Government in 1940 introducing the present listing of Senate candidates'
names by mutual consent (effectively by party decision). Tasmania's first
change from an alphabetical list of candidates' names in the party columns
was fortunately not to adopt that party machine concession,
but rather to make the order set by lot,
but that was in force for the 1976 and 1979 elections only, as circumstances resulted
in the adoption of Robson Rotation in 1979. Unlike the mainland States, where
electors in State lower house elections had only one candidate from each
party to choose from, the existence of multi-member electorates, with casual
vacancies filled by countback since 1918,
meant that parties normally stood more candidates than the number of seats
they expected to win, thus giving Tasmania's voters a wide choice of
candidates within each party. How-to-vote cards listing a party's candidates
in a particular recommended order were not used in Tasmanian Assembly
elections, and moves to introduce them were nullified by the introduction of
Robson Rotation.
Constitutional
Entrenchment by Referendum Needed: Tasmania's Constitution
Act 1934 does not prescribe a method for counting votes, or require a
referendum or special majority to alter it, or the electoral system; or even
to abolish either House. Hare-Clark, although very popular, could be
abolished by ordinary legislation. Tasmania
's Constitution Act 1934 ought to specify key Hare-Clark features and
entrench them, so that they can only be removed after a referendum.
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Tasmanian Local Government: The Groom Liberal Government's Local
Government Act 1993 introduced Hare-Clark proportional
representation (Section 299) for all Tasmanian municipalities (PR had
previously applied just to Hobart City Council), with Section 25 invoking
Schedule 3, which specifies the number of councillors
in each municipality, and the number of subdivisions in each municipality if
there are to be any (Schedule 3 has to date shown no municipalities as
being subdivided, but its details may be varied by the Governor on the
Minister's recommendation), and with vacancies filled (Section 307),
Assembly-style, by countback, for all municipal polls. The Act
provided that councillors' terms be for four years,
with the term of as near to practicable half the councillors
ending every two years.
Partial
optional preferential voting applies. As a result of requests from MHAs that had been municipal councillors, ballot-papers
for election of councillors have, since 2002, been
required to be printed using Robson
Rotation by Section
288(2) of the Act, which refers to a prescribed order, and that appears
in Schedule
1 of the Local Government (General) Regulations 2005.
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VICTORIA: As named on an early letterhead, the Proportional Representation League of Victoria's
Secretary, from the late 1800s, was Edward Nanson, Mathematics
Professor at the University
of Melbourne from 1875
to 1922. He persuaded the university to adopt PR, but unfortunately the
University now uses it only for elections to its Committee of Convocation. Also
named is a President of that league, Sir
James Barrett, who was Vice-chancellor
of the University
of Melbourne from
1931-34 and Chancellor from 1934-39. The League's successor, in 1943, was the Proportional Representation Society of
Victoria [renamed Proportional
Representation Society of Australia (Victoria-Tasmania) in 2000,
and incorporated as Proportional
Representation Society of Australia (Victoria-Tasmania) Inc.
in 2006]. It has successfully promoted proportional representation for
elections for the Australian
Conservation Foundation, National Trust
of Australia (Victoria), Anglican
Diocese of Melbourne, ALP Victorian Branch and other
bodies. See details here
of some of PRSAV-T Inc's present and former
members, and here for some AGM Guest Speakers.
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150 Years of Winner-take-all
Periodic Upper House Polls Ended in 2006:
Alfred Deakin, a Victorian MP, later Australia's
second Prime Minister, worked for PR in Victoria's
Colonial Parliament, but failed. The PRSA Election
Analysis of the last, in 2002, of Victoria 's
winner-take-all periodic polls for the retiring half of its
Legislative Council shows the unsatisfactory nature of that system. Victoria led the world when it introduced
the secret ballot
in 1856, which was also the year its Legislative Council:
- first
became a fully-elected house,
- first
occupied its present meeting chamber,
- first
became the upper house of the present bicameral legislature, and
- had
its first - and until 25th
November 2006 - only general election.
That first general election
was counted by a multiple, or bloc,
first-past-the-post method, with subsequent elections
being the filling of single vacancies by a first-past-the-post (plurality)
method until that was
changed to a preferential method in 1921. Victoria 's was the last Australian
bicameral parliament to have neither House elected by proportional
representation. The ornate Legislative
Council chamber was used by the Senate from 1901
until the Federal Parliament was relocated to Canberra in 1927.
Efforts for
Hare-Clark in Victoria
: The PRSAV held a public meeting in 1999 to draw attention to the
Victorian Government's plan to apply PR to Upper House polls. The Constitution
(Proportional Representation) Bill 2000 was improved after countback
amendments by Independent Gippsland East
MLA, Craig Ingram, were accepted by the Bracks ALP
Government, but it still lacked proper Hare-Clark features such as Robson Rotation
and absence of Group Voting Tickets. That apparent acceptance of countback then appeared to be a deceptive feint,
as the eventual amendment of the Constitution
Act 1975 now in force provides, in its Section
27A, for filling of casual vacancies by a joint sitting of the Parliament
by a candidate that is a member of the vacating member's party. Except for
special provisions for replacing independent MLCs,
if any ever get elected, that effectively amounts to party appointment, as
that party can expel any of its members that would accept such an appointment
without the party's approval or effective nomination.
Victoria's
Constitutional Commission: The PRSAV-T made a submission
to the Constitution Commission of Victoria set up to report on the Bill. In
2001 the PRSAV-T brought Hon. Neil Robson, a former Tasmanian minister
administering Tasmania's Electoral Act, and also the instigator of
Tasmania's excellent Robson Rotation
system, to Melbourne for a meeting the three Commissioners agreed to
have with him, and for a public meeting. Section
11 of the Commission's Report foreshadowed future benefit in instituting
Robson Rotation for Legislative Council elections and also for dispensing
with above-the-line voting. In 2002 the Bracks
ALP Government constructively transferred legislative detail on its electoral
systems from the obscurely-named The Constitution Act Amendment Act 1958
to the new Electoral
Act 2002.
Institution
of PR for the Legislative Council: Proclamation of the Royal
Assent to the Constitution
(Parliamentary Reform) Act 2003, which enabled alteration of
Victoria's Constitution
Act 1975 and its Electoral
Act 2002 to require quota-preferential proportional representation
elections for the Legislative Council, appeared in Special
Government Gazette S57 of 8th April 2003. Victoria 's PR
system has impressively reversed a retrograde trend
in Australia, which the Commonwealth began in 1919, to move towards a
requirement that a preference must be indicated for every candidate in a
multi-member electorate in order for a vote to be deemed valid. Tasmania's Hare-Clark system has always had partial
optional preferential voting. On the day the Legislative Assembly that was
elected in 2002 was dissolved, Part 3 of Division 2 of the Constitution
(Parliamentary Reform) Act 2003 became operative and implemented
other provisions needed for the change to PR that also became operative then
and have amended the Constitution Act 1975 and the Electoral Act
2002 to institute PR for the Legislative Council.
Section 36 of the Constitution
(Parliamentary Reform) Act 2003, on that day, operated to insert a
Section 93A into the Electoral
Act 2002, which reversed that trend, and cause Victoria's rule on below-the-line
voting to differ markedly from the Senate below-the-line rule, by
deeming a ballot-paper to be valid provided that the number of preferences
indicated is at least equal to the number of candidates to be elected.
Likewise, Section 42 of the Constitution
(Parliamentary Reform) Act 2003, on that day, operated to insert a
Schedule 1A into the Electoral
Act 2002, which provides for the new form of ballot-paper and
introduces, in its Section
74(3B)(b), a novel aspect to the Legislative Council ballot-papers that
was specifically recommended by the Constitution Commission above, viz. the
printing, to the right of each candidate's name on the ballot-paper, after
the name of that candidate's party (if any) the name of the suburb or
locality at which that candidate is enrolled. The PRSAV-T wrote to all MLAs and MLCs advocating countback, Robson Rotation,
and the omission of the unfortunate Group Voting Tickets
provision, but those aspects did not form part of the Act. The Upper House
Opposition Leader acknowledged the PRSAV-T's advocacy in his
speech (Hansard Page 437) in the House.
The only entrenchment for the PR system to be implemented in 2006 will be the
requirement that an absolute majority of both houses approve any change.
Other PRSAV-T Inc. Work: Evidence of PRSA
permission to incorporate the Rules for
conducting elections by the quota-preferential method from the Society's PR
Manual in Schedule 1 of the Health Services (Community Health Centre
Elections ) Regulations 2001 appeared as Endnote
1 to those regulations, until those PRSA rules were superseded by a
reference to the proportional representation rules in Victoria's Local
Government Act 1989.
The PRSAV-T Inc.
provides a vote-counting
service for organizations, which particularly assists those that
conduct proportional representation polls.
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Victoria 's Local
Government: As proportional
representation elections had not been prescribed for public elections in
Victoria at the time, the forerunners of the Victorian Electoral Commission had no
experience with counting quota-preferential proportional representation
elections then, so the PRSA’s Victorian
Branch assisted the officials counting Victoria 's fortuitous (no explicit
statute) first PR municipal elections for the then City of
Richmond in 1988. When the ALP Government introduced the consolidated Local
Government Act 1989, it continued the traditional 3-year term for all councillors, but added the option of triennial general
elections to the only option that had previously existed in Victoria , which was periodic elections,
where the longest-serving third of the councillors
retired annually. Unfortunately, owing to Coalition amendment in the
Legislative Council, the ALPs PR option was
omitted, so where a municipality used the general election model, with
all three seats in each ward being filled as a group, they were filled by the
winner-take-all multiple majority-preferential method that had
previously been used only by certain municipalities that had chosen not to be
divided into wards. That method had been discredited and superseded
for Senate elections in 1948 by quota-preferential proportional
representation. The method still applies in some municipal elections in the Northern
Territory.
Victorian Liberal MPs have
been slower to support PR than their counterparts in other States and the
ACT, but in 1995 the
Kennett Liberal Government amended the Local Government Act 1989
to prescribe quota-preferential PR election at large for 5 of the 9 seats on
Melbourne City Council, which were filled in 1996. PR in the City of Melbourne has since
regressed, as the Bracks Labor Government
introduced Senate-style
Group Voting Tickets there, although PR casual vacancies are now
filled by countback. The Minister for Local Government
was empowered to apply the Melbourne
model, or PR for all vacancies, to any other Council. For a time that model
was used for the Greater Geelong and Nillumbik Councils.
The PRSAV-T wrote to all of
Victoria's Councils in 2003 advocating Hare-Clark features for the PR
system that is now mandatory for all multi-vacancy polls, as, by the Local Government (Democratic Reform) Act
2003, the Bracks Labor Government amended the Local
Government Act 1989 resulting in its Section
42, which invokes Schedule
3, Part 4A of which provides, for any poll where more than one councillor is to be elected for a ward or electorate,
that quota-preferential proportional representation shall apply, thus
completely discontinuing the previous multiple majority-preferential method (identical to the 1919-46
Senate system), which had lingered until its last use at the 2000
municipal elections. See the example of the 2000
Strathbogie Shire elections, where the
candidate with the second highest number of first preference votes was not
one of the five candidates elected, but where the candidate with the fewest
first preference votes - who would have lost his deposit for failing to
obtain at least 4% of first preference votes had he not been elected - was
the last candidate elected from the nine standing. Unfortunately since then, elections in
that municipality have been held in single-councillor
wards only, so the benefits of PR have not yet reached it. Section
37A of that Act invokes Schedule
3A, under which countback is to be
used to fill casual vacancies following PR polls.
The Kennett Government amended
Victoria's Local
Government Act 1989 in 1997 to allow single-councilllor wards, not just for all of a
municipality's wards, but even for just some of them. Single-councillor wards, which can only give winner-take-all
results, have never applied in any other Australian jurisdiction, or even in Victoria until then.
Their use in a given municipality is now decided by an utterly ad hoc
and rather opaque periodic Representation
Review conducted under Sections
219A-219G of the Local Government Act 1989, and requires formal
ratification by the Minister for Local Government before it can take effect,
but a system like the NSW Constitutional Referendum
would be much sounder. The Act regrettably does not require such elementary
conditions for electoral parity as each ward being required to have an odd number of councillors, and each ward being required to have the
same number of councillors.
The PRSAV-T Inc. has made submissions to most of those reviews. Of Victoria 's 79
councils, 18 still have winner-take-all single-councillor
wards only, but 40 councils (51%) now use PR in all polls, and the
remaining 21 councils have some PR wards. It would be far sounder if a
system, for each municipality, of multi-councillor
electoral districts, each with an uneven number
of councillors and the same number of councillors per electoral district (for parity of the
quota throughout the municipality), were made standard, without the
implausible hotchpotch of inequitable, confusing and shifting arrangements
for municipal elections that are now allowed.
A PRSAV-T
submission supported a draft of what are now Victoria ’s Local
Government (Electoral) Regulations 2005 which, had it been adopted,
would have discontinued the circulation, with postal ballot-papers, of
indications of candidates’ preferences. That circulation, at public
expense, encourages in Victoria’s municipal elections a confusing
proliferation of 'dummy
candidates', who are people nominated simply to appeal to groups of
uninformed voters, so that their ballots are then transferred to the intended
principal beneficiaries. That tactic is far less profitable in PR polls, as
papers are first transferred for surpluses of elected candidates, who are
generally the highest-polling candidates, whereas if only a single position
is being filled, all transfers are from the lowest-polling candidates. Victoria lacks even partial optional preferential voting
as Section
20 of those Regulations requires that ballot-papers are not valid unless
all consecutive preferences, or all but the last such preferences, are
marked.
The City of
Melbourne Act 2001 for the City of Melbourne regrettably provides for
indirect
election of the Lord Mayor and of the Deputy Lord Mayor, and segregates
candidates for that election from those standing for the remaining Council
positions, which are filled with the undesirable Group Voting
Ticket system. See the PRSAV-T Inc. submission to a
2007 Elections Process Forum.
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NEW SOUTH WALES : A New South
Wales Proportional Representation Society began in 1913. Proportional
Representation, promoted by that forerunner of the present NSW Branch
of the PRSA, was used for Legislative Assembly polls in 1920 (won by
Labor), 1922 (won by a non-Labor Coalition), and 1925 (won by Labor). The first Lang Labor
Government repealed the proportional
representation provisions in its first term (1925-27), but lost the
ensuing 1927 election, which was held on the system of single-member
electorates with preferential voting that it had restored.
Criticisms of that proportional representation system included its lack of
satisfactory provision such as countback for filling casual vacancies, and a high
percentage of exhausted votes
attributed to the fully optional marking of preferences.
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Legislative Council of NSW:
The first NSW Legislative
Council had all of its members appointed
by the Governor-in-Council. It became part of a bicameral NSW Parliament,
from 1856 to 1933, which was reconstituted,
by a 1933
referendum, to be indirectly elected by an electoral college of MPs,
whereby the third of that Council's seats that became vacant at each Assembly
election were elected by PR by an electoral college of all MLAs and the continuing MLCs.
The Heffron ALP Government's proposed abolition of
the Legislative Council, and proposed prohibition of its restoration, was
soundly defeated at a 1961
referendum. The PRSA's NSW
Branch influenced the Wran Government away from [4]
a party
list system of PR towards the present direct election
by a quota-preferential
system (albeit marred by the imposition of a Group
Voting Tickets provision) when that Government introduced a Bill for direct popular
voting for the Legislative Council, which was approved at a 1978
referendum. The NSW Parliamentary
Elections and Electorates Act 1912 governs NSW State
elections. The NSW Constitution
Act 1902 entrenches a referendum
requirement before a bill or bills that the Legislative
Council fails to pass can, notwithstanding such a failure to pass the
bill or bills, become law; and also before prescribed changes to either or
both of the Legislative
Council and the Legislative Assembly, including abolition, can become
law.
Other PRSA( NSW) Work: Since 1984, the Branch has
assisted in the incorporation of quota-preferential PR (the Single
Transferable Vote) in Schedule 2 to
the Constitution of the University of Sydney Students' Representative Council.
As a result of the Branch's advice a By-law of Macquarie
University (See
Clause 9(7) of Schedule 1 of By-law 2005 of Macquarie University)
specifies the use of the Society's PR Manual
for PR elections to the Council of that University.
PRSA(NSW) Vice-Presidents, Andrew
Gunter and Ed Haber, were 2 of the 20 elected for
NSW at a national PR poll, to Australia 's 1998 Constitutional
Convention, and raised proportional representation as an issue of importance
for inclusion in the Australian Constitution at that forum.
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New South Wales Local Government:
In 1928 the Council of the then City of Armidale in
north-eastern NSW became the first municipal council in NSW to be elected by
quota-preferential proportional representation as a result of a local
referendum to adopt it. What is now the PRSA's
NSW Branch helped NSW to become the first State in Australia to have PR as
its predominant electoral system for Local Government, which the Cahill ALP
Government began in 1953. PR is now enacted in the Local
Government Act 1993, except that the Askin
Liberal Government reverted to a "winner-take-all" system in 1968,
but PR was restored by the Wran ALP Government in
1976. The system, set out in NSW Local Government (Elections) Regulation
1998, Schedule 2, is primitive compared with PR systems used in other
States, in that it uses surplus transfer by random selection instead of the Gregory
fractional transfer used in Tasmania 's Hare-Clark system since 1907, and
does not fill casual vacancies by countback. Some electoral matters are
determined by the Local
Government (General) Regulations 2005. NSW regressed when it
introduced Group Voting Tickets into local government in Australia.
A flexible and democratic
feature in NSW is requirement for a council to hold a municipal Constitutional Referendum, under Sections 15,
16
and 17
of the
Act, to enable key aspects of a municipality, such as the number of councillors or wards, or the electoral system, to be changed.
Partial
optional preferential voting applies.
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the INDEX
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WESTERN AUSTRALIA : The
PRSA's WA Branch (Electoral Reform Society of Western
Australia Inc.) promoted the 1987 law for Senate-style PR for the Legislative
Council. An ERS member, Hon. Ed Dermer MLC, spoke
of its work in his inaugural
speech on 12th March
1997 to the WA Legislative Council. The |
