Somewhere between the desire of the major parties for a tightly locked-down Senate election process that makes it difficult for anyone else to break into the club, and the ludicrous outcome of Saturday’s election that threatens to see donkey vote candidates and candidates with less than 1% of the vote elected to the Senate, lies sensible reform. Reform that would reduce the now almost absurd complexity of voting for the Senate (magnifying glasses?!), reforms that would reduce the impact of good luck in ballot ordering (rotation on ballot papers would be a start), reforms that would require a basic threshold of popular support for parties to meet before they can have a chance of being preferenced into the Senate.
There’s also the bizarre and discriminatory circumstance that sees 128,000 Northern Territorians and 265,000 Canberrans electing two senators each, while 362,000 Tasmanian voters elect twelve senators.
There is a clear disconnection between the expectation that the will of the voters of each state should be reflected in the composition of the Senate, and the reality that micro-parties can ride their luck and preference deals into a nearly $200,000-a-year job and the balance of power.
The Joint Standing Committee on Electoral Matters, as part of its normal post-election inquiry, must look closely at Senate election processes before voters’ confidence in the process is eroded further.
Why do you think I moved to Tasmania? 🙂
Who is it that makes these “deals” with these moth parties, because they’re so clever, but other party brains-trusts?
Who gave us that border-line clown “Sloppy” Fielding for a couple of years in the “Up a House”? Conroy and Labor.
I’ve heard two suggestions today (on radio), that are worthy of consideration:
1. ANY party or individual must receive at least 5% of the primary vote in the Senate to be eligible for preference distribution.
2. EACH party or individual is only permitted to suggest preferences for the number of seats available in the Senate, in their electorate. That is, a primary vote and five preferences in each state, and a primary vote and one preference in the territories, at a normal half Senate election. This would double in the event of a double dissolution election.
Presumably in No.2, this would make the Senate ballot paper more like the current House of Reps, where voters in the states would receive a ballot paper with SIX boxes, and those in the territories a ballot paper with TWO boxes. Then the state voter could write in 1 for their candidate of choice, and 2-5 for their preferences (territories 1 for their candidate of choice, and 2 for their preference.)
Anybody have other suggestions or comments?
If the media reports are to be believed, the current system is wide open to manipulation and fraud. Certainly NOT democratic, if someone can be elected to the Senate with less than 1% of the primary vote.
What’s wrong with Tassie having a dozen senators? Its not like they’ve got any other viable industry.
As to the balance of power issue. This only happens because the major parties allow it. They can eliminate this aspect anytime they want.
I would further argue that the last few years have shown that the binary nature of our political system is now failing the modern construct and we need to develop a new means for participatory democracy
Don’t lose sight of this fact – more than 30% of the electorate voted against the two main parties in the Senate.
Minor parties are duly predicted to win 11 of the 40 seats available – in actual fact, minor parties in total would be slightly under-represented in this result (and even more under-represented when the 2010-elected senators are taken into account).
In the lower house, again, more than 20% voted against the major parties. The Coalition’s majority, and Labor’s better-than-expected representation, owes less to their relative electoral strength, and more to the combination of single-member electorates and compulsory full preferential voting corralling most of the dissenting vote back into either the Labor or Liberal camp. Why are we up in arms about the Senate result when it is actually more representative than the House result?
Having said all that, if we are worried about tiny parties gaming the Senate counting system, here are some easy reforms to deal with the issue without sacrificing proportionality:
– abolish above-the-line voting
– introduce optional preferential voting
The first reform robs party machines of their ability to control the distribution of preferences, and puts that power back where it belongs – the voters.
The second reform, as well as sparing everyone the burden of filling in 110 squares, may also discourage the alleged proliferation of front parties, since there would no longer be a guarantee that votes for such parties would flow to their intended targets as preferences.
Two other things we could do, if we really wanted to get hardcore:
– ban the distribution of how to vote cards
– adopt the Tasmanian practice of rotating the order of ballot papers
both of which would further take power to direct preferences (even among their own tickets) away from the parties. (The second suggestion would also eliminate the donkey vote.)