Australian Senate Electoral Reform: Close, but no Cigar

In Australia, we have a great, albeit complicated-in-the-back-end, system for electing senators. Not only is it proportional so that smaller parties can get represented, but it's preferential, so people aren't pushed towards 2-3 parties due to a fear of wasting their vote.

In practice, almost every person just votes for a single party, and the party's own preferences for how that vote should be distributed are followed. This is called a Group Voting Ticket, or GVT. The effort of a person specifying all their own preferences, or even learning about more than a couple of different parties' policies, is enough to deter about 96% of the population from numbering every box for every candidate, which often reaches about 200 in total, which until recently, was the only alternative to following a party's GVT.

One area where there has been a lot of argument is that the way GVTs were being created wasn't fair, because they allowed parties to agree how to game the system by preference sharing in a way that was technically visible to voters, but invisible in practice, creating strange bedfellows. This allowed election of senators with sub-1% of the first preference votes to win seats after preference distribution.

Lack of transparency is an issue, but I have no problem with preferential voting systems allowing the election of people who would not have been foreseen in a non-preferential system. That's what preferences are for, after all: electing consensus candidates, rather than extremists who win a non-preferential plurality.

So, a reform that's just been made, specifically designed to exclude many minor parties from doing what was done in the last election - winning seats against the odds - has been enacted. (The government says the problem is that those who were elected in this way are not representative of Australia, but looking at the individual senators makes it clear they are far more representative of Australia than the major parties' senators.) The reform sounds reasonable, being that a person can preferentially number party boxes - as many as they'd like to express their preferences - instead of one party box or all candidate boxes.

The problem with this reform, however, is that it throws the baby out with the bathwater: some parties, specifically Pirate Party Australia in my experience, use preference deals with other parties in an open, transparent and honest way, and those parties will now be penalised by the unaddressed problem with this reform: most people still don't know enough about all the political parties, or care enough about how the system works, to vote for more than a few pairs at the top of their mind. Preferences will now be left unspecified, even where they would have clearly aligned with a voter's honest preferences.

I appreciate that the Australian Greens have said that they have had this reform as their policy for 12 years, so there should be no surprise to anybody, but the public debate was non-existent, and most people would have no clue about some old Greens policy that has had very little airtime over the intervening years. There was no Australian Law Reform Commission request for opinions, followed by a report, which would be standard practice for such an important reform.

Pirate Party Australia was calling for a, now possibly useless, non-partisan royal commission to consider different approaches that would be fair (to the voters, not the status quo). I would like to think that one solution that could have come out of that would have been this: Allow people to specify their own party preferences, just like in the current reform, but for any unspecified preferences, follow the preferences of the party in the voter's first preference.

For example, if party A had a GVT of A, B, C, D, E, F, and a voter voted A, F, D, then that would be translated into A, F, D, B, C, E.

This slight tweak to the system would have been the best of all worlds: Voters would be free to specify their own preferences, without too much effort and without relying on backroom party deals, parties could have worked with like-minded parties to ensure that votes aren't exhausted, and thereby wasted, and most of the power to exploit GVTs would have been removed.

Maybe this idea can be revisited after the upcoming election, but with all those independent voices set to be wiped out and a resulting, further entrenchment of power upon us, I'm not holding my breath.

Third-party Primaries League

The U.S. has a First Past the Post (FPTP) voting system, which I'm sure just about everyone out there knows. It means that a candidate can win an election with a plurality of the vote, rather than a majority, i.e. the highest number of votes, rather than more than one half of the votes.

To highlight why this is a problem, consider this:
- One candidate, who believes in X, and disagrees with Y, gets 10% if the vote
- Ten candidates, who believe in Y and disagree with X, each get 9% of the vote.

Who wins? The pro-X candidate.
Who should win? Anyone but the pro-X candidate.

That example is a bit contrived, but you only need 3 candidates to see the problem in practice. Think of Ralph Nader taking a couple of percent of the vote in 2000. Most of the Naderites would otherwise have voted for Al Gore. If that had happened, the difference in the election would have been too pronounced for Diebold to have gotten away with handing the election to George Bush.

Anyway, countries like Australia have solved this by using a preferential voting system. There are plenty of ways of implementing preferential voting, and Australia's is a little bit mathematically flawed, but it's far better than FPTP. It allows voters to specify who they want to win, in a decreasing order of preference, so that if there first choice gets too few of the votes, their next preference will be chosen, down the line, until one of their preferences is in the top two.

The benefit of this is that it recognises that everyone wants different things, and builds compromise into the electoral system. It seems that most Australians don't really understand how the system works, so they still vote for one of the two major parties. There are even plenty of people who complain when the system works so well that a third-party candidate actually wins a seat.

But back to America... FPTP voting forces people into voting for one of two options, because anything else is a waste. It takes a massive, expensive campaign to run as a third-party candidate, because more people need to have you at the forefront of their minds than anyone else, rather than finding you the least objectionable in aggregate.

So, why not have a third-party primary league? Get all the free-thinkers, radicals, liberals, crackpots, conservatives, fascists and civil libertarians who are not affiliated with the establishment to joust it out to see which one of them gets to compete in a given election against the establishment.

It could be the latest reality TV show, which would solve the problem of publicity and allow the winner to compete on a relatively even playing field. If the compromise results for the third spots were good enough, and some of the candidates started winning elections, then the U.S. might even consider moving towards a preferential voting system overall, which would break the back of the two-party system once and for all.

It could be called Little Brother.

What do you think?

The Occupy Process

I finally went along to OccupyMelbourne today. I brought along enough ingredients to make about 80 sandwiches, and the UPS from my computer, in order to offer people the ability to charge mobile devices.

I thought the story I would find would be the expected one about the right to freedom of assembly or a protest about, at its root, a lack if government transparency and accountability. These are real issues, being dealt with as primary problems by the movement, but the real story is the meta one. It is about a system of decision making that far exceeds what is in place in our parliament, which by contrast seems primitive.

The Final Solution to the Problem of the Boat People

I've been listening to Gillard, Abbot et al arguing about how best to come up with a final solution to the problem of the boat people, and while I can believe they're acting like this, it still totally disgusts me how partisan the Australian parliament is, at the expense of the human rights of those already at risk.

I was saying as soon as the High Court decision came down about the Malaysian solution that Labor would probably try to change the Migration Act. If Liberal were in power, they'd be doing the same thing, human rights be damned. The only reason Liberal are trying to block it is because they're not in power.

I don't know if I've blogged about it already, but this is an almost perfect example of how democracy can be abused by partisanship and factionalism:

Hung parliaments are good for society

Lots of people have been talking about the likely outcome of the Australian election, which is that we will end up with a hung parliament. I have heard opinions that Australian voters have somehow messed up, and that our country will be somehow crippled. I disagree.

I think that a hung parliament is the best outcome in this election, if it eventuates, and I have been hoping for just this to happen. Here's why:

Unless you live in Julia Gillard's electorate, or Tony Abbott's electorate, then no matter what the major parties tell us, you are not voting for Julia Gillard or Tony Abbott. People vote for someone to represent the interests of their electorate, and those of the state, and those of the country. It is a corruption that has led to the situation where people vote for a political party instead of a representative. That corruption is bloc voting.

Let's say that there is a faction in the Labor party that is just over half the size of the party. And let's say that just over half of that faction votes against supporting gay marriage. That faction becomes bound to vote against gay marriage. Sorry Penny Wong. Anyway, now that faction votes within the Labor caucus to oppose gay marriage, which binds the whole party. So, now Labor has to vote against gay marriage. And let's now assume that Labor has just over half the parliament. Because Labor votes with one voice, just over one eighth of the parliament has managed to force through their policy, without even asking the rest of the MPs what they think. This might be an extreme case (though due to the opaque nature of negotiations, we don't really know), but it highlights the issue: A small minority of MPs can force through a policy that binds all of Australia, even though the issue is not core to the electorates or even the party they claim to represent.

So now that no party has a majority in either house of parliament, the bloc voting can only work up to the level of the party, and neither party can pass legislation without the help of a few independents. These independents get elected, despite not having a major party name associated with them, because they work to represent the interests of their electorates. Hopefully, and I may be a bit idealistic here, these independents will require more than "because we told you so" as a reason to pass legislation. Legislation will still be passed, but there will have to be more deliberation, which should help to filter out crap like Internet censorship and the ACTA treaty.

It could even lead to individual MPs taking the same kind of stand that the independents get by default. Kate Lundy might grow the metaphorical balls to vote against Internet censorship or Penny Wong might realise that it's a matter of conscience to redefine marriage to mean something that wouldn't cause Alan Turing to kill himself.

As for who should be Prime Minister, that ill-defined face of the country, well, it's obvious really. Same as everything else, if the bloc voting can be broken, then all the MPs just have an internal election. If I remember correctly, ministers are a real position, according to our constitution, but the PM is not. The PM, if one must exist, should just be an ephemeral position. Whoever has the confidence of the parliament, for a time and for a task, is PM. Things should be expected to change, without the need for knives or tears. This system would result in an understanding that would prevent such complaints like "I voted for Rudd to be PM. I don't want Gillard," because the recognition would return that people only vote for their own representative, rather than a party or a PM.

Anyway, I am making chicken soup for a sick wife, so enough rambling from me...