Mark McGowan swept back into office in WA in a landslide, and he’s now about to make it much harder for the conservative side of politics in the state to maintain its traditional control of the upper house of Parliament.
The WA Nationals are up in arms over a proposal to do away with weighted electorates in the Legislative Council, which has blocked previous attempts at electoral reform.
Under the current system, there is a wide discrepancy in the worth of a vote in the Legislative Council, against which WA Labor has been campaigning for decades in favour of one vote, one value.
But the Nationals have described the recommendation by the Ministerial Expert Committee on Electoral Reform as “another nail in the coffin for fair representation for regional WA in the state’s Parliament”.
When the McGowan government won office with a massive majority, including control of the upper house, it commissioned a report by an expert panel to make recommendations on electoral reform.
In addition to abolishing the malapportionment of voting in upper house electorates, the committee also recommended the abolition of group voting tickets — or vote harvesting — which resulted in a daylight-saving candidate winning a seat in the upper house with only 98 votes.
Opposition Leader Mia Davies has attacked McGowan for denying electoral reform would be on the government’s agenda should Labor be returned to office.
“He denied it again and again and then arrogantly made it his government’s first order of business,” Davies said.
But the proposed reforms should have been no surprise both to the Nationals and the Liberals, given Labor’s well-known criticisms of the existing system.
McGowan described the Legislative Council as “the most undemocratic of any state or territory in Australia”.
“It lags behind most parliaments in the developed world,” he said.
Draft legislation has already been introduced into the Parliament under which the Legislative Council will become a whole-of-state electorate and will no longer be regions-based.
Former Fremantle Mayor Brad Pettitt, the only Greens member in the WA Parliament, says the Greens will be a beneficiary of the legislation, which will render election outcomes more transparent rather than a random lottery.
“Smaller parties like the Greens will be able to have greater certainty in their representation in the Parliament,” Dr Pettitt told Crikey.
“It will now mean the Greens will consistently get three or four seats in the Legislative Council assuming their long-term vote hovers around 10%.”
Dr Pettitt said the expert committee report and proposal was excellent and aligned closely with the submission the Greens made in support of one vote, one value.
“It will be no surprise then that I will be strongly supporting this in the Parliament,” he said.
Good to see some coverage of this. The ABC’s recent coverage has been woeful, with emphasis given to complaints about the proposed reform which are obviously wrong: “But advocates for the current system argue the whole of state electorate would leave regional voters underrepresented and disadvantaged.” This turns the truth on its head. The current system has for decades ensured metropolitan voters are under-represented and disadvantaged. This is an objective demonstrable fact. The proposed reform provides equal representation for all voters, leaving nobody under-represented and disadvantaged.
Opposition leader Mia Davies goes even further with claims such as “What it will do is rip regional representation from this state parliament.” This is so absurd it would make Donald Trump blush. Mia Davies is trying to prevent all voters being properly represented by defending a grossly distorted system that always favours the regions, but rather than give any reason why regional voters should continue to enjoy far greater representation than other voters she is telling dreadful lies.
The reform is designed to give everyone equal representation. It is correcting a great injustice done to all WA metropolitan voters. Any claims that anyone anywhere in WA would in consequence be under-represented or disadvantaged, or not represented at all, are indefensible. The opponents of the reform should at least explain why they believe equal representation for all citizens in WA is wrong instead of whining about being victims. The views of metropolitan residents about their relative lack of representation in the state parliament should get proportional weight. This is not an issue that only affects regional voters.
Though that’s the great trick of Conservatives everywhere. The Senate (or equivalent) is a great place to gerrymander as you can claim that it acts as a check against the more populace states/metropolitan regions. You can then slow down reform and control the Parliament, even when you’re in Opposition.
It’s a joke though and is fundamentally bad more democracy.
So, good on McGowan. This is a necessary reform and the people of WA deserve it.
Agree 100%.
Excellent summary SSR. I have long held a bit of a grudge about the disproportionate representation of smaller states in the federal chamber, at one stage seeing a god bothering senator from Tasmania basically dictate public policy to John Howard. While much good work was done by him, and he stopped Howard doing some seriously wrong things. The nationals have a similar gerrymander position in the HOR federally, garnering a small percentage of the vote with outsized representation. I’d like to see a form of MMP so that the number of seats held by a party more closely aligned to their vote.
As you say, this might mean that metropolitan people end up in a greater say in how things are run. I think there is a name for that, aahhmmm, democracy. It’s certainly better than having a few cockies dictating to the overwhelming majority that we can’t take climate change seriously.
An end to the gerrymander in WA – which has worsened in recent years with something like 80% of WA’s population (in Perth metro) represented by just 50% of the upper house seats – is long overdue. However, it may have been fairer if there was a slight skew retained of 10% or so for regional, say by keeping country and metro divisions, of 8 and 22 respectively, when by population it would be 6 and 24 (compared with 15 and 15 at the moment). WA is a physically large state, with a lot more area to manage in country areas than city.
But the proposed change is so much fairer than the current one, so you can understand why McGowan would want to use the rare political opportunity to do it. And of course, the Nationals’ opposition is expected, given that their upper house gravy train has been scrapped.
I’m fascinated that you argue for retaining something of the current set up as a ‘slight skew’ in representation because of the (undeniable) differences in land surface area per voter between country and city. How exactly is that an argument for giving country voters more representation? And if we accept that equal representation for all is not appropriate, why not also accept any other reasonably arguable claim that any group of voters might make for extra representation? I could quite easily make a very long list of groups with reasons to ask for more representation. Of course, as the list of special interests and deserving causes gets longer they tend to cancel out.
The argument for giving regional voters a slightly bigger say is obvious to anyone who’s lived in regional WA, especially if they’ve lived outside of the south-west land division. If you live in a regional area, you are at a disadvantage compared to your metro peers according to every measure — income, life expectancy, unemployment, access to education, access to healthcare. It’s similar to the reason why we accept the Senate having 12 seats for each state regardless of population.
Yes, by those measures it’s all worse in regional WA. And those regions have always had excessive representation. So either the excess representation does not help, or it makes things worse. Perhaps all these extra parliamentarians are just helping the wealthy privileged few in the regions, and leaving the rest to rot. The majority population of the country regions might actually be a lot better off without them.
The reasons for equal representation of states in the federal senate are entirely different.
Conservatives around the world are basically anti-democratic. It is their way or the highway. The Taliban are conservative. Catholic anti-abortionists are conservative. Go figure.
One thing though. What about greater aboriginal representation? Do the WA reforms address this? Giving Perth a greater say over WA political decisions may result in a few more sacred sites being blown up.
Like I said in reply to David, having extra representation is what got the country regions to where they are now. It’s hardly likely any reform could make it easier to blow up sacred sites in future given there are no difficulties doing it now, and I don’t know any reason to think that metropolitan voters and their representatives would be any more likely to want sacred sites destroyed. And as I said in reply to PoPH and – and GL made the same point – once we agree we will not have equal representation for all why not also accept any other reasonably arguable claim that any group of voters might make for extra representation?
Having been 22 when Gough was dismissed in November 1975, I have spent a lifetime laughing at any claims by the various iterations of the Lib/Nat/DLP/ONP/UAP Coalitions that the system is loaded against them.
As someone who left Perth nearly half a century ago, can I welcome WA finally into the ranks of electoral democracies.
It’s not gerrymandering, it’s malapportionment. Big difference.
Malapportionment is the creation of electoral districts with divergent ratios of voters to representatives. For example, if one single-member district has 10,000 voters and another has 100,000 voters, voters in the former district have ten times the influence, per person, over the governing body.
Gerrymanders. The sort of manipulation of electorate boundaries that goes on in American state legislatures is known as ‘gerrymandering’. The aim is usually to draw boundaries that maximise the number of parliamentary seats won by a party on its available vote.
It’s both and is what enables the Nationals with a tiny fraction of the vote to control the nation with their fellow mad mutts
Do we have evidence which shows that the boundaries have been deliberately drawn for electoral advantage? Boundaries like Agricultural, Mining & Pastoral, and South West seem to be quite an intuitive expression of where people live and the industries which operate in those areas. Yes, it’s malapportionment (although supporters would justify it by saying it’s to account for massive inequalities between urban and regional WA), but we can’t say it’s gerrymandering.
Correct, David. Essentially a vote for Mining and Pastoral in WA upper house is worth 6 times a vote in South Metropolitan – that’s malapportionment. A gerrymander is what I used to have living in the lower house seat of Darling Range, when it was a 56km drive to the MP’s electoral office but only 39km to the CBD. The most ridiculous salamander shaped seat there was, although it was more the scrapings off the floor than any attempt by one party to gain an electoral advantage.
Mia, I think the question is, do you agree with the principle of one person one vote? Are you saying that certain postcodes should get extra votes? If you want to accord extra votes to certain postcodes based say on remoteness, would you be prepared be prepared to grant other postcodes extra votes on the basis of… I dunno, say numbers if people with an intellectual disability?
I hope very much nobody sinks so low as to suggest that your whimsical alternative for people to be favoured with extra representation would in practice look very like the current arrangement.
I’m just surprised that nobody tried to defend the current arrangement by saying that those in Perth who didn’t like their vote’s worth could always take a hike to regional WA.