I am not a big fan of psephology-like “what if”s, I had only written this a while ago to vent frustration, but this weeks reading for one of my subjects touched on some of the issues of democratic implementation and I got all fired up again.
The results of the Australian 2004 federal election are well known, but the most outrageous result is number of seats the nationals have compared to the greens in this regionally defined electoral system. These figures show that with 5.9% of the national vote the national party get 12 seats but the greens, with 7.2%, get no seats. While I will be the first to admit that the regional electorate system allows for voters to be able to hold their representatives accountable directly, the inequity in a 7% share party having no seats in a 150 seat parliament is far more of a problem for a system that claims to be democratically representative. And I can hear people mentioning the senate already, but the senate is not a good enough solution to these problems either, as it is not fully proportional because doing it state-by-state still lets the two party system dominate.
A good example of this senate problem is the Victorian reforms of the legislative council which break the stranglehold of the conservatives and make the system “fairer”. But it divides into “regions” which each have five members, and it while it might make in “fairer” for the two parties it looks not unlike tullymandering to me. In this day of telecommunications and the car and train is a regionally divided electoral system the fairest democratic implementation? And surely if we are to have two houses rather than a unicameral parliament we should have at least one of them as a fully proportional house rather than these half-measures.
A hypothetical unicameral federal parliament of 300 seats might have something like (this is rough working from the results) 3 One Nation members, 3 Democrats and 20 or so Greens. When the Liberals like Eric Abetz taunt Bob Brown for not being able to be in two places at once you have to wonder what they would say if there were twenty greens members able to campaign etc. And the most interesting thing from such a hypothetical parliament is that the current government would still hold power, so it’s not a radical change designed to favour one party. It’s a systemic change which attacks the duopoly of the major parties, and restores voice to the disenfranchised.
