A couple of days ago, ABC election analyst Antony Green called for rules to make it harder for political parties to be registered in Australia. (The YouTube video is above, or you can click here for a link to it, or click here for a transcript if you don’t want to watch the vid.)
While there’s a real problem he’s trying to solve, his solution is undemocratic and will make it harder for legitimate minor parties to contest elections. However, there’s another solution, far more democratic, which was first suggested at least nine years ago by someone who also has a lot of knowledge of Australian elections: ABC election analyst Antony Green.
In the interview above, Green explains that so many parties have registered for this year’s Federal Senate elections that the Australian Electoral Commission may need to issue magnifying glasses so that people can read the ballot paper properly. When asked by the interviewer if electronic voting is a solution, he says that will still leave the problem of too many candidates standing for election. Instead, he proposes:
“The solution they’ll have to come up with is to tighten the rules for registration of parties and rules for nomination. That’s happened at this election; they’ve doubled the deposit and doubled the number of nominators but what’s happened is a surge in minor parties, which means the new nomination rules are overcome. And if parties are prepared to put up $4000 they get on the ballot paper”.
This needs some background information to grasp fully:
At the moment, to register a party, you have to submit the names of 500 enrolled voters to the Australian Electoral Commission. The AEC takes several months to check these names – it’s known that they will send mail to at least some of those voters’ addresses, and if the mail is not responded to in writing, that’s one name they will refuse to count towards the 500. If the AEC decides there’s enough names, and some other formalities are met, the new party becomes official.
As Green explains in the interview, this leads to several privileges for the party. The most important one is that they don’t need to find 100 people to nominate each candidate they want to run for the Senate, which is what you have to do if you want to run but aren’t backed by a party. So the party is assured they’ll be able to be on the Senate ballot paper if they come up with $4000 to nominate two candidates. And THAT means they can start making deals with your vote. The next bit will explain how that works.
When two or more people run for the Senate, they can form a “group”. Each of those groups gets one box “above the line”, and instead of writing down a number next to every single candidate, you can just put a “1″ in the box for your favourite group, and they’ll take care of the rest. By “take care of the rest”, I mean someone from the party gets to decide exactly where your vote goes if the group you voted for doesn’t win a seat. For instance, let’s take a simple example:
There are 11 voters and three candidates, Labor, Liberal and Green. Let’s say Labor and Liberal each get five votes, and the Green gets one. Because the Green has the fewest votes they drop out, and if the Green voter just put a “1″ in the Green box, then the Green Party – NOT the voter – gets to decide if that vote goes to Liberal or Labor. So (in this case) the Green Party gets to decide who wins the election.
In a normal Senate election, it takes around 16% of the vote to get elected. If you control a party that has, say 4% of the vote, then you have enough votes for around a quarter of a seat. If you get really lucky, you might win a seat. (It’s happened several times before) But even if you don’t, who knows what sort of deal you can make to pass on that 4% to someone who needs it? Green alluded to this in the last part of the interview:
“And the reason so many small parties come on the ballot paper is because of the ticket voting system. If they didn’t have that they’d have no chance of getting elected and they wouldn’t nominate in the first place”.
This incentive for people who understand the system to game it has led to ridiculously-large ballot papers, including an infamous “tablecloth” ballot paper in an election in New South Wales in 1999, which was one metre wide by 700mm deep – Green displays this in the video.
As quoted above, Green states in the interview that the solution is to tighten the rules for registering a party. Presumably this means increasing the number of enrolled voters you have to get to support you to become a party. Another potential change might be to say a new party needs a certain number of members in each state to register, as well as a certain number of members across the country. Or maybe the amount of money you need to pay to nominate for Parliament would be increased (again). I think any such rule changes are undemocratic and mean that genuine small parties with a case to make to the Australian voters get swept away along with the opportunists who are gaming the system.
There is, however, one simple solution that would take almost no public resources to change, that would reduce the incentive for parasites to grab little bits of electoral power while keeping the bar at the right level so genuine political movements can contest elections if they choose: “Above the line optional preferential voting”.
And in 2005, Green recommended exactly that to a Parliamentary committee looking at the 2004 election (along with a number of other recommendations (pdf file)):
Recommendation 11: A new form of above the line voting similar to that which applies in the New South Wales Legislative Council be adopted. Electors should be allowed to express preferences for parties above the line in the same way that they can express preferences for candidates below the line. Ideally this should be adopted with optional preferential voting…
This would change everything we discussed earlier in the example election. If you really just wanted to vote Green, you would just vote “1″ Green – but that wouldn’t let the Green Party make any deals about where your vote goes. If the Green party didn’t win, your vote would stop being counted after they get drop out of contention. If you really wanted Green to win, but wanted Liberal to win if Green couldn’t, you could vote “1″ Green and “2″ Liberal. This would completely take away the power of small parties to decide where your vote goes.
To give an example of how this works in real life: In the 2011 New South Wales Legislative Council election, the Family First Party got 55,000 votes. When the last Family First candidate got knocked out, 52,000 of those votes also dropped out (pdf file) – they didn’t go anywhere else because the voters didn’t say they should go anywhere else. In the current rules for the Federal Senate, however, the Family First Party would have got to say exactly where those votes went, no matter what the voters wanted. There were also only 16 groups running for the election, although the rules for setting up a political party to run in NSW state elections are a little tighter than the Federal rules.
So while I agree we need to reform the way the rules for our Senate elections work, the fairest way is not to make it harder to become a party – it’s to make it harder for parties to game the system. Adopting optional-preferential above-the-line voting makes it harder for micro-parties to harvest votes and make deals, so all groups that have a vision to put to the Australian people, large or small, get to have a go.
Filed under: Minor parties, Parliament, Senate, Voters / voting
