Labor, Liberal aim to trim democracy
By Allen Myers
The NSW Labor government on June 2 announced plans to further restrict democracy in the state's electoral system. The measures, expected to be endorsed by the Coalition, will be put to a referendum, probably on September 11.
Premier Bob Carr's government is proposing to reduce the number of Legislative Council members from 42 to 34, thus increasing the size of an electoral quota from 4.5% to 5.5%. In addition, it wants to exclude from preference distribution parties which receive less than 3% of first preference votes.
Parties which do not already have an MP would need to register 1000 members and pay a fee of $3500. They would have to be registered a full year before an election.
These plans are part of an Australia-wide campaign that for several years has been seeking to make elections for state and federal upper houses less democratic in order to exclude smaller parties. These efforts involve a certain historical irony.
The state upper houses were set up with the intention of representing the propertied classes; they generally included appointed members and/or had property restrictions on who could vote for or sit in them. As legislative assemblies were established with a relatively democratic franchise, the legislative councils were seen as a protection for property against the danger that "extremists" might gain a majority in the lower houses.
Other undemocratic features of upper houses were extremely long terms, spread over two parliaments to prevent rapid changes, and electoral gerrymandering that gave a greater weight to conservative, usually rural, electors.
Over the years, however, many of these undemocratic features were modified or done away with — in the case of Queensland, the upper house itself was abolished.
Breaking the monopoly
More democratic electoral procedures for some upper houses, especially proportional representation, have provided a certain opportunity for voters to express their increasing dissatisfaction with the two major parties. As the vote for independents and small parties has grown, the major parties have gone looking for "reforms" that might restore their monopoly over the electoral system.
Today there is a considerable range in the degree of democracy of upper house elections. In the best cases, NSW and South Australia, upper house elections treat the entire state as a single electorate, and representation is proportional; this makes upper house elections in those states more democratic than elections for the lower house, based on single-member electorates.
(However, both SA and NSW still elect only half of the Legislative Council at each election, which denies voters the right to make a rapid and more sweeping change in their representation. NSW voters, for example, are now stuck with One Nation's David Oldfield for eight years.)
On a federal level, the Senate has also been elected proportionally since 1949. Equal numbers of senators from each state make a vote in a small state more influential than a vote in a big state, which is inherently undemocratic. But in recent years there have not been big differences in the way voters in big and small states cast their ballots, so this feature has not greatly skewed the overall membership of the Senate.
While John Howard complains that the Senate won't recognise his "mandate" and makes threats about "reforming" Senate elections, the reality is that Howard's solid majority in the House of Representatives was achieved with only about 39% of first-preference votes. The numbers in the Senate, elected proportionally, are a much better reflection of the way the country voted.
NSW vote
Much the same was true of the NSW election in March: the results in the Legislative Council were a better reflection of voters' wishes than the results in the Legislative Assembly.
In the upper house, Labor won 37.3% of first-preference votes and 38% of the seats. The Coalition received 27.4% of votes and 28.6% of the seats. Independents and smaller parties received 35.3% of votes and 33.3% of seats.
In the lower house, however, Labor has 55 MPs, or 59% of the total, although it received only 42.2% of first-preference votes. The Coalition is slightly over-represented, with 35.5% of Legislative Assembly seats from 33.7% of first-preference votes.
And if anything, these figures must underestimate how much single-member electorates rort the result in favour of the big parties. First, smaller parties can't afford to stand in every electorate, so many voters have no opportunity to vote for them. Second, some voters presumably vote for Labor or the Coalition in the lower house only because they know their preferred candidate cannot win.
These factors help to explain why the combined vote for Labor and the Coalition is 11% higher in the Legislative Assembly than in the Legislative Council.
The Sydney Morning Herald headlined its front-page article on the Carr government's plans: "Push to axe minnow MPs". It was a good, though perhaps accidental, choice of words: if it succeeds, it will leave in state parliament only the sharks.
There is nothing defensible about any of the government's proposals. They are a grab bag of any available measure to make it more difficult to vote for small parties, and to discount or ignore the votes of those who do manage to cast such a ballot.
The $3500 registration fee is particularly obnoxious: there is no more reason to charge people for standing for office than there is to charge them for voting.
The one-year requirement, like that for 1000 members, seems designed to stop activist groups from taking their views to a broader public. Under such a rule, the Nuclear Disarmament Party, which received around 10% of the vote in two states in the 1984 federal election and elected one senator, would not have been allowed to stand.
As if all this were not enough, the government has an additional proposal to ensure that any small party candidates elected to the Legislative Council cannot have any real effect on legislation: if the upper house twice rejected or amended a bill passed by the lower house, the government could call a joint sitting with the power to pass the bill.
Only a government with the slimmest of majorities would not have the numbers to turn the Legislative Council into an empty debating society.
Abolition?
The Liberal Party's former state leader, Peter Collins, welcomed the government's plans even more enthusiastically than did current leader Kerry Chikarovski. Collins went further, calling for an additional referendum on abolishing the Legislative Council.
Treasurer Michael Egan, who is managing the government's proposals, is also known to favour abolition of the upper house.
When upper houses were elected on restricted franchises and other undemocratic rules, their abolition was a traditional demand of the labour movement and of democrats generally. The principle, however, should be to make parliaments as democratic as possible; it doesn't matter whether they are called "legislative assemblies" or "legislative councils".
There is no need for a second chamber in the parliament of any country that is not a real federation (that is, a federation of distinct peoples). All Australian parliaments should be single chambers, but they should be elected democratically, by proportional representation.
In NSW today, the simplest way to make parliament more democratic would be to elect the entire Legislative Council at each election, and to abolish the Legislative Assembly. The last thing democrats should do is support either abolition or undermining of the more democratically elected house of parliament.