An upper house for Queensland?

In a unicameral system this is only exacerbated because electors have no capacity to qualify their electoral decisions, by indicating an alternative set of preferences and thereby expressing a qualitative measure of their support for particular parties and candidates.

The reality is that in modern liberal democratic states there is no monolithic “popular will”, not even the “will of the majority”, and even if there was, it is doubtful whether any one electoral system would be capable of giving reliable expression to the will of the people. Indeed, studies of voter behaviour in bicameral systems demonstrate that even individual voters do not have unitary electoral wills, but are often inclined to “split” their votes among different parties when given the opportunity to vote for more than one chamber.

It is of course true that the introduction of a second chamber in Queensland, elected upon a different basis to the first, is no panacea. A second house will not always hold the government accountable; it will not always perform effectively as a forum of legislative review; and its capacity to represent voters adequately and fairly will always be contested. However, a carefully designed upper house will at least provide an additional arena and a second opportunity for scrutiny and deliberation, as well as an alternative opportunity for voters to express their diverse electoral wills.

No electoral system has yet been devised that does not in its practical operation occasionally contradict one or another of the various, generally-accepted normative standards by which electoral systems are evaluated. This is obviously the case for single-member plurality systems, but it can also occur in complex preferential, proportional and multiple-member systems. No system is perfectly representative. A second chamber, elected on the basis of a different system, at least provides the opportunity to “correct” for the unavoidable deficiencies of the electoral credentials of the first chamber. Two differently elected chambers will thus enhance the prospects that the parliament will approximate a truly representative deliberative body.

The reintroduction of an upper house in Queensland may be an idea whose time has come. The challenge, however, is to design a system that is indeed likely to improve the quality of government accountability, legislative review and parliamentary representation. Not just any upper house will be an improvement upon the status quo. Many complex questions arise, and it is time to debate them.