In a remarkable development, Queensland’s parliament has legislated for the reintroduction of compulsory preferential voting, putting an end to an optional preferential voting regime that was introduced by Wayne Goss’s Labor government in 1992. This arises from a bill that was introduced to increase the size of parliament by four seats, which the Liberal National Party opposition pursued to win favour with the four cross-benchers who hold the balance of power. Each represents a seat in north Queensland – the two ex-Labor members, Billy Gordon (Cook) and Rob Pyne (Cairns), and the two Katter’s Australian Party members, Rob Katter (Mount Isa) and Shane Knuth (Dalrymple) – and supported the enlargement due to their concerns about regional representation. However, Labor has spectacularly turned the tables on the LNP by successfully moving an amendment to also revert to compulsory preferential voting. This leaves New South Wales as the only state with optional preferential, although it will also be introduced at the Northern Territory election in August. In the immediate future, this is sure to be a boon to Labor, who should now receive at least three-quarters of Greens preferences, as they do elsewhere. It will also make life a lot easier for opinion pollsters, who have faced the problem of how to convert primary votes to two-party preferred in a system where the option to exhaust has made voter behaviour highly volatile. Galaxy’s recent results have been based on an average of preference flows from the last three elections, which most recently produced a result of 51-49 to the LNP. However, that would probably have come out at 50-50 under the safer assumptions entailed by compulsory preferential voting.
Wonderful improvement to democracy, but the Church of the OPV will be looking to burn people at the stake.
As Michael Maley points out to me, this sudden move (changing a state electoral system in hours) comes from the state branch of a party whose federal branch thought years of argument about Senate Reform still wasn’t enough and wanted more consultation about it, despite themselves having contributed pretty much nothing to the debate.
Apart from that this is a whopping strategic bungle by Springborg and co who have just handed Labor something like two 2PP points on a platter in pursuit of trinkets.
Oh wow. Well done Labor.
Two highly relevant observations in just 2 sentences from KB above.
Finally, some sanity has returned to Queensland. Now, maybe an upper house or a more proportional electoral system would be great.
Ah CPV. The walking contradiction that says that exhausted preferences are a catastrophe, but tossing out partially preferenced ballot papers is totally fine.
Interesting time to increase the size of parliament. Isn’t a redistribution about due?
Contemptible behavior from Qld Labor. Forcing voters to confect opinions they don’t truly hold because this corrals everyone into expressing a preference between the two old parties. This has been done with absolutely no public inquiry whatsoever. A major reduction in the power of voters to express what they really think has been imposed in the public through a tactical maneuver in an unrelated legislative tussle. The substance of what Qld Labor has done is wrong and the process is extremely poor.
I dreamed I saw Sir Joh last night,
Alive as you or me,
Says I, “but Joh, you’re ten years dead”,
“I never died” said he,
“I never died” said he.
David, this legislation also delays the redistribution (though it will still be done before the election is due, obviously).
An appropriate riposte from the LNP federally would be to try to persuade the Greens, even at this late hour, to support legislation for OPV for the House of Representatives. This would be in both their interests.
Michael @ Thursday, April 21, 2016 at 11:34 pm
The LNP are going to need CPV after the RWNJ rump splits off as it inevitably will.
ajm: “Inevitably” is a strong word. My guess is that there will be such a split only if the conservatives decide that they have irretrievably lost influence in the Liberal Party, and that seems to be far from the case at the moment. And starting a serious new party is not so easy, with no public funding from past elections. And such a party would get no backing from big business, or from too many people other than the conservatives in the community themselves, who are mainly the sorts of grumpy old pensioners who ring 2GB all the time and complain when train fares go up.
Well, ain’t that a turn-up! Now considering that the existence of OPV was the main reason for the merger of the “Liberals” and “Nationals” (two misleading names) into the “Liberal National” (even more misleading), there’s nothing really to hold them together. They still don’t like each other very much, so they can split and run 3-cornered contests and each “direct” their sheep to preference the other party, and it’ll be just like the old days.
Treating Informal as terrible but exhausted votes as perfect was the biggest give away in the recent sham of a reform debate. CPV eliminates one problem entirely and lets the electoral commission focus on eliminating the other.
It is not too much for a country to demand you number all the boxes, and idiotic to suggest there is some right to a chicken gate midway through a vote. Not voting, informal, exhausted or complete and valid are the same in terms of your responsibility to your country. You don’t get to abstain and wash your hands of your community responsibility, you remain responsible however you vote.
William, you say this will delay the redistribution – do you have any more information about why/how long it will be delayed? Yvette D’Ath said it would delay the redistribution until after the election which seems ridiculous but I can’t find anything definitive.
Jack A Randa,
OPV wasn’t the only reason for the amalgamation. There was also the question of who was the senior Coalition partner. In opposition the larger party was always the Nationals, who held most of the safe rural seats. But with so many suburban marginal seats, in government it could have been either party. This always provoked questions at election time about who would be premier in the event of the Libs winning more seats (as almost certainly would have happened in the 2012 landslide).
WeWantPaul,
Informality is generally the result of an unintended spoilt ballot. Exhaustion is a conscious choice. That’s the difference. CPV sets a higher formality hurdle.
As a NSW voter, I’m rather relieved not to be forced to make arbitrary choices between random nuisance parties when casting my state ballot.
If abstention is so bad, why are parliamentarians allowed to do it?
Is this really going to be the bonus for Labor that everyone is assuming? At the moment, Greens voters can be divided into 3 groups – the many who preference Labor (possibly further left than Labor on most issues), the few who preference the LNP (environmentalists who are scared of the big bad unions, I suppose), and those who let their votes exhaust (possibly because they see both majors as equally bad on enviro issues, especially coal). Everyone inc Antony Green seems to be assuming that if the 3rd group are forced to give a preference they will split in the same proportions as those who currently give a preference. But maybe there are grounds for thinking that if they think both majors are equally bad they’ll split about 50:50 and in the end the compulsion to give preferences will have absolutely no effect?
The evidence fairly conclusively suggests that Greens voters in Queensland will strongly preference the ALP rather than the Coalition. They do so at Commonwealth level, so why would they not do so at state level?
http://results.aec.gov.au/17496/Website/HouseStateTppFlow-17496-QLD.htm
Well, Tom, maybe Adani. Those who do indicate prefs in State elections are already strongly pro-Labor; I just wonder whether making the others voters express prefs will add to the Labor advantage or leave it unchanged. We shall see at the next election.
Queensland`s expansion of Parliament makes the Bracks Government`s referendum entrenching of the size of the Victorian Parliament stand out more. It very nearly caused serious grief in 2010 as there were only about 300 votes from a tied Legislative Assembly with a fixed term that cannot be cut short without a motion of no confidence passing, which require a Speaker, who their could have been a deadlock over appointing.
Yes Tom – of course the really dumb thing they did in Victoria was setting the number at an even number (88) before they entrenched it! First principle of design of legislatures – always make sure that Houses have an odd number of members. Originally Walker and the Katterites were proposing that the Qld LA should be expanded to 94 members – I think I played a small part in having that reduced to 93.
@Tom: Federally, the lower house is at 150, of course. True enough, while this is not entrenched, this setup is just as susceptible to a deadlock as the VicLA. The fact it can be changed without a referendum after the fact (and an election) doesn’t mean it’ll be any less of a deadlock in the meantime.
There are valid arguments for both OPV and CPV, though I think those for the latter are more persuasive in a lower house setting. If the Libs are going to complain about a tinkering with democracy, they never should have tried it themselves in the first place, with increasing the size of the legislature. And let’s not make any comparisons between CPV and the ghost of Joh.
I’m actually just going off what Possum was saying on Twitter yesterday.
https://theconversation.com/queensland-labor-and-lnps-appalling-hypocrisy-experts-warnings-over-shock-electoral-changes-58273
Well the ALP just got slaughtered in the Brisbane City Council election, where they took just 5 of 26 wards, despite a combined Greens + Labor vote of 48%. BCC elections are is OPV, and it seems many Greens voters chose not to preference as far as the ALP. So the fix just had to be in.
(BCC is a much larger and more important legislature than the NT, BTW.)
WWP:
So was it reasonable to require that the voters of Bradfield number all 22 boxes so they could correctly rank each of the nine Christian Democrats and that failure to order each of these CDP candidates correctly was an abnegation of their national duty? How about the Senate? Should we go back to requiring voters to number every box, as was the case pre-1984, with informal voting rates of c.`10% and obvious disadvantage to the ALP? After all if it is not too much to require voters number all of several boxes in the Reps, then surely allowing voters to get away with just numbering 1 box in the Senate (and having their preferences automatically distributed all the way by a party) was a copout.
I scrutineered the Hobart City Council election 2014 in which the requirement for a valid vote was to correctly number 1 to 12 with no repetitions or omissions. You could go on after 12 (there were 30 candidates) and mistakes after 12 were OK. This was a voluntary vote conducted by post with a turnout around 50% (so generally screening out the low-information voters and the don’t-cares) and people could take their time over voting at home when they were least busy.
Even so, over 7% still voted informal and most of these were unintentional repetitions or omissions, plus a few who got to ten or eleven candidates and thought that would be considered good enough.
People who advocated compulsory preferencing without savings provisions often just have no idea of the lack of numerical and clerical skills in the broader community, and effectively hold the position that a person should be denied their say if they are just bad with filling out numbers. CPV without adequate savings provisions is an undemocratic position. CPV with savings provisions is a different matter, but then Langer-vote types come in and start exploiting it.
(I suspect I’ve made most or all these points in discussions with you before but others may not have seen them.)
Now only NSW and the NT will have OPV at state/territory level , which will make it harder for unswitched-on voters in those two jurisdictions to vote formal in a federal election. Queenslanders will probably struggle for a while too.
While the lack of a proper submissions and consultation process is a valid concern, I think comparing it to Joh’s era is a bit of stretch. At least there’s no malapportionment and gerrymandering of districts here.
When it comes to single-member divisions, I would prefer full PV to OPV, to avoid a simplified form of FPTP tactical voting, but it does increase informal votes in the case of there being over 20 candidates to choose from.
“An appropriate riposte from the LNP federally would be to try to persuade the Greens, even at this late hour, to support legislation for OPV for the House of Representatives. This would be in both their interests.”
No it wouldn’t. Minor parties benefit from compulsory preferential voting because they heavily rely on preferences.
Why do you think Katter Australia Party Mp’s and the independent agreed to this proposal? It’s because it’s in their interests to do it.
“The decision was then made to approach Katter MPs Robbie Katter and Shane Knuth.
Compulsory preferential voting is attractive to minor parties and independents because major parties will preference minor parties above each other, a move that could potentially net the Katter’s Australian Party more seats.”
http://www.couriermail.com.au/news/queensland/queensland-government/leader-of-the-house-stirling-hinchliffe-behind-palaszczuk-government-preferential-voting-laws/news-story/f93423ae0ff6bf5277d39d8cedc03974
David: My earlier comment didn’t relate to minor parties in general, but specifically to the coalition and the Greens. That OPV is in the coalition’s interest would seem to have been established by their concern at its abolition in Queensland. It’s in the Greens’ interest because it gives them much more bargaining power when dealing with the ALP. For the Greens to threaten not to preference the ALP isn’t really much of a threat under compulsory preferential voting, because it would mean preferencing the coalition, or leaving it up to individual voters. Under OPV, a threat by the Greens to recommend just voting 1 to their supporters would be a real, credible threat to the ALP. They could use that both to kill off any Danby-style threats from the ALP to preference the Liberals, and to extract policy concessions from the ALP. So the Greens would be pretty much guaranteed ALP preferences, and they aren’t going to win that many seats on Liberal preferences anyway.
Michael, the problem is that a move to OPV will introduce a (somewhat weaker than FPTP) spoiler effect into the system, leading to far fewer disaffected Labor-supporters parking their “1” next to the Greens candidate to send a message.
The Greens, as with any other minor party, should avoid any system which introduces a spoiler effect like it’s poison – because it is, as far as they’re concerned.
Matt, that argument makes no sense to me. If I am a disaffected ALP supporter, I can’t see how having the option of showing later preferences, rather than being compelled to do so reduces in any way my incentives to vote 1 Green. If anything, it would give me a greater incentive to vote Green: under compulsory preferential voting, assuming I would never preference the coalition, I might well query what’s the point of voting 1 Green, since my vote will wind up with the ALP anyway. Under OPV, I would know that by voting 1 Green and not showing later preferences, it would give the ALP a good kick in the backside.
The Bradfield situation was ridiculous. Parties are no longer allowed to run multiple candidates because of this by-election. It still highlights a potential need for a cap on the number of preferences required. Partially compulsory preferencing, such as applies in the Tasmanian Legislative Council and will apply in the Senate, gives the best of both worlds.
In response to some here who have argued for full preferential voting as a civic duty: why should some wingnut nonentity, merely by paying a deposit and nominating to get on the ballot out of vanity, thereby have the right to require tens of thousands of people (or millions, in the case of the Senate) to take him or her seriously, and to go to the effort of making a comparative assessment of him or her against the other candidates? These candidates are pests, and their nominations represent attention-seeking behaviour. They deserve to be ignored, like brats throwing tantrums in the supermarket.
[Exhaustion is a conscious choice.]
How could you possibly know this! It is funny how the OPV church needs to have a different view of voter competence with each separate issue, but yet be unwilling to discuss voter competence as an issue at all. A clearer example of a political solution looking for a problem to solve we have never seen!
[So was it reasonable to require that the voters of Bradfield number all 22 boxes so they could correctly rank each of the nine Christian Democrats and that failure to order each of these CDP candidates correctly was an abnegation of their national duty? ]
Um not necessarily and um no. I’m very comfortable with appropriate mechanisms to limit candidates appearing on ballots. In fact in relation to the table cloth night mare that seems to have scarred quite a few of the NSW people I think a system to limit the number of candidates is the only intelligent and honest response (OPV not being a response to this problem in any serious way).
There are two points about a sense of national duty, one is that the Country is entitled to ask you to number all the boxes, if collectively we believe preferential voting is a good thing. My second point was that you remain responsible for your vote and the outcome whether you don’t vote at all or number every box below the line (it is incredibly easy despite all the silly claims tot he contrary). I guess that another way of putting my point is that a failure to pick between A and B is the same as voting for the worst of the two.
I am for CPV, but I can’t disagree that exhaustion is a conscience choice. I can’t see how you would accidentally exhaust your vote unless you do so under instruction by someone else. It would be more likely that informality is more likely due to misnumbering while filling all the boxes.
There is also no law to make someone number the boxes. Your duty is to report to a polling centre to have your name struck off.
[I am for CPV, but I can’t disagree that exhaustion is a conscience choice. I can’t see how you would accidentally exhaust your vote unless you do so under instruction by someone else. ]
Exhaustion can be a conscious choice of course, just as many of those who were voting above the line made a conscious choice to vote that way. With the change in the senate you might have some, how would you say, less attentive voters not realising that just voting 1 or even going for 5 at the top creating an exhausting vote without realising. That you can perhaps no longer tell the difference between a deliberately exhausted vote and a badly cast exhausting vote, and you don’t have to call it invalid gives those given to extremely superficial analysis a false sense of pride in reducing informal votes.
And the worst. It still needlessly informalises ballots with less than the required preferences. It still insists on arbitrary choices that the voter may not care about. And it still permits vote to exhuast.
WWP,
For all your bluster about civic duty, you still haven’t dealt with the basic problem that lies at the heart of full preferential voting.
On the one hand, FPV insists that it’s vital that everyone’s vote must count to the full extent possible. On the other hand, it says trash the votes of those who fail to vote in this manner. Those are two contradictory impulses.
[WWP,
For all your bluster about civic duty, you still haven’t dealt with the basic problem that lies at the heart of full preferential voting.
On the one hand, FPV insists that it’s vital that everyone’s vote must count to the full extent possible. On the other hand, it says trash the votes of those who fail to vote in this manner. Those are two contradictory impulses.
]
Not really. You could consider informal votes deliberate, and some clearly are, you could also consider that those who want to but can’t are better excluded. I don’t have a crusade against informal voting, it isn’t a big deal to me, but I’m convinced we are much better for having compulsory voting and compulsory full preferencing, and gain nothing at all (indeed lose) by letting people preference optionally.
Tom the first and best @ Sunday, April 24, 2016 at 11:12 am
For those not aware of the latter, in the Tasmanian Legislative Council a voter must vote for at least three candidates. So it is compulsory preferential for fewer than 5 candidates (which is common, including both of this year’s seats) and semi-optional with some exhaust for 5 or more. My own instincts aside (I believe that people should not be forced to vote, let alone preference), this sort of semi-compulsory preferencing seems like a good solution. It keeps the unintended informal rate and the clueless exhaustion rate both pretty low. If a few micro-party voters choose to deliberately exhaust their votes by passing them through a pack of micros then so be it.
The Bradfield situation was very unfortunate because in the past there had been times when the major parties had legitimately run two or more candidates in an electorate, usually as a way of covering some really large electorates. Now that legitimate option is denied, although it hadn’t been used much for a while.
But we still see certain seats where micros flood the ballot paper, especially at by-elections, and huge numbers of candidates run. For every extra candidate the informal vote goes up. Yes we can tighten registration requirements but often that just helps micros that have a lot of money at the expense of those that don’t.
WeWantPaul: “You could consider informal votes deliberate, and some clearly are, you could also consider that those who want to but can’t are better excluded.”
Just who do you think you are, taking upon yourself the right to judge whose votes are “better excluded”? You seem to have missed your calling in life. You would have been well suited to the job of Sheriff somewhere in the deep south of the USA in the 1950s, part of whose job description was to make sure that people deemed “unfit” didn’t get to vote.
Courier Mail has been biased and disgraceful in their coverage. They suggest Labor is ‘Gerrymandering’. Yet it was the LNP that moved a motion on Tuesday to increase the seats totals from 89 seats to 93 which would be voted on Thursday. It was done to be ram through because the LNP would benefit with the new seats distributed in conservatives parts of Gold Coast and Sunshine coats. Labor was only given two days to consider the proposal.
Queensland Liberals who call for ‘small government’ and ‘limited government’ have been shown up as empty in their rhetoric. When this proposal does exactly the opposite of this and creates bigger government.
WeWantPaul @ Sunday, April 24, 2016 at 5:46 pm
That’s basically imposing a numerical and clerical-skill test for voting. Someone might be completely dumb about politics but good at copying numbers from a card and their vote is valid, but someone might be very politically aware but scatty with numbering and their vote is binned. I just don’t see how such selective exclusion is justified.
Preferencing properly might seem incredibly easy to you, but there is so much empirical evidence that for several percent of the population it isn’t. Binning their votes as informal doesn’t cause them to learn any better as it is; indeed they’re probably not even aware that this has happened.
I agree with your comments about how a person who chooses to exhaust their vote is effectively complicit in whatever outcome might result. But that’s their problem, and that’s something where voters can be educated under OPV, as an increased number were last election in Queensland. It’s also something voters can do as a strategic choice to try to stop both major parties from being as bad as each other – which might explain why OPV was proposed as an anti-corruption tool.
[Just who do you think you are, taking upon yourself the right to judge whose votes are “better excluded”? You seem to have missed your calling in life.]
Nope I’m just honest, something that was lacking almost entirely from the OPV campaign. You only had a miscarriage of election, you only had preferencing whispering if those voting above the line were completely dangerously ignorant. The OPV campaign as I said lacked the consistency internal awareness and honesty to work this out and admit it, but really dumb voters who are getting it wrong was the very foundation of the ‘problem’.
So I take it as a badge of honor that all you have in the way of argument is abuse for me stating the starting foundation of the OPV case in the recent debate. Hilariously ignorant.
[That’s basically imposing a numerical and clerical-skill test for voting. Someone might be completely dumb about politics but good at copying numbers from a card and their vote is valid, but someone might be very politically aware but scatty with numbering and their vote is binned. I just don’t see how such selective exclusion is justified.]
I’m not really sure how or why you made up this example, but as a father of a brilliant child with significant diagnosed difficulties that you so very cutely called ‘scatty with numbering’ and as a person who loves democracy in action on polling day and who has participated in assisted voting as a booth captain, i suggest you study both issues a little.
WWP,
Your position is incoherent. You accuse OPV proponents of being blase about exhausted votes whilst being zealous on informal votes. Yet you’re quite proud of taking the exact opposite approach.
To say that informal voting “it isn’t a big deal to me” is an incredible statement. Yes, let’s toss aside those votes with a clearly stated intent. It’s not a big deal. If informal voting is not a big deal to you, then why are exhausted votes a big deal to you?
Courier Mail calling it gerrymandering is a stretch. Districting is done by the electoral commission and aren’t done in such a way that the electorates snake around.
And with the informal / exhaustion debate. I’m generally OK with OPV for the Senate as it is a multi-member electorate.
Perhaps a way around OPV vs CPV in the lower house is to ask that voters number all the boxes but accept non-complete numbering (but an attempt at numbering rather than just voting one) as formal. No one should deliberately ask voters to disregard the voting instructions. I can understand why some voters would not want their votes to end up with the 2 major parties and would rather allow them to exhaust.
The seat expansion is much more likely to be a gerrymander (because of the fact that it actually involves drawing electorates), but it isn’t malapportionment or gerrymandering in the slightest. The Courier Mail is acting biased as it always does.