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The 2013 Australian Senate ElectionCriticisms
Suggested ReformsLegitimate ReformsCriticismsAs compared to the Australian House of Representatives, members of the Senate are elected by a hybrid proportional representation system utilising preferential voting. More than any other election in its history, Australia’s 2013 election created a broad range of parties to occupy Australia’s upper house and thus decrease the influence of the two traditional party groups, the Coalition and the Australian Labor Party. Almost one in four Australians (23%) voted for a minor party, causing members of these traditional party groups, as well as many in the media and academia, to respond, not by welcoming the increased multiparty democratic forum, but surprisingly, by calls for the electoral system to be “reformed” so as to return to a time when the number of parties at the nation’s forum was kept to a minimal few. Donkey-Vote Luck of the DrawOne of the winning, so called, micro parties, the Liberal Democrats, is said to have had significant help by being placed by the random draw at the #1 position on the ballot paper. This indeed is probably true and even the party itself does not deny this. However this is the nature of practically all voting systems and also is nothing new with Australian elections. It does seem highly hypocritical that critics should complain of it now when the “wrong” party profits from it.
Voter confusion with party name similarityIt is claimed that one party profited from having a name similar to that of a major party, the Liberal Party of Australia. This is in all probability true and reform to aid political party identification would not inhibit democracy, and should not necessarily be opposed, however in this particular instance one thing needs to be noted.
Voters, not parties, should declare where preferences go“People have got to understand who they are voting for and this system doesn’t allow that.” When commentators complain that the average punter doesn't know who their preferences go to when voting above the line, the obvious implication is that the voter has in their own head a list of their preferred parties from one to 110. Really? How many voters know the difference in policy platforms between, for example, the Christian Democrats and Family First? This does seem to be a furphy put up to disguise the intention of simply denying electoral success to minor parties. Voters’ knowledge of the political scene is generally limited to three or four parties they do like and three or four they detest. Basically they have their one desired preference and when they give that party their tick above the line they also hand over their long list of preference votes to the trust of that party for one of two reasons: either because they deduce that if they like the policies of that party they assume that that party’s preferences should thus be somewhat similar to their own, or because they realise that whatever the preference deals that have been done, have been done to maximize chances of success and as they want success for their party, they have no objection to their own vote supporting that deal.
Winning with only a miniscule percentage of the primary voteOne of the most spurious objections to the validity of preferential voting is that some candidates win a seat with only 2% or even less, of the primary vote. The rationale being that a second, and beyond, preference vote is considerably inferior in quality to a first preference vote. The alleged response to this “problem” is that the law should change to deny victory to any candidate without at least 4 or even 5 percent of primary votes. [More than one commentator has even gone as far as to omit the descriptor and stated that some micro party candidate has won on only a few thousand votes. The logic used is quite challenging. Apparently as the elector only voted above the line, then his second and further preferences were not in fact his, but only that of his party’s. Thus the preference votes, if needed, simply float around in the ether and no candidate at all should have the right to claim them.] The argument for discounting further preference votes seems to be that, for some reason, a voter’s submitted ballot paper loses value the more often it tries to be part of a full quota in preferential counting. The implication in this criticism of the preferential system is that even though you are allowed a second preference, in effect a second vote, it is somehow not as good a first preference vote, thus the reason critics talk about ‘primary votes’ but ‘only preference votes’.
Forced to select, in order, up to 110 candidatesThose voters not wishing to be tied to the preference order of their chosen parties have the option under the system to mark off their own preference of parties. However the complaint is that this is unnecessarily arduous in that one has to go to the trouble of marking off all of up to 110 names (if living in NSW). The change suggested is to offer what is called option preferential voting.
Ending up with a representative you had never heard ofAs any student of civics is taught, preferential voting essentially means that the voters do not have to put up with a truly objectionable candidate merely because he or she won more votes while still being short of a majority. The Australian system, in contrast to most other democracies, allows the compromise choice. It is deemed better for the majority to be represented by a somewhat acceptable candidate who, in the voter’s estimation, will support relatively benign policies, than by a totally unacceptable candidate supporting distasteful policies. The virtue of the compromise candidate is not that he or she is a repository of wisdom on a broad range of policies. In most cases it is simply that he is not any of the other choices. He is the “begrudgingly will accept” middle-of-the-road candidate who can unite the majority of opposing political sentiments. Lottery Aspect to Senate Voting Noted election analyst Antony Green has commented that winning a seat has become a lottery for the micro parties. Reform “…would remove the lottery aspect of the present Senate race, and force parties and candidates to do what they are supposed to do - campaign for votes, not negotiate outcomes through preferences.” He is correct in that there is an element of luck in being elected: with the same number of accrued votes, your chance of success still depends on the votes other parties you exchanged preferences with, get. However he is perhaps a little disingenuous to imply that parties should instead do the right thing, so to speak, and get out there and campaign for votes to be rightly deserving of a Senate seat. Australia has 76 members in its democratically appointed Senate and thus, technically, each Senator represents 1.315% percent of Australian voters. Not that it did them any good but, accumulated throughout Australia, the Sex Party at the 2013 election, and Family First and the Liberal Democrats (where they were not in a privileged spot on the ballot paper) at the previous 2010 election did in fact attain that percentage. So if we have allocated 76 members’ seats for the federal Senate, is it really too much of an extreme position to take, to ask that a party that wins one seventy-sixth of the vote should have a right to claim one of those 76 seats? Those parties have already done “what they are supposed to do” to sell their message to one segment of Australian voters. Why should they have to campaign further because the electoral system is arranged such that the natural quota of less than two percent eventually becomes over 14% for various highly questionable reasons? The irony is that despite the micro parties being accused of “manipulating” and “gaming” the system, it appears that over the last century it is the larger established law-making parties who have taken advantage of, and done nothing to modify, a system, allegedly proportional, which prevents 1.3% of the voters from electing 1.3% of the seats in the Senate.
Denying the government its mandateThe strangest comments made regarding the success of the new independent Senators were about their threat to the new Prime Minister’s “mandate”. Suggested reforms for these “problems” Above-the-Line Preferential VotingCommentators such as Senator Nick Xenophon, erstwhile Senator Bob Brown and current Attorney-General George Brandis have suggested that so called ‘above the line preferential voting’ should be introduced to Senate voting (while leaving ‘below-the-line’ as is). This would mean that instead of voting above the line for just one party with its attendant full list of preferences, its group voting ticket (GVT), one would vote in sequential order for as many parties as one wishes but each vote would be for only the candidates of that party, and no further. The alleged virtue of this system is that voters would not be giving support to parties they were not aware of (parties they may, or may not, express any particular sentiment towards), which might otherwise be in their preferred party’s list of preferences. This is indeed true. However there is one thing the supporters of this suggestion fail to mention. Micro party supporters are not the ones complaining about their preferences electing unknown candidates. For years the approximate 20% of the electorate who don’t support the major parties have been voting for their individual small parties and ending up after elections with approximately 0% of representatives in the Senate. This was because traditionally after voting for their first, second or third preferred micro party, they then went back to an established major party for their third or fourth preference. A practice which always got them nowhere but that established major party, their final successful candidate. Finally they have awoken to the fact that the only way to get ones preferred party elected is to give all preferences to small parties then hope, perhaps by the luck of the drawer, that your chosen party may win that final seat. For the very small percentage of micro party supporters who still might happen to complain, they still have the option to vote below the line anyway. The ‘reformers’ in this situation are offering a solution to a problem which in fact doesn’t exist. Apart from members of larger parties attempting to beat up an issue, they don’t know anyone of smaller parties who complain about unintended voting results. However what they do know is that introducing above-the-line preferential will definitely increase the exhausted and informal vote, and thus decrease the vote of micro parties who depend to a much greater extent upon preference votes. While supporters of the larger parties will only have to vote, in order, for up to three parties above the line, if even that, micro party supporters will definitely have to fill in, in correct sequential order without mistakes, almost the complete list to guarantee that their vote does not become exhausted (discarded before ever being used) before it would be effective. It does appear a spurious claim to suggest reform, which will undoubtedly seriously impact upon micro parties, for the sake of a small minority of voters who could alleviate their problem anyway by simply voting below the line. A Minimum Threshold of Primary Votes to be Elected
The problem with this argument is that it is very feasible that not all of six Senate candidates in a state can be guaranteed to accrue even 4% of the primary vote. Coalition politicians Julian McGauran, Judith Troeth and Bridget McKenzie as well as Labor’s Stephen Conroy all, in at least one of their elections, won their Senate seats on primary votes of 0.04% or less. It would be rather ridiculous to create new electoral laws which might actually prevent some states sending their full allotment of upper house Members of Parliament to Canberra. How should the legislation then be written? “A candidate must first gain 4% of the primary vote, unless he or she is a member of an established larger party…”?
Legitimate Reforms to the System Luck of the Ballot DrawerParty positions on the ballot paper are decided by ‘drawing out of a hat’ random choice. This is certainly an improvement on earlier versions where candidates’ names were listed alphabetically. However there still remains the problem of the so called ‘donkey vote’, especially prevalent with compulsory voting, where some people simply tick the first box in sight so they can be out of the voting booth as soon as possible. Thus the candidate / party lucky enough to draw the first position gets an unequivocal advantage. A solution to this, as practiced in Tasmanian elections, is to introduce what is called Robson Rotation. With this system there is no need for a random draw and instead multiple sets of voting papers are printed each with a different party listing. Name ConfusionIt is without doubt that in the 2013 Australian Senate election the Liberal Democrats gained an advantage due to the similarity of their name to that of the established Liberal Party of Australia. In fact a decade earlier the Liberal Party took the party ‘liberals for forests’ to the Administrative Appeals Tribunal claiming they had no right to use their name. In its ruling the AAT ruled that in politics the word ‘liberal’ is quite a generic term due to the fact it is used widely in all manner of political and social discourse, and it would be wrong for one political party to claim ownership and sole proprietal rights. However what was perhaps remiss of the Australian Electoral Commission was to fail to make any concerted effort to warn voters of possible confusion. This would not have been that difficult. Published print ads and even posters in the voting booth could list those parties with similar sounding names together with identifying their dissimilar attributes. Reforms the Major Parties won’t be Supporting Voluntary VotingTwo of the three oft repeated criticisms of the 2013 Senate election was the advantages one successful minor party had due to the luck of the voting paper draw and the similarity of its name to that of an established major party. Some of their support came from voters who either took little time to check which party they were giving their support to or in fact took no time at all and simply ticked the first box in sight. It would be quite fair to say that without those counted votes, the result would have more correctly reflected the wishes of those Australians concerned about their political future. It does not take a genius to work out that those voters careless with their vote are those who don’t wish to be there in the first place and are simply performing “their duty” as expeditiously as possible. Thus an effective solution would be to do away with that rarity in the democratic world, compulsory voting, and return to the almost universal system, whereby only those truly concerned about their country’s future should be the ones to direct it. Remove Artificially High QuotasThe third main criticism of the election related to the preferential system of voting utilised. Where a person’s vote did not immediately become part of a quota to elect a candidate, it subsequently went into, what may be called a holding pattern of floating preference votes, which after various tries, would eventually become part of a quota to elect someone, a candidate often way down on the list and not that well known, if at all, with the voting public. While suggestions of dubious democratic legitimacy have been made to remedy this perceived problem, possibly the simplest of all have been ignored. Remainder preferential votes have become such a big issue in contemporary times because there are becoming so many of them. Many of the political parties engaged in the preference swap negotiations garner less than 2% of popular support, and yet by current law, to win a seat in the Senate, a quota of 14.3% of the vote must be accrued. At the last election 21 of the 36 states’ Senate vacancies were won on only primary vote quotas, meaning that the remaining 15 vacancies, over 40% of the vote, went into this preference-exchange, holding pattern maze. But why does this quota have to be so high? With 76 seats in the Australian Senate the natural quota is only 1.35%, a fraction of the existing artificial level, and small enough to ensure that almost all primary votes could in fact elect a candidate. Yes there would still be some preference votes left over, but far fewer than the current 41% of the total. The arguments made to defend high quotas tend to ignore not only the loss of political representation for minorities but also the clarity and confidence gained from elections where preference dealing would play such a little effect.
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