The recently completed 2022 election study by Australian National University and Griffith University political scientists clearly shows the need for an electoral system that will provide democratic opportunity for fair representation.
A record one in three voters at the federal election in May cast a ballot for minor parties or independents. Clearly, voters want change, they want to make their vote count. They have in fact abandoned the two-party system.
However, the political scientists refrained from recommendations for change. Why? Is this not a function of political scientists? Presumably that is left to the major political parties themselves. However, there is a problem here. They clearly have no interest in a change to Proportional Representation as it could well reduce the number of their MPs and that would require them to form post-election coalitions.
The proportional representation system is common in 90 countries. including New Zealand, South Africa (since mid-1990s) and Ireland. Australians should reflect on this situation as it provides an opportunity to end the adversarial, combative two-party system.
Fortunately, Australia has had some benefit from the Hare-Clark system of proportional representation used in Tasmania, the Senate elections (since 1949), state upper houses and the ACT. These legislatures are essentially proportional in character but the need for compulsory preferencing has long made it unnecessarily cumbersome, in fact rejected by voters. In most PR systems voters have one vote only (of equal value) but the voter can choose from several parties with equal chances.
Proportional Representation does away with basically all the negatives of the current Single Member District system. Pork barrelling becomes undoable, branch stacking ditto, gerrymandering (US) meaningless. proportional representation is based on Multi-Member Districts which can vary in size. The Single District System, in contrast, does NOT guarantee democratic representation at all, although that is often claimed. The distribution in Single Member District seats can be highly unbalanced favouring one of the two major parties grossly over the other. That only happened in the UK quite recently.
Australians have had little experience with proportional representation on account of distance from European countries, most of which use the proportional representation system.
New Zealand adopted a variant of the proportional representation system after an excellent exhaustive Royal Commission on the subject during the 1980s. They adopted a two-vote system – somewhat like Germany – which has been well received. Most New Zealanders have welcomed this change. With the exception of Italy, for a short period only, proportional representation systems have not been abandoned anywhere.
I should add that women representation has fared significantly better than in Single Member District systems.
Read the 2022 Australian Federal Election Study.
Klaas Woldring is a retired A/Prof of Southern Cross University and was active in the ALP in the 1980s, when he twice stood for the federal seat of Richmond, based on Lismore.
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