There are ultimately many different ways a democracy can function. In Australia we use a modification of the Westminster system, whereby the Executive Branch of government (headed by the Prime Minister and their Cabinet) is drawn directly from the legislature. This contrasts with the American system, where the Executive is headed by a completely separate President, and the Cabinet (composed of 'Secretaries' rather than 'Ministers') is appointed by the President, rather than being elected to and drawn from congress. The American President also fulfills both of the roles of 'Head of Government' and 'Head of State', roles filled in Australia by the Prime Minister and Governor-General respectively (although technically the reigning British monarch still remains Australia's Head of State, much to the chagrin of those of us with any common sense).
In short, there are many variations on what we can call a 'democracy'. Each has their own pros and cons. In the wake of the 2013 Australian Federal elections, where the results were at times startlingly strange (the election to the Senate of a candidate from the little-known 'Motoring Enthusiasts' Party from Victoria and the even more obscure 'Sports Enthusiasts' Party from WA being the most egregious examples) many have started to wonder whether the Australian electoral system is in need of some reforms.
I think this is absolutely the case, here are my suggestions.
- Increase Senate candidacy fees
The current guidelines for forming a political party in Australia are pretty simple, and for the most part I have no desire to see them changed. To form one all you need is a $500 registration fee and the signatures of 500 people (who must of course be eligible voters listed on the electoral roll). These requirements are there as a modest barrier to prevent people forming any number of parties on a whim, or just for a joke (Britain for instance used to have a 'Monster Raving Loony' Party that was heavily inspired by Monty Python sketches).
In addition, if you want your party to actually run candidates than the fee for running for a seat in the Federal House of Representatives is currently $1000. This means that any party that wants to contest all 150 Australian lower house seats needs to scrounge $150,000 from somewhere. Typically only a handful of the larger minor parties, such as the Greens and Family First, can do this (it should also be noted that by winning more than 4% of the vote, on both lower house and Senate tickets, the candidate's party will then get its money back). This ensures that micro-parties only tend to be able to contest a limited number of seats. In the 2013 election over a thousand candidates ran nationwide, a record number, but the current system meant that no more than a dozen or so candidates ran in all but a handful of seats (the most was the division of Melbourne, containing Melbourne's CBD, which had 16 candidates). While increasing lower house candidacy fees might be necessary in future, at the moment the system is still workable.
The Senate however is a different matter, and the source of most of the problems that have many people complaining about the 'farce' Australia's electoral system has become. The fee to run as a candidate is double the lower house fee at $2000. For anyone out there who intends to reform Australia's democratic process this is the first area you probably want to look at. Since the Senate fee isn't all that much higher, and the corresponding ballot paper is distributed on a statewide basis rather than to individual electorates as is the case with the lower house, an impractically large number of candidates have been clogging up the ballot lately. This is particularly obvious in the larger states. In the 2013 election 97 different candidates were listed on the Victorian ballot and 110 on the New South Wales' ballot. The ballot was literally three-feet across. This is not practical, we simply can't have an electoral system where to go and vote properly you need to take the morning off.
The solution would seem to be simple, raise the fees. Instead of $2000, make it $5000, or even $10,000. Such fees may make it seem that the system is being unfair to minor parties, and to some extent this is true, but the case shouldn't really be that hard to argue. The argument should be framed as not trying to shut out minor parties, but just 'micro' parties. Remember of course that to run a candidate in every lower house seat nationwide requires fees totaling $150,000. If the fee for each Senate candidate is $10,000, then that translates into a nationwide cost of only $60,000, still considerably less than for the lower house overall.
Such extra fees could also serve as a small source of revenue. The 2007 and 2010 elections both cost about $160 million each to run. In 2013 there were over 500 Senate candidates nationwide. If they each paid $10,000 to run (though the idea of course is to decrease that number significantly) that would raise over $5 million, plus an extra $1 million and a bit from the lower house. Its not a very large number, but such fees do add up over time.
The result would be a more manageable political scene. The whole point of having a preferential voting system (and overall I think such a system is absolutely essential to any democracy) is to prevent the sort of monolithic, two-party duopoly that plagues many countries, notably the United States. The disadvantage the current system gives us is that instead of a two-party system, we have a hundred-party system.
A ten or fifteen-party system would be much more desirable, nor would it really reduce the diversity of our current political scene. Many micro parties seem basically redundant anyway. Do we really need a 'Rise Up Australia' Party and a 'Stable Population' Party alongside 'One Nation'? Couldn't we just arrange for all the bigots and xenophobes to gather in one party, rather than have multiple duplicates of them clogging up our Senate ballots? Do the 'Australian Christians' and 'Family First' really have to be separate parties? Why couldn't the 'Socialist Alliance', the 'Socialist Equality' Party and the 'Communist' Party all merge? Hell they might actually win upwards of one percent of the vote if they did. If the fee to run as a candidate was $10,000 or higher, then many such parties couldn't easily compete by themselves, and might be compelled to merge with similarly fringe political activists, simplifying the whole system. A greater degree of cooperation would be useful here.
- Voluntary preferential voting
This one should really be a no-brainer, and one wonders why
on Earth it hasn't already been introduced by now. Currently, there are two
ways of tackling the Senate ballot. You can either put a number ‘1’ in just one
box ‘above the line’, or you can number every single box ‘below the line’. An
above the line vote means that you’re not only voting for the party in
question, but you’re allowing your vote to be passed down whatever preference route
that party sees fit. i.e. if you voted for the Greens, eventually your vote
will presumably end up with the Labor Party rather than the Liberals.
A ‘below the line’ vote means you’ve decided to order your
preferences how you see fit. Given that in the 2013 election some States had
ballots with around a hundred different candidates, only 2% of people now
choose this option. This has led to the practice, undesirable to say the least,
of minor parties swapping their preferences with other parties based not on
their ideological similarities, but just on their size. i.e. minor left-wing
parties will tend to preference minor far-right parties over the major parties.
In this past election preferences from the Sex Party (a socially progressive
party, basically the opposite of Family First) helped elect a candidate from
the ‘Liberal Democrats’ in NSW. The Liberal Democrats are a far-right ‘libertarian’
party that is vehemently anti-taxation and anti-government. It is doubtful that
most Sex Party voters, who would probably see themselves as overwhelmingly
progressive, knew what they were getting themselves into.
So the solution is really quite simple, and wouldn't even
require a change to the layout of the ballot. The ‘above the line’ option would remain unchanged, while as for the ‘below the line’ option voters should no longer have
to fill out every box, but just as many as they see fit. You could write just
one number, or five, or dutifully fill all of them out. So if you wanted to vote for the Sex Party, but also make sure your preferences didn't end up right-of-center, you could put Sex Party first, the Greens second, then Labor third, and that's it. Beyond that your vote would disappear off into the aether, rather than run the risk of it ending up with a party you didn't want to vote for in the first place. Simple yes?
- Make the Senate nationally proportionate
There are three main reasons why Australia has a second house of parliament. The first is for it to be a 'house of review'. Senators are elected to six year, rather than three/four year, terms. This serves the purpose of stabilizing our political system, meaning that even a large swing in the lower house against a sitting government may not translate into a new party also gaining control of the senate, and thus the entire parliament.
Secondly, it is the main arena in which minor parties can have a say. While minor parties and independents rarely hold the balance of power in the lower house, this is the norm in the Senate. It is also a way of combating gerrymandering, which can affect any parliament that is composed of representatives from individual electorates rather than through proportional representation. On many occasions a party can gain power with a slim majority of seats, and yet have received somewhat less than half the vote. Ideally this should not occur in the Senate.
This concern though, also ties into the third reason, which is that the Senate is also meant to be a 'state's house'. When the six Australian colonies federated in 1901 it was a necessary compromise that an equal number of senators were to represent each state. Herein lies a big problem. The Senate suffers from a distortion far greater than any caused by the electorate system of the lower house. Each of Australia's six States (not to mention it's territories) have different populations. New South Wales has over seven million people, while Tasmania has half a million. This means that a Tasmanian voter has roughly 15 times as much representation in the federal Senate as a NSW voter.
This system is unfair, obsolete, and ideally should be changed. Australia has been a unified country now for over a hundred years. There is no realistic prospect of its federation being dissolved (despite the hollow complaints of Western Australians whenever the Federal government tries to impose a new mining tax). Members of the Senate would instead be chosen based on a nationwide proportionate system.
This ultimately means that the voting system would not change a great deal. A quota would now be just over 1.3% of the national vote, rather than 14% or so of the vote in any of the six states (or in reality twice that at 2.6%, if Senators continued to serve 6 year terms). In the 2013 election the coalition was able to win 33 Senate Seats, Labor 25 and the Greens 10. Between them the three biggest parties were able to control 89% of the Senate with 76% of the vote.
By comparison, under a nationwide proportional voting system, the composition of the senate would be as follows, looking at the 2013 results counted out so far -
Liberal/National - 37.43% - 28.4 seats
Labor - 30.45% - 23.1 seats
Greens - 8.69% - 6.6 seats
Palmer United - 5.06% - 3.8 seats
Liberal Democrats - 3.77% - 2.9 seats
Xenophon Group - 2.11% - 1.6 seats
Australian Sex - 1.38% - 1.1 seats
Others - 10.7% - 8.1 seats
Approximately 58 out of 76 Senate seats would be held by the three major parties, or about 76%, which lines up properly with the portion of the vote that they won. A mix of the major and minor parties would control the remaining 18 seats (as there would be quite a lot of major party votes left over and, depending on how the preferences flowed, they could win a few more) again lining up appropriately. Since parties would have to compete on a national level, and combined with preferential voting being made voluntary, this should help prevent the ascension to the Senate of tiny, single-issue, Mickey Mouse parties like the Motoring Enthusiasts from Victoria or the Sports Party from WA. The latter has apparently been elected to the senate despite winning only 1900 votes, or a fifth of one percent of the WA electorate. Given that no party controls a majority in the Senate, it is perfectly possible that some bills will pass or fail in the next three years based on the whims of a candidate elected by such a tiny number of people. This is not democratic and steps should be implemented to prevent it from reoccurring.
While it would be ideal, there are two reasons why such a system will probably not come about any time soon. First of all, Senators from minor States would surely protest against it. Tasmania, South Australia, Western Australia and the Territories have 5.3 million people between them, only a quarter of Australia's population, yet together have a 40-36 majority in the Senate. Tangent to this is the likelihood that at least one of the major parties would be opposed to it because they happen to be stronger in those smaller states. Given that Labor tends to dominate in Tasmania, South Australia and the ACT, it would likely be them.
Secondly, there's a fair chance that both major parties would oppose it anyway, because it would erode their power compared to minor parties in general. Labor, the Coalition, and even the Greens are probably pretty happy with their current, privileged situation where they are able to control 9/10 of the Senate with 3/4 of the votes.
Also worth noting
- Stick with compulsory balloting
Amid these other arguments, one that is often brought up is whether Australia should end compulsory voting entirely. There are various arguments either way, but ultimately I am still in favor of the practice. Most of the arguments against it run something along the lines of - 'no one should be forced to cast a vote, as it infringes upon their civil liberties'. These arguments are neatly countered by the fact that voting is not technically compulsory, only balloting is. All any Australian citizen is required to do is register on the electoral roll, turn up at a polling station on election day (or a pre-poll station shortly beforehand or submit a postal vote), take a ballot, go into the voting booth, then come out and submit that ballot in a box. What a voter does in the voting booth is, to use an old cliche, between them and God. It is completely private, and there is no way someone can be prosecuted for not marking the ballot, or filling in out improperly. About 5% of ballots cast in Australian elections fall under this definition, being called 'informal ballots'. Nor is Australia unique in having such a system. 22 countries worldwide have compulsory voting systems, although only about ten of them regularly enforce it.
Wikipedia's article on Compulsory voting neatly sums up the arguments for and against it here - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compulsory_voting
- I know its tired but...yes, the Republic
This is so long overdue it borders on the ridiculous. There have been plenty of other essays written on this topic over the years, so I imagine everything worth saying has already been said on this issue. I would just like to note here that I am absolutely in favor of Australian becoming a Republic. I would also favor the minimalist model, whereby things pretty much stay the way they are. All that really changes is that we take a marker to the constitution and wherever it says 'Governor-General' we cross it out and write 'President'. The President would continue to be appointed by the Prime Minister and remain a ceremonial position, and would completely replace the reigning British monarch of the time as Australia's official Head of State. This is another reform that should really be a no-brainer.
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