Democratic dysfunction in thumping Queensland result

The Red Corner boxer who has been knocked out in the first 30 seconds of the first round by the Boxer in the Blue Corner is not in much of a position to claim “we wuz robbed”.

But Labor in Queensland was robbed. It won 27 per cent of the vote and only nine per cent of the seats.

The LNP should have won, and won handsomely, but it should not have won 87 per cent of the seats with a whisker under 50 per cent of the vote. It got 38 seats more than it should.

Sure, an exact correlation between percentage of votes and percentage of seats is hard to obtain and any system that yields it has the downside of the Government having to deal with shrapnel parties and the instability of multi-party coalitions. Israel is a case in point.

But there is a happy medium somewhere.

The theoretical extremes illustrate the problem: 100 per cent of the seats with 50.1 per cent of the vote. Fifty per cent of the seats (and government) with 25 per cent of the vote.

And lots of undemocratic points in between, such as what happened in Queensland.

The democratic dysfunction in the single-member system occurs in two instances. The first is where the party with more than 50 per cent of the two-party-preferred vote did not get government while the one with less than 50 per cent did. This has happened five times federally since 1949 (one election in five), and many times at state level.

The second is where one party gets more than around 60 per cent of the vote and attains a swamp effect of capturing nearly all the seats. Or quite a lot less than 60 per cent if a lot of votes are wasted to minor parties. In this situation the second party, which is supposed to provide an Opposition, becomes a rump of just a few seats, despite getting a quarter or more of the vote. This happened in Queensland.

In a way, this is more harmful for democracy than the first form of democratic dysfunction.

A rump cannot form an effective Opposition. Its small talent pool diminishes its parliamentary performance. Its reduced staff numbers prevent it from doing to the research work needed to develop effective and credible alternative policies.

The Opposition does not have enough MPs to engage in the committee work to ensure accountability of the executive and balanced policy development.

And electorate representational work suffers overall because government MPs are less likely to rock the boat on behalf of constituents.

Also, many of the unexpected Government MPs are not the sort of people equipped for the job - the sort of people who have a crack at an impossible seat with no expectation of winning just for the experience.

Both the democratic dysfunctions can be fairly easily overcome – not with full proportional representation but with partial proportional representation.

Full proportional representation can hamper effective government if the major party has to rely too much on too many tiny parties. A few single-issue parties can hold a government to ransom. Imagine Campbell Newman having to bend to the will of the Mad Katter Party. Also in a full proportional system, voters do not have a local member to take up local issues.

In a partial proportional system, you have the present system but have a quarter or a third of the seats listed as national (or state-wide) seats, which are voted separately according to party and allocated according to the percentage of party vote. The parties would provide an ordered list of candidates. If a candidate got a local seat you would call on the next candidate down.

This system would have the added advantage of obviating the silly, distractive argument about the possibility of a party leader, such as Campbell Newman or John Howard, not getting elected in their own seat while their party won the election overall.

It would also enable talented people in marginal seats being saved for frontbench duty if they happened to lose their local seat.

A system like this works in Germany and variant of it applies in New Zealand, but the New Zealand version has some defects (which are too boring to go into here).

In the corporate and charity world in the past couple of decades, “governance” has become a critical question. Boards up and down the country look at their constitutions and processes, improve them and change them as experience suggests.

As a result, many of these organisations improve their performance.

But when it comes to governing the nation or the state we are strangely shy of doing anything to improve “governance”. By “governance” I mean the machinery of government, as distinct from “government” which is the use of that machinery to put policy and programs into effect.

“If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,” the argument runs. But it is a silly argument. Few would suggest that the system of government in Australia is seriously flawed, but even fewer would insist it is perfect and could not be improved.

It is a bit like having slightly faulty TV reception – some pixilation, an annoying red line or some snow. Some people will put up with it out of apathy or fear that trying to do something might cause a total failure of reception – catastrophe. Others will go out a fiddle with the aerial or thumb through the ever-increasingly complex menu of reception and picture-quality options on the remote in the pursuit of a better picture.

I’m and aerial and remote-control fiddler.

As at 2012, Queensland may well be better governed under the LNP than Labor, but I think that Queensland would be better governed by the LNP with a majority of 10 to 20 than by the LNP with a majority of 60 or 70.

Another way to deal with the swamp effect is to have multi-member electorates as in the ACT and Tasmania. That works for places small in area and population. If we had had single-member electorates in the ACT we would have had a swamp effect at nearly every election since self-government, with Labor or Liberal winning all 17 seats on some occasions.

It would have been terrible for democracy. The reason we did not have a single-member system is because the Coalition in the Senate prevented the then Labor Government having its way.

The gasps of incredulity at the Queensland result have obscured the fact that the LNP in fact got a whisker under 50 per cent of vote and the “thumping” part of its majority was delivered by the electoral system, not the voters. Yes, the LNP should have won handsomely and the ALP should have lost badly, but an electoral system should not skew the result in a way that hurts democracy.