The Examiner newspaper in Launceston at the weekend made the extraordinary prediction of a 9-8-5 result to the Liberals in the Tasmanian election this Saturday, based on an EMRS poll. The problem is there are 25 seats in the Tasmanian House of Assembly, not 22. What about the other three seats, the critical ones? Perhaps the Examiner should just have admitted it and its analyst don’t have a clue.
At the other end of the scale, iElect is bravely showing 14-7-4 to the Liberals. iElect is an experiment in aggregating voter expectations of poll results to predict the result. People have to register with the site to record their prediction.
One of iElect’s developers, Andrew Scobie, one-time head of the Tasmanian Chamber of Commerce and Industry, explained to Crikey it is all about “the wisdom of crowds”.
“Consistent with popular publishing, the wisdom of crowds is just the rebadging of an old idea,” he said. “That idea is rather unfashionable but still true. Markets predict outcomes better than any other methodology. The stock market’s ability to predict price movements is superior to all individual pundits and any other approach.”
Given the result that the wisdom of this crowd is predicting, one is drawn to the suspicion the Liberals have rorted the iElect website to distort the result, the motive being to create an expectation among undecided voters of a Liberal win.
The election is going to be tight. Results of 10-10-5, 11-9-5, 11-8-6, 11-10-4 are all possible. You won’t see much money on iElect’s 14-7-4 or even the Libs getting a clear majority with 13 seats. That means minority government, in which attention turns to the Greens to try to understand the role they will play in deciding who governs.
I have argued that, apart from perhaps providing a speaker, the Greens will have little to offer Labor or the Liberals. Neither major party has to enter such an arrangement since the Greens would not move to bring down a government, even a minority government, in Tasmania unless the circumstances were so self-evident that not to do so would amount to dereliction of their duty — say, if the government is manifestly corrupt. By the same values, they would not oppose the passage of a Budget, so their bargaining power becomes limited.
Tasmanian Greens leader Nick McKim offers Crikey no explanation of what he describes as the “negotiated agreement” the party will offer to deliver stable government. McKim outlines a manifesto guaranteeing “stable, accountable and transparent government”. But at what price?
There are many areas of policy where he might seek to apply a lever on a minority government, even if just to provide Labor or the Liberals with a Speaker. Forestry policy, an end to clear-felling and the protection of high conservation value forests is the obvious lever he would extract from his grab-bag but neither party would accept it.
I have a long-term suggestion.
The Greens are committed to a return to a 35-seat House of Assembly, made up of seven members in the existing five electorates, which mirror Tasmania’s five federal electorates. Seven instead of five members in each electorate would return the quota of votes to win a seat in any of those electorates to 12.5% instead of the present 16.7%.
However, both major parties have also countenanced a 35-seat House, but they want to have five members in seven electorates, seven new electorates with no common ground to the federal electorates and would therefore be more expensive to maintain in terms of balancing voter numbers.
The attraction to the major parties of this configuration is five members in seven electorates maintains the quota to be elected at 16.7%. That is code for nailing the Greens. The Greens would have to be attracted to the party that committed to the Greens’ 35-seat formula of 12.5% quotas.
That would be better for the Greens obviously, but even the 7 seat version pretty much guarantees them a minimum of 5 seats, and up to 8, which still makes it very hard for majority government. I can’t see any alternative eventually to a full-on coalition between Labor and the Greens so that the Greens get stuck with some actual accountability, or a Lib-Lab coalition that becomes semi-permanent. Or of course single member electorates…
G’day Bruce
Bob from Burnie. The option for electoral reform that I have heard discussed involves dividing each Federal electorate in two, and electing three members from each of the new electorates. The quota required for election would reduce the Greens to one ,or at most, two members.
The difficulty would lie in selling this idea to an increasingly skeptical electorate, because it could not be sold as a cost saving a la 1998 reforms. However, the House worked quite well with 30 members from 1909 to 1959…
There’s a much simpler, less expensive, less open to manipulation, way of overcoming the problem. Maintain the current six seats per Federal Division, but add a second vote electing five members on a State-wide basis, giving you the 35 members many people seem to believe is better. Advantages include:
1) It continues the current system of seats based entirely on Federal boundaries, meaning State politicians can’t try to manipulate them for electoral advantage — as would be a danger with either Patrick Baumes’ “single member electorates”, or Bob’s “dividing each Federal electorate into two”.
2) There’s no need to set up an additional expensive buruacracy as would be the case if Tasmania moved away from its current system, which merely adopts the Federal Electorate boundaries.
3) Tasmanian voters would continue to enjoy their current advantage (not shared by any mainland State) of not having to worry about the confusion caused by overlapping different State and Federal Electorates.
4) Whichever Party gained the highest vote State-wide could hope to benefit from its overall support by gaining an extra seat, thus reducing the likelihood of the uncertainties often associated with hung Parliaments. That’s if, of course, you believe being the most popular Party is significant?
5) Parties would need to run campaigns which looked at important State-wide issues, rather than merely concentrating on whatever local issues are deemed to be potential vote winners locally, regardless of whether they’re in the best interests of the State as a whole. That might not suit some politicians, but I suspect that sometimes it could be a good thing for Tasmania as a whole.
6) I’ve only just come across this site, and haven’t had time to give it much thought, but believe readers will add a few more pluses.
Now for the arguments against — but I’ll leave that to politicians who benefit from either the current system, or the other alternatives being promoted by them.