Ben Raue Thursday 30 April 2015
If small parties want to win Senate seats, they can still do it without group voting tickets. Proposed reforms actually would make them accountable to voters
Independent South Australian senator Nick Xenophon. Photograph: Mike Bowers for the Guardian
The Senate is a key part of Australia’s democracy, but the electoral system used to elect the Senate is broken, and reform is urgently needed to ensure that the Senate is able to continue to democratically represent the Australian people.
Under the current system, a number of seats are effectively decided not by the popular vote, but by a “preference lottery” where backroom deals can deliver power to a candidate with a miniscule vote.
A proposed change to the system, agreed to by a parliamentary committee in 2014, would fix this problem.
The proposed Senate electoral reform would eliminate the power of parties to automatically direct their voters’ preferences (using “group voting tickets”) without their knowledge.
It defies belief that the Liberals would lock themselves into a hostile Senate David Leyonhjelm Changing the system to lock out minor parties isn’t an improvement to our democracy, and could be a disaster for the Coalition government
Voters could instead direct their own preferences, and if parties want to influence those preferences they could give advice by handing out how-to-vote cards – advice voters would be free to accept or reject, as in the House of Representatives.
This reform would also make it much easier to cast a formal below-the-line vote.
The current system has allowed parties to direct preferences in ways that their voters don’t understand, or wouldn’t endorse. When very few people see your preferences, it’s easy to play political games and direct preferences to candidates who don’t align with your principles.
In recent years, small parties have gotten better at swapping preferences amongst themselves, often amongst parties with opposite ideologies. This has allowed micro-party candidates to leapfrog candidates with much larger votes and win seats on tiny votes.
Ricky Muir of the Motoring Enthusiasts party, for example, only polled 0.51% of the primary vote in Victoria in 2013, and defeated candidates from nine other parties who polled more votes but didn’t win a seat.
Often the winner of this “preference lottery” is decided by the precise order in which candidates are knocked out, and ephemeral matters such as the appeal of a party’s name and their position on the ballot paper.
With this lottery allowing candidates to win with miniscule votes, it’s encouraged more and more parties to register and run more candidates. In 2013, the number of registered parties more than doubled to 54, up from 25 in 2010.
This results in bigger ballot papers, making it harder for voters to find their preferred party, and increasing the value of drawing a position near the front of the ballot paper.
The preference lottery also tends to produce a large number of points in the count where a very small number of votes can change the result. In 2013, a gap of 14 votes between two candidates (neither of whom had any chance of winning) was critical to how two Senate seats were filled in Western Australia. This triggered a state-wide recount, which then ended up with a very costly Senate re-election.
This problem will continue to get worse, as more people see their chance of striking it lucky and winning six years in the Senate as the grand prize. The problem would be even more extreme if there was a double dissolution, where the quota would be halved and more candidates would be elected on even smaller votes.
The proposed reform maintains the Senate’s proportional representation system, which allows minority parties such as the Greens and Palmer United party to win seats. Preferences will still matter, but those preferences will be in the hands of voters, not backroom party apparatchiks.
This system has existed in New South Wales since the 2003 election, after the 1999 election saw a huge number of parties registered, and candidates with no public profile elected. It has worked very well and a number of small parties have still won seats. The Greens, the Christian Democratic party and the Shooters and Fishers regularly win seats, and the Animal Justice party recently won their first seat under this system.
The current ticket voting system doesn’t just allow small parties to win on a negligible vote – it also allows the major parties to act in concert to lock out rivals.
In the past, the Senate preference system was used by the major parties to lock out alternative voices, with the Coalition and Labor working in concert in 1984 to preference each other over Nuclear Disarmament Party candidates such as Peter Garrett. Victorian Labor acted in a similar way when they preference Steve Fielding ahead of the Greens in 2004.
The proposed reform would still allow small parties to win seats in the parliament. Estimates suggest that the Liberal Democratic party and the Palmer United party would have still won seats, and Nick Xenophon may well have elected a second candidate on his ticket.
We don’t know how the changed system would affect the way parties work, and who would end up in the balance of power – we may well see a consolidation of tiny parties, as striking backroom preference deals becomes less important, and winning votes becomes more important.
If small parties want to win seats in the Senate without group voting tickets, it can still be done. It’s much easier than winning a seat in the House of Representatives, but to do so they will need to go out and talk to voters, and win a small but solid slice of the vote – and that’s a good thing.
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