The (Lack of) Integrity and Fairness of South Australia’s (SA’s) Electoral System
The 2014 ‘SA Election’ and my Official Report to the Government of SA, as officially Commissioned: The issues within remaining current, at state and federal levels:
My comments as at July 22, 2022:
By way of background, in referring to the 1989 fairness legislation, Labor Premier Jay Weatherill said “Complaining about the rules when you designed the rules I think sits ill on the mouth of the Liberal Party.” But whichever ‘side’ you are on, if the rules do not work to deliver sufficient fairness and reflect a rigorous democracy, then they should be changed in order to do so! And I say this through gritted teeth, as I supported the triumphant election of Prime Minister Anthony Albanese this year, where his thumping Labor victory fleshed out very similar issues to those contained in this report. But going back to the 2014 SA election results, whilst the state-wide two-party vote was 47.0% for the Labor Party vs. 53.0% for the Liberal Party, the metropolitan area recorded a two-party vote of 51.5% Labor vs. 48.5% Liberal. The Liberal Party only won 12 of the 34 metropolitan seats while four of its 14 ‘notionally safe’ two-party seats were urban, all eight ‘non-safe’ seats were urban. Overall, the election resulted in a ‘hung parliament’ with 23 seats for the Labor Party and 22 seats for the Liberal Party. The balance of power rested with the two cross-bench independent candidates, whose seats both returned clearly won two-party votes for the Liberal Party, but yet elected those independents. The end result was the Liberal Party with 24 seats reflecting their two-party vote, and the Labor Party with 23 seats reflecting their two-party vote, therefore it was argued that the ‘fairness’ provision was met. My ‘take’ back in 2015 begins underneath this diagram…
Above: The Results (Labor is Red/Weatherill; Liberal is Blue/Marshall) — Image used with permission by By DrRandomFactor
Original 2015 Report:
Thank you for inviting me to report to the South Australian (SA) government my opinion and recommendations on the electoral system for the SA House of Assembly (the House). There is an inherent problem with the SA Electoral Boundaries Commission redistributing electoral boundaries in order to reflect the two-party vote: not only is it meant to consider the latest election results, but strictly considering the wording of the SA Constitution, it must predict the likely results of the next election, which is an impossible task. Under section 83 of the SA Constitution, ‘fairness’ in redistribution must occur ‘so far as [is] practicable’ — yet this constitutional provision takes away the necessity and impetus of the Boundaries Commission to achieve the correct distribution. Clearly, the Alternative Vote electoral system (AV) has favored the Labor Party, even though the amendment to the Constitution in 1991, in effect, to introduce section 83, was brought about by lobbying by the Liberal Party on the unfairness of the former system. Over several decades, the SA election results have awarded government to parties with the lower two-party preferred vote. This, on the face of it, is unfair and unrepresentative of voters’ wishes. The AV system is meant to deliver a strong and stable parliament; however, what we have seen are several minority governments, and also a propensity for Labor governments to be formed without attaining an overall voter majority on a two-party basis. This needs to be redressed in terms of the AV system and, in turn, the introduction of the Hare-Clark system of proportional representation (PR), which is currently used in Tasmania and the Australian Capital Territory (ACT) — a form of representation that is fair and effective and correctly reflects the wishes of the voters thus restoring public confidence in the electoral system.
In the latest SA election held on 15 March this year [2014], the Liberals won a convincing result on the two-party preferred basis of 53 per cent to Labor’s 47 per cent, yet the Liberals did not win enough seats to form government in their own right. If this was a one-off election result, perhaps there would not have been so much concern about SA’s electoral system. However, in 1989, 2002, 2010 and 2014, the Liberals convincingly won the two-party preferred vote but failed to win government each time. Federal Liberal Senator Simon Birmingham [then] stated:
You’ve got to ask the question: is there something systemically wrong with the construct of electoral boundaries in South Australia if you’re having this issue where the party that wins the majority vote is constantly and consistently denied the capacity to form government? South Australian’s aren’t getting what they’re voting for.
It is a fair point to make because SA’s Constitution is meant to ensure fairness and equity in dividing electorates after each election to reflect the two-party preferred (or, popular) vote. ‘Electoral fairness’ requires that the boundaries are redrawn after each election so that ‘if candidates of a particular group attract more than 50% of the popular vote, they will be elected in sufficient numbers to enable a government to be formed’. Section 83 goes on to say ‘as far as practicable’, a virtual ‘admission’ that there will likely be times that the Boundaries Commission cannot attain an accurate result. I believe the Boundaries Commission has been given an ‘impossible brief given the demographic and geographic make-up of SA.’ The SA Electoral Commissioner herself admitted that it was an ‘impossible’ task for the Boundaries Commission to achieve the constitutional requirement. Furthermore, the secretary of the Electoral Reform Society of South Australia stated:
The Commission has an impossible task and rather than forming them to undertake another pointless redistribution, it is time to consider changing the current system, such as introducing multi-member electorates and proportional representation. [my emphasis]
Indeed, there was a select committee of the House at the time — had the committee been joined with the Legislative Assembly, the Democrats and Liberals ‘would have supported proportional representation … and the select committee is likely to have recommended a multi-member preferential system rather than the retention of single member districts with a fairness clause.’ As I have alluded to, I am in favor of recommending a PR system for SA’s House of Assembly and will deal this topic later in my report.
The Labor Party has stated that section 83 of the Constitution sets out the rules that the Liberal opposition lobbied for after the 1989 election when Labor won, despite only receiving 48% of the popular vote; ‘The Labor Premier John Bannon agreed [to the Liberal Party’s concerns] and a subsequent state-wide referendum saw overwhelming support for amending the constitutional to introduce … the “fairness clause”;’ however, what the Labor Party must accept is that the constitutional requirements under section 83 are literally unworkable, evidenced in the dubious results where Labor consistently wins government with less of the popular vote than the Liberals and backed by the Boundaries Commission. The system is impossible to carry out and therefore unable to achieve the electoral equity it was originally intended to achieve.
The Alternative Vote (AV) is SA’s current system. It is meant to deliver strong majorities for parties to form government:
The basic assumption [of AV] is that a government must be assured, for the lifetime of a parliament, of power to carry out the whole programme on which it fought the election.
But this feature of the AV system is not the norm. In fact, several minority governments have been formed in the last decade. The latest example of this was the Labor and Liberal parties vying for power after the recent SA election, with the two independents holding the balance of power in the House. Furthermore, the AV system in SA is delivering consistently a disproportional result because the amount of votes for each party does not correspond to the proportion of representation in the House.
Most European countries favor coalition rule under PR electoral systems.[1] What is meant in Britain and Australia as ‘strong government’ (that is, absolute majority on a pluralist or two-party preferred basis, as the case may be) is not necessarily the best version of strong government, otherwise all of the many thousands of versions of PR systems that occur in national, international, state/federal, local municipal and incorporated association elections would surely throw the world into chaos. Taking Switzerland as an example, domination by one party would be seen to be ‘wrong’ and would also be highly unusual — they see that there is some good in all parties. Polls in Europe favor coalition rule.[2] There are a number of modifications of the PR system but essentially the principle remains unchanged:
· One person, one vote;
· Election of several representatives together; and
· Each by quota and not majority.
New Zealand (NZ) is an excellent example of a modern country moving from a pluralist electoral system to a PR system, more specifically, Mixed Member Proportional Representation (MMP). NZ had similar problems to SA in that ‘since 1984 successive Labour and National governments were accused of having exercised exclusive power, despite having been elected with only a minority of the overall vote.’ There was much feeling of disillusionment with NZ’s politicians since the 1980s — what MMP did was to restore confidence in the parliament because politicians were forced to exercise consensus policy, and had to listen to a far greater proportion of different elements of NZ society. NZ voters have two votes under MMP: one determines the local representative for a relevant electorate which works on a plurality system; and the other is a vote for one party — this determines the proportion of seats each party is entitled to in the House. Seats in parliament are allocated to MPs voted for in relevant electorates; then parties fulfil their remaining quota (based on their proportion of the party vote) from their list members.
There are multitudes of PR systems that have been running throughout history and have consistently produced stable and effective government. Tasmania’s Hare-Clark[3] system of PR (HCPR) has been successfully running since 1909 and it is this system that I recommend to SA’s House of Assembly. Without a ‘list system’ (such as in NZ), Tasmanians are free to choose their own candidates in their own order of preference (i.e. ‘candidates above parties’) rather than having to rely on a party list being put to them, such as the case with the Federal Senate (even though you can ignore the party lists and number all the candidates; however, in practice, people cannot be bothered and will simply indicate their vote to one party, thus subjecting their Senate vote to an ‘unknown’ list of candidates). Tasmanians must number all their preferences and the top five candidates in each electorate who achieve the relevant quota are duly elected. Preferences will come into play once a candidate has reached their quota and they have surplus votes, which are then directed to the candidates that have been listed in preference by the relevant voter. The Tasmanian ballot papers are also randomized so that candidates are not put in the same spot on every ballot paper, thereby avoiding ‘donkey votes’.[4]
I advise the SA government to adopt the HCPR for SA’s House of Assembly. This would overcome the problems with section 83 of the SA constitution, as you would rely on your Federal electorates to become the basis for your state ‘Hare-Clark electorates’, to which five candidates would represent each of those eleven electorates. As to the number of candidates, having five in each electorate would provide the closest to the current number of seats in the House which is currently 47. Voters would have the benefit of contacting up to five MPs for their state electorate, which would be especially helpful in sparse regional electorates — or they may simply choose the MP that they most prefer. Furthermore, all parties making the relevant quota would be represented. Most ideally, the numbers of MPs from different parties in the House will reflect the proportion of votes they won in each of their respective electorates. So we would see the minor parties and independents vying for seats and indeed reflecting the proportion of votes they received in their respective electorates. I implore you to embrace this advice as I can see it being the beginning of an extremely popular and effective electoral system in SA.
Notes:
[1] Switzerland, Sweden, Belgium, Netherlands, Luxembourg, Finland, Denmark, Norway, Germany, Austria, Italy, Greece, Israel, etc. PR leads to coalitions in many of these countries that are stable and truly representative: ‘The general result is great stability of policy, each government, of whatever composition, maintaining those policies on which there are widespread agreement.’
[2] Not ‘Coalition’ in the Australian sense. ‘Coalition’ for European purposes means a combination or fusion of political parties or factions.
[3] HCPR is named after Thomas Hare and Andrew Clark. Hare had the original idea of the STV system (known as preferential voting). Clark was a Tasmanian and modified Hare’s original plan of PR to incorporate a modified quota and a system for determining the flow of preferences from elected candidates.
[4] This is known as the ‘Robson rotation’.
