PROPORTIONAL REPRESENTATION SOCIETY OF AUSTRALIA HAVING AN EFFECTIVE VOTE WOULD MAKE A GREAT DIFFERENCE Supplementary submission to the Joint Standing Committee on Electoral Matters following the double dissolution election of July 2016 Proportional Representation Society of Australia December 2016 Summary 1 Not a representative House 2 Table 1: Two-party-preferred support for successful candidates 4 Table 2: Two-party-preferred support where seats won in New South Wales or Victoria 5 Unjustifiable requirement that all preferences be marked 5 Improving the performance of the Australian Electoral Commission 7 Summary Voter engagement requires a belief that their efforts are worthwhile and might make a difference. Voters are well aware that most House of Representatives contests are determined once a dominant party’s preselection has been settled. Their instead having an effective vote in most circumstances would make a huge difference to the way that politics is presented to them and to the interest that they show in particular situations or campaigns. Nearly one-quarter of formal votes in the House of Representatives were not for Labor or Coalition candidates, compared with just over one-third in the Senate. Just over 3% of the House is drawn from those candidates compared with just over 26% of the Senate. One-third of MHRs, predominantly from the Coalition, were elected on first preferences alone. There were 17 instances where the final two candidates were not from Labor and the Coalition. The national division of 145 seats between the Coalition and Labor nearly followed the cube rule but relativities in the most populous states were more severely distorted by differences in the distribution of individual seat margins or overall two-party- preferred support. In particular, Coalition candidates dominated among the narrowest victors, Labor had a fairly uniform distribution of margins in its successful seats, and the Nationals mainly won by very large margins in New South Wales and Victoria. The final nature of the government’s majority was determined by the donkey vote in Herbert. Robson rotation should be introduced for the House of Representatives so that the conscious 1 preference markings of voters in individual seats are never overridden by the luck of the draw for places on the ballot paper. While House of Representatives informal voting under draconian requirements to indicate all preferences without omission or duplication was about 1.1% greater nationally than for the Senate, that gap was 2% or more in one-fifth of seats, quite a few of which changed hands or did not have the previous MHR standing again. A closer examination of these outliers as well as those seats where House informals were actually lower may offer useful insights into local factors and activity that had pronounced positive or negative effects. The Australian Electoral Commission should give greater priority to ensuring that training of casual polling officials equips them with confidence about accurately stating what constitutes a formal vote and marking off electors’ particulars as quickly as possible, especially when it is obvious queues are lengthening. Concerted efforts at quicker throughput should be made by polling supervisors when voters are waiting as long as half an hour. To assist in grounding analysis of internal and external factors contributing to delays, a record of the number of empty voting compartments should be made by each issuing officer who is handed a half- hourly post-it note by the elector who was recently at the end of the queue, The Joint Standing Committee should call for more details about the costs associated with identity checks and vetting of prospective senior casual polling officials, and any unintended consequences of the requirements to supply detailed documentation or the repeated automated phone calls made daily to those who had not yet submitted all of that material. Summary particulars of officials’ experience presented by the AEC appear implausible. Not a representative House In the House of Representatives, when 23.5% of first preferences were not for the Coalition or Labor in July 2016, candidates from other parties or independents won just five seats of 150 (3.3%) in the winner-take-all environment of single-member electorates, This compared with 20 seats out of 76 (26.3%) in an environment where 7.7% support guaranteed a place in any state, when 35.3% of Senate first preferences were not for the Coalition or Labor. Two of these seats were amongst Victoria’s thirty-seven (5.4%) when first-preference support other than for Labor or the Coalition was 22.7%. One of these seats was in each of Queensland (3.3%), South Australia (9.1%) and Tasmania (20%) where support for candidates endorsed by neither the Coalition nor Labor was noticeably higher, respectively at 25.9%, 33.4% and 26.7%. There were no such seats in New South Wales or Western Australia where respectively 20.75% or 18.85% of first preferences were not for Labor or Coalition candidates, nor in either of the territories where such support stood at 21.15% and 26.4% respectively. Such high levels of dissatisfaction with the contenders for government cannot be successfully suppressed indefinitely by the winner-take-all operation of single-member electorates. There were seventeen seats in which either a Labor or Coalition candidate did not figure in final two-candidate calculations, on six occasions involving the Greens and four times the Nick Xenophon Team. If the trend of a weakening aggregate first-preference vote for Labor or the Coalition continues, there is a possibility of an eventual significant breakout driven by dissatisfaction in 2 areas essentially too long taken for granted or the emergence of strong third forces that take many votes away locally from either one or both of the alternative governments. The emphasis on the need for localised support in the House of Representatives is also highlighted by the fact that the Australian Greens secured 10.2% of first preferences nationally and won a single seat, while the National Party won 7.5% of the vote in New South Wales and Victoria and emerged with ten seats out of eighty-four (11.4%) in those two states, nominating just seven unsuccessful candidates there compared with the Greens’ eighty-three. Independents obtained 2.8% first-preference support nationally and retained the two seats (1.3%) they held in the previous parliament. The Nick Xenophon Team achieved 21.2% of first preferences in South Australia but won just one of the eleven seats there. There is nothing fair to voters about current arrangements that leave one party or another dominant in regional blocs and the other without representation or sometimes even a credible local presence there. Quite often such areas continue to be taken for granted with little serious local policy debate or limited access to additional facilities in campaign promises unless a strong independent or third-force candidate emerges. All victories have the same effect irrespective of the margin. Just under one-third of all seats (48) were determined on first preferences, one-third of them being won by Labor candidates. Of the 145 seats won by Labor or the Coalition, forty-four have two-party-preferred support under 56% and sixty-five would require a swing of more than 10% to be lost to the alternative government. Disproportionate effort and largesse are poured into the small number of marginal electorates upon which government is expected to depend. Campaign attention and strategy are driven by assessments of whether there is a serious challenge or contest. Green inner-city hopes were dashed in New South Wales, and bolstered in Victoria although no further seats were won. All areas should have a serious contest of ideas and personalities. Much fewer than half the electorates fall into this category, especially in rural areas. National Party victories were huge except in Page and some Queensland seats. Voters in the ACT who experienced little federal activity concentrated mostly on the Senate contest found much more material in their letterboxes and extensive local candidate presence during the subsequent Hare-Clark election for the Legislative Assembly through five five- member electorates using the single transferable vote. The Coalition’s two-party-preferred majority in NSW did not translate into a seat majority there, while improvement in two-party-preferred support in Victoria for Labor was accompanied by the loss of one seat. A 4.6% swing against Liberal in South Australia did lead to a switch from a previous majority to a minority of seats. Winner-take-all propensities on display in Queensland, Western Australia, Tasmania and the territories where two-party- preferred support for one party or another was in each case above 54% ended up broadly determining the nature of the government that was formed. The overall national swing of 3.13% against the Coalition was comprised of swings of 1.62% in inner metropolitan electorates, 3.85% in outer metropolitan seats, 3.78% in provincial electorates and 4.07% in rural constituencies. While swings of 10% occurred in some new 3 seats or where boundaries significantly changed, most seats that changed hands experienced swings of less than 6%. There were twenty-four seats with two-party-preferred anti-government swings of more than 6%: five had swings beyond 10%, including Kennedy and three changing hands; five seats changed hands after swings of between 6 and 10%. In eighteen seats there was a swing to the government, with Chisholm at 2.8% won from Labor, and Murray. where a National and Liberal were the last two continuing candidates, improving for it by just above 4%. There were ten such seats in Victoria, four in Queensland including the hard-fought seats of Petrie, Griffith and Brisbane, three in New South Wales including the marginal electorate of Reid, and Curtin in Western Australia.