The final lower house results from the South Australian election have now been decided, giving Labor 26 seats, a net loss of only two despite a drop in its vote of 7.8%. Final results from Tasmania aren’t expected until tomorrow or Thursday, but we can already summarise the key difference between the two: Tasmanians will substantially get what they voted for; South Australians didn’t.
Here are the percentages of votes and seats won in South Australia:
| PARTY | % VOTES | % SEATS |
| Liberal | 41.7 | 38.3 |
| Labor | 37.5 | 55.3 |
| Greens | 8.1 | 0 |
| Family First | 5.4 | 0 |
| Others | 7.3 | 6.4 |
Now here are the corresponding figures for Tasmania (assuming the Liberals win the last seat in Denison):
| PARTY | % VOTES | % SEATS |
| Liberal | 39.0 | 40.0 |
| Labor | 36.9 | 40.0 |
| Greens | 21.6 | 20.0 |
| Others | 2.4 | 0 |
Notice the difference?
I’ve said before that designing a fair electoral system isn’t rocket science, and here’s the proof — same day, same country. One state gets a parliament where each party’s representation corresponds approximately to its support. The other fails miserably.
Nor is it the distribution of preferences in South Australia that’s making the difference. After preferences, 51.6% of South Australians voted for a Liberal government. But they didn’t get it. On what possible understanding of fairness can that be described as fair?
If South Australia had the same voting system as Tasmania, with five-member electorates and proportional representation, the result would have been something like: Liberals 22, ALP 18, Greens 4 and one independent. (It changes a bit depending on boundaries and assumptions about preferences, but that’s a good approximation.) Still not perfect, but a much better fit to what people actually voted for.
Interestingly enough, if you reverse the experiment and imagine Tasmania voting as single-member electorates, the result doesn’t change very much: I tried it and got 12 Liberal, 10 ALP and three Greens (although of course that’s even more sensitive to just where you draw the boundaries). The Greens are still disadvantaged, but in Tasmania their vote is now large enough to guarantee some representation regardless of the system.
In a less even result, however, the unfairness would be more obvious: after the 2002 Tasmanian election the same exercise produced a parliament with 23 ALP, two Greens and no Liberals at all.
It’s long past time that Australia had a serious debate about this issue. In the past, single-member electorates usually worked against the ALP; as recently as 1998 it lost a federal election despite having majority support from the voters. Now, as in South Australia, it’s usually the coalition that misses out: in Victoria, New South Wales and Queensland the Opposition will probably need 52% of the vote or more in order to win government.
Meanwhile, minor parties are routinely deprived of the representation that their votes deserve — unless, like the National Party, their support is highly concentrated, in which case they can be ridiculously over-represented.
Tasmania’s system isn’t perfect, but it’s streets ahead of other states when it comes to fairness. The rest of the country should be watching and learning.
But the point about SA is that the votes ARE highly concentrated.
Antony Green said as much on 891 ABC radio this morning. The Liberal and Labor votes are largely concentrated around certain geographic areas and he said this sets SA apart from any other states (certainly from Tasmania).
Labor got an enormous swing at the 2006 election, but still only have 1 seat outside the metropolitan area; a seat they have held since forever (Giles). Their chance of winning another is pretty much buckley’s and none, because this is Liberal tiger territory.
The opposite is true of the metropolitan area of Adelaide. As Antony observed, if you start at the Adelaide Hills and work your way north-west, the Labor vote just gets stronger and stronger. These north-western suburbs are Labor tiger territory.
The change to the electoral boundaries every 4 years is at least an honest attempt to accept this quirk in our voting patterns and try to do what they can to even the playing field. The problem is (as every election since 1989 has shown), it ain’t working as it should.
I think multi-member electorates ARE the way to go for SA, but where the boundaries are drawn will still very much be the key to its success or failure.
I don’t understand.
The majority spoke. Yet they didn’t get what they wanted.
True electoral power has been taken out of the hands of the people and given to bureaucrats and back room deals then, is this right?
The saddest part is, that the general public don’t know about this, and if they did, something inside me tells me they wouldn’t care.
Charles great article.
I wholeheartedly agree with you.
Chinda63 – It’s true that the vote in SA is highly concentrated, but that alone doesn’t create the problem. The distortion happens when one party’s vote is much more highly concentrated than the other’s; that used to be the case for Labor, & now it is for the Liberals. But 5-member electorates would be enough to correct for most of the unfairness, unless the boundaries were blatantly gerrymandered. (7-member would be better still, but I wanted to keep it close to the Tasmanian example.)
Great article, but I don’t get my channel 7/9/10 election result neatly packaged in the one evening timeslot.
Your today tonight viewers won’t stand for that and you’ll never be able to explain how it works to them 🙂
I’ve felt there has been rampanant unfairness for minority parties and independents for years where votes of +10% have basically translated to no parliamentary represenation.
Just wondering, at the peak of it’s powers how many seats would one nation have got under this system? (Would we accept it?)
Dean Jaensch is usually a guru on this topic, I like his ideas on proportional representation and (heaven forbid) compulsory voting:
The Australian elector, in any three-year period, will be asked to vote for the Australian Senate with one electoral system, for the House of Representatives with a different system, for his two state houses with the possibility of different systems for each, and for his local government with yet another system.
There is no such thing as compulsory voting (despite Electoral Acts using the term). There is compulsory attendance, compulsory acceptance of a ballot paper, and compulsory placing that paper into a ballot box. But no-one can be compelled to vote.