Parliaments, Representation, and Quotas in Australia — A crisis, or a civic duty deficit?

The notion that one human being can represent another, let alone another one hundred-and-ten-thousand, is laughable, because the type of person with the sociability and commonality necessary to truly be one amongst the people does not have the vanity to run for this position; and, there is a belief that a sense of aristocracy and intellectualism must be necessary within a person to achieve a prominent office within the nation, even if that office is nominally reserved for everyone, regardless of birth, education, or wealth. Therefore, the so-called ‘House of Representatives’ is inherently flawed, because, like all democratic systems, it has become not a House of representation but a House of rule. This is not an issue. It is merely a point of interest. Ronald Reagan stated that one of the great things about the USA was the ability for any man to walk into the president’s office, pound on his desk, and state to the president that he is dissatisfied with his work as president. Of course, very nearly everyone would be disallowed from entering the president’s office, and most would be too polite to do such a thing, yet what Ronald Reagan was alluding to was correct — we in the West have freedom, and we have freedom in such a manner that all forms of politicians ranging from the representative to the president or prime minister cannot rule over the common people without restraint, for the common people are empowered and encouraged to criticize, and, if the need demands it, remove, the politician. There is also the notion that any person can run for an elected office, which is entirely true, yet, most people who run for office at the Federal level tend to have backgrounds in certain ‘high-up’ fields such as law, economics, or business, and people who have no such tertiary education are underrepresented in Parliament. Why is this?

Firstly, Westminster style Parliaments, a Parliament style of which Australia is in possession of, are constructed in such a way that any representative can, at any moment, be burdened with the responsibilities of being a minister of a certain portfolio, or even becoming the prime minister. These people are stereotypically seen as being highly educated ‘ruler’ types who lead the commoner instead of representing the commoner’s issues, and, while they still can perform representation, much of their time is taken up by rulership. Therefore, Australia’s House of Representatives is flawed because those designed to represent can be expected, and must prepare, to lead rather than to represent.

Secondly, the way Australia’s electoral system is set up in such a manner whereby voters live in electorates with up to 110,000 other voters stacks parliamentary representation overly in the favour of two parties, as minor parties or independents are unable to simply garner the support of a few thousand people to achieve success; rather, they must somehow make their message salient to not only tens of thousands of people, but tens of thousands of people in a specific area to actually achieve any political gain. In addition, Australia’s single transferable vote means that a minor party or independent candidate cannot hope to simply split their many opponents’ vote in such a manner that the few votes given to the independent will secure their victory, for the votes given to independents will eventually transfer to and consolidate for the two major parties. Therefore, Australia’s House of Representatives is flawed because it allows highly organised and large parties to dominate, and these parties will generally place their most educated, qualified or long-standing candidates forward for election, and this can combine with the fact that the voting system makes it difficult for independents and third parties to enter parliament, thereby making representation something which remains generally in the hands of party-line elites. A solution could be to increase the number of seats in the House. This would lessen the number of votes necessary for a victory, considerably helping the campaigns of minor parties and independents. This must be carefully tempered — if too many seats are added, say, one thousand, this would lead to one thousand people sitting in a room for an average of 627 hours a year. How many of these new Representatives who truly come from the people, as opposed to so-called party elites, would get the chance to speak seriously and continuously in an effective manner for a careers worth of talking? 627 hours a year split between one thousand people may seem ample time for one to talk at least once a year, however it must be made known that much of the business of Parliament is taken up by government bills, and the privilege of speech is generally handed to government and shadow government leaders, with even a ruling party’s backbenchers receiving little opportunity to talk. With this in mind, should the hours remain the same, yet the number of people to take up those hours is inflated for representative purposes, the likelihood that some elected Representatives never talk in a year, let alone in their entire elected career, begins to manifest itself, and the notion that expanding seats to gain more representation will end up denying the ability of many Representatives to speak, thus becoming a self-defeating idea. A more reasonable reform would be to increase the days that Parliament sits. Indeed, voters best garner representation through the ‘traditional’ methods available to them — by contacting MPs, senators, vocalising issues, and protesting, which, if successful, can lead to their pressing issue becoming vocalised in Parliament. Therefore, people should aim to be more active with their representative’s to achieve what they wish.

Thirdly, the common man may not always care for the issues that the career politician cares for, and, in some cases, cannot know the issues that the career politician cares for, meaning that, in some cases, entrenched career politicians are better suited towards certain issues because they have knowledge deemed as secret or sensitive which is not available to the ordinary man. Therefore, if the common man is to challenge the career politician for his seat, he is at an inherent disadvantage because he must form opinions and solutions towards topics he knows little about. This is not to glorify the career politician, because the career politician’s long career spent away from normal society may make them deaf to issues regarding unemployment and the cost of living, for they are presented as numbers rather than experienced as difficulties. Therefore, Australia’s House of Representatives is flawed because it favours long terms for its members, and the longer one remains in Parliament, their chance of becoming aloof from the normal constituents they aim to represent increases.

Fourthly, the notion of garnering proper representation becomes a moot point when the idea of intersectionality makes itself apparent. It is an incredibly simple argument based off good intentions to say that we must have more women, more Asians, more homosexuals in our Parliament to better represent the people of this country. This can be done easily and is constantly being pushed for, and women and minorities are becoming closer to reaching a form of ‘mirror representation’ whereby the makeup of Parliament in terms of proportions equals to the makeup of Australia’s population in terms of proportions — for instance, half of Parliamentarians are female to account for the fact that half of Australians are female. Many people would support this, and many more would be non-caring about the issue, not being bothered whether women made up any particular percentage of Parliamentarians from zero to one hundred. Intersectionality is the notion that one can have many labels attached to them — one can be a woman, one can also be a woman and a homosexual, one can also be a woman, a homosexual and an Aboriginal. This is where the issue of representation breaks down, because things always evolve, and movements never remain static. For all the protestors who demand more women must enter parliament today, there will be another protestor in the future who demands women who are lesbians must enter parliament.

Aboriginals make up 3.1% of the population, yet 3.9% of Senators. Homosexuals make up somewhere between 3 to 4 percent of the population, yet 5.26% of Senators — are they then overrepresented, and is this a bad thing? Should their proportion of seats be lowered to make room for non-Aboriginals and non-homosexuals? A movement supporting this idea would most likely not go down well, though it is, ultimately, an equality movement. When intersectionality comes into play, it would suggest, under the basic notion that one must be of the same label to represent the commoner of the same label (females in Australia can only be represented by Female parliamentarians, for instance), that Aboriginal homosexuals are not currently represented in Parliament. Despite this, Aboriginals are now able to marry other Aboriginals of the same sex, and this was made possible by this Parliament which does not have any Aboriginal homosexuals. Is an overrepresentation of Aboriginals and homosexuals in Australia’s Senate capable of filling the gap left by homosexual Aboriginals, or should this only be achieved when there are Aboriginals, homosexuals, and homosexual Aboriginals in Parliament?

We can extrapolate this further when we come to issues of class, employment, and income. The income granted to a Representative will place them amongst the highest earners in our nation. This would suggest that lower income earners are unrepresented in Parliament simply because it is impossible for them to be — yet, their issues are still debated in Parliament, and assistance is given to them by Parliament. It can be rectified by applying an MP’s salary based on their previous earnings, which can lead to a situation where lower income earners are represented, though it is obviously an unnecessary and plainly stupid thing to do.

Take it another step further: the unemployed. Australia’s unemployment rate generally sits around five to six per cent, which seems a relatively easy proportion to represent in Parliament — yet, when elected, these people will inevitably become employed, and no possible reform can prevent that. Yet, a Parliament of employed people was able to come up with the idea of an unemployment benefit, and successive Parliaments of employed people are able to legislate in a manner by which the unemployment rate can be lowered.

In addition, our Parliament is not proportionally allocated according to national vote percentages. Each seat is determined by the votes cast in its boundaries, and the voters know they will be represented by that seat’s elected member. This is why, once more, the idea of label representation is a failure. The average seat is home to just under 110,000 electors, and on top of that is home to children and non-citizens. If an adult woman is elected to a seat, are all the men and children of that electorate not represented by her? Are they better represented by men from far away seats? An elected MP is meant to be the MP for all those within his or her electorate, and is not going to shy away from the complaints of their constituents if those constituents do not share the same labels as them. To suggest that the makeup of Parliament must be distributed proportionally to allow for women, blacks et cetera, rather than geographically with a candidate suited to that area, detracts from the fairness and, ironically, from the representativeness of our flawed House of Representatives.

This is not even taking into account party lines, which fundamentally destroy all the notions that extremely small minority communities are somehow better off with a representative specifically tailored to them who mirrors them. Take the following example:
Queensland makes up around 20% of Australia’s population, and thus, if we were to mirror our Parliament with basic terms (such as Queenslander and Victorian, not gay Queenslander, or Black Victorian), we could expect 20% of our Representatives to be Queenslanders. This would allocate them 30.2 seats, which we will round up to 31 seats, in our mirrored Parliament. Presume that all of these 31 MPs who identify as ‘Queenslander’ are members of the Opposition and of minor parties. If the Government, formed by the party that has a majority in Parliament, also happens to have no MPs who would identify as ‘Queenslander’, and were to introduce a Bill that bans all Queenslanders from leaving their State forever, would this Bill pass? It would be a very discriminatory Bill, which would obviously be highly criticised by these Queenslander MPs. Yet, the governing party has a majority, and regardless of what is said, so long as they are committed to the Bill, it will pass, for even if Queenslanders are mirrored, they are not given this representation in the governing party. This would happen even with MPs who identify as ‘Queenslander’ being overrepresented, because if their representation is gained outside of the governing party, it has less chance of being impactful.

However, there is one key reason why representation is properly unattainable. The previous example given regarding the overrepresentation of Aboriginals in the Senate comes from a key issue with Parliaments — there are not enough seats. 3 seats allocated to Aboriginals will leave them overrepresented, yet two seats would leave them underrepresented. The only option is to go somewhere in between, which is impossible. In addition, there will be several communities far too small to even be given a seat in the event of a perfectly mirrored Parliament. This is fundamentally the reason why Representation is flawed, yet the many proposed methods to rectify it are also unnecessary and can generally have a negative effect on Parliament by forcing it to become overly large to fulfill proper representation.

The uniqueness of each individual, and the intersectionality of various labels which can be applied to them, means that for true representation to actually be achieved, each and every person must have their own seat in Parliament. Obviously, this is impossible, because doing so would reveal sensitive information to everyone in the country, and even if it were possible, most people do not want to become seriously vested in politics, and the same situation we have now, where a handful of career politicians are dominant, would manifest itself in practice, if not in law. The situation we have now, and have always had, where a handful of elected officials who inevitably become pseudo-aristocratic and aloof from society are the supposed Representatives of millions, is an incredibly flawed yet preferable system. Citizens must remember that they too have a civic duty to allow for representation to occur in a way which benefits the commoner, and this can be expressed in more than just voting. Representation fails when these MPs become aloof from society due to society’s own inability to keep them aware of the problems of society, and this can be for a variety of reasons. One of the more dangerous reasons is the lack of cohesion and unity in society, in which members of the society seeks to defame and distance each other from those who hold contrary opinions to themselves, and spend more time hating other members of society than pressuring for proper representation. This is something which is relatively common today. Notably, these factors lessen as the electorates become smaller in size. When downgrading to State Parliaments, the electorates become more local and thus more unified, and when downgrading to city councils, they become even more local and thus even more unified, and better common representation can be achieved in lower levels of government. Regardless, at a Federal level, representation of the commoner is not achieved by forced mirroring, but instead by the participation of the commoner by all the means available to them. Protesting, petitioning and contacting one’s MP, or even any MP, is the best method to achieve representation in a flawed House of Representatives, for so long as pressure is consistently maintained to make an issue salient to an MP, the issue will be able to come into consideration by those who can see what society is wanting and act accordingly. When society is instead focused on making common issues into partisan ones, MPs will react accordingly, and perform their representative duties in a fashion by which one part of society’s supposed ‘enemies’ are beat down more than this part of society is brought up. Those who suggest mirror representation do so with nothing but good intentions, for they perceive an unequal society and wish to make it more equal. Unfortunately, it is impossible to achieve true equality because the only person capable of knowing each individual is themselves, and to give seats to everybody is not a possibility. The current system we have is flawed and somewhat unrepresentative, and is done out of pragmatism to balance the work of government with the needs of the individual. The individual is more than capable of attempting to force representation into this system, not by changing it, but instead by becoming more active within it. Therefore, the idea of mirror representation must be abandoned, because it will make the government increasingly inefficient, and further divides society by suggesting people are wholly defined by labels instead of their individualism.

This article is an excerpt from my work We Will Save Australia: A Policy Handbook for the 21st Century, which focuses on social and economic issues. Available on amazon now : https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09B3DNFM3