The Albanese government has made it apparent over the past few days that it has a substantial agenda of electoral reform in mind, which it will hopefully do a better job of delivering on than the last Labor government. My main focus here is on the Prime Minister’s announcement on Friday that the government will look at reciprocating an existing arrangement where voting rights are granted to Australians resident in New Zealand for more than a year, along with other measures designed to smooth relations with New Zealand and otherwise drop the previous government’s obnoxious attitude.
Voting in Australia has been restricted to citizens since an earlier requirement of British subjecthood plus six months’ residency was dropped in 1984, grandfathered so as not to remove existing rights from a now dwindling band of mostly British and New Zealander non-citizens. New Zealand, however, has since 1975 granted voting rights to permanent residents, which raises the question as to why the Albanese government’s proposal should be limited to New Zealanders in particular.
When changes to electoral laws are on offer, it always pays to consider how those proffering them might stand to benefit — and I dare say there have been suggestions in right-wing media spaces over the past few days of a Labor plot to preserve its hold on power by unleashing legions of foreign dole bludgers upon our electoral roll. With this in mind I set to work on the Australian Bureau of Statistics’ TableBuilder census data facility to get a detailed look at the demographic characteristics of New Zealand-born non-citizens, only to learn the hard way that they are yet to stock it with data from last year’s census.
Having made do instead with results from 2016, I have produced the chart below comparing population percentages among those aged 20 and over by weekly personal income. The only evidence for the stereotype is that 7.0% of New Zealand-born non-citizens report negative or no income compared with 5.5% for Australian citizens — that aside, our New Zealanders actually tend to be fairly affluent, particularly in the upper-middle part of the range.
A second chart showing the respective age distributions of Australian citizens and New Zealand-born non-residents offers strong hints as to why this is so: many New Zealanders are here for work purposes, and are thus under-represented at both the young and the old end of the scale. The main reason to think adding them to the electoral roll would be to Labor’s benefit is that few are among the older cohort that uniquely remained loyal to the Coalition on May 21.
Also significant is the uneven geographic spread of the New Zealander population, which was — at least at the time of the 2016 census — concentrated in the resource states of Queensland and Western Australia, where their numbers were respectively equal to 3.8% and 3.4% of the population of Australian citizens. This would add as much as half a quota to Queensland’s population for purposes of determining its House of Representatives seat entitlement, and give Western Australia a reasonably handy fillip as well. Given long term voting patterns in these states, this could give the Coalition a swing to negate the roundabout of Labor’s likely advantage among New Zealand voters. UPDATE: It’s pointed out in comments that this is not the case, since the entitlement is already based on total population without regard to citizenship.
The table below shows the 20 top ranked electorates for New Zealand-born non-citizens, remembering that this is based on 2016 boundaries. All but one of the seats are in Queensland or Western Australia, and all the Queensland seats are in the state’s populous south-east except the borderline case of Wright, which no doubt owes its presence to the Gold Coast end of the electorate (the Gold Coast triumvirate of Fadden, Moncrieff and McPherson all rank among the top ten).
The work of the Joint Standing Committee on Electoral Matters’ post-election review will not end there, as committee member Don Farrell has today flagged the following:
• Truth-in-advertising laws. The obvious model here is South Australia, where Labor was told to pull ads before the March state election which claimed the state’s ambulance ramping problems were “worse than ever”. It fell to the Electoral Commissioner to determine that this was not strictly true, which is not a role the Australian Electoral Commission is in a hurry to assume. When the Greens’ submission to the JSCEM inquiry after the 2019 election suggested the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission would be better suited for the job, its chair told the inquiry he considered this a “terrible idea”. Labor’s dissenting report to the inquiry said consideration should be given to a “new, independent, election-focused body”.
• Spending caps. If Clive Palmer’s repeated efforts have achieved nothing else, they have made a powerful case for laws that cap the amount specific parties or third party actors can spend on election advertising. Caps have applied in New South Wales since 2010, though the present government hit a hurdle when union-targeted caps on third party expenditure were deemed unconstitutional by the High Court. The current Labor government in Queensland introduced caps before the 2020 election, though Palmer still found ways to dominate the advertising space with attacks on Labor, for all the good it did him. The Coalition has acquired an interest in the matter after Climate 200’s expenditure on the teal independents’ campaigns, but The Guardian reports Liberal federal director Andrew Hirst has signalled that spending caps will likely be opposed by the Coalition.
• A $1000 threshold for public disclosure of political donations. The Howard government used the Senate majority it gained during its final term to hike this from the $1500 at which the Hawke government had set it at 1983 to an indexed $10,000, and it now sits at $15,200. Plans to reduce it to $1000 were the subject of Rudd government legislation that was blocked in the Senate by the Coalition and Steve Fielding of Family First in 2009, and formed part of Julia Gillard’s deal with the Greens after the 2010 election, which for some reason was never acted on.
• “One vote, one value”. Farrell was apparently asked if he supported “spending caps, truth in political advertising and reforms to improve one-vote one-value”, and replied the all were “in our party policy” and that government would be “producing legislation at some point”. Specifically on the last point, The Guardian reports the committee would be directed to “see what solutions they come up with”. Given constitutional constraints, it is difficult to see that further progress could be made on this front without going down the politically difficult path of enlarging parliament. The Guardian’s report notes suggestions the territories might be granted extra seats in the Senate, but the territories are not in fact under-represented in either house.
Can we please keep this thread for discussion of electoral reform issues. The general discussion thread is here.
I do wonder if New Zealanders tend to be slightly to the left of the average Australian and, hence, letting them vote is in Albanese’s interests.
Can’t image why any country would allow non citizens to vote in their elections – ludicrous proposition!
From a purely cynical point of view (which I don’t support) why would you implement a measure which would provide an additional seat in the State with the highest vote for your opposition?
Would Kiwis then be required to do jury duty too?
House of Representatives entitlements are based on the total population of the states, not the citizen or enrolled population. Electorate boundaries are based on enrolments. That means that adding Kiwis to the rolls could move around boundaries within states, but it won’t increase or decrease the allocation.
I’m perhaps uniquely of the view that the only way to remove the malapportionment in the senate is to make it politically unviable by adopting PR in the House of Representatives. Once that is done, every matter that passes the lower house and fails to pass the upper house is a vote where the senators of small states have worked against the majority. This will probably make the senate politically illegitimate to a new generation who doesn’t remember the role they play currently. It might result in a political change (a custom that says they don’t go against the will of the House of Reps) or it might result in a constitutional change. The transition will be painful.
At the moment, it’s only the people who actually care who think there’s something wrong with the senate – voters from NSW and Victoria are happy enough when Jackie Lambie’s vote is the one that decides the result. So even a little bit of pushback from Tasmania will probably prevent the passage of a constitutional amendment to remove the constitutional rule that prevents a constitutional amendment to remove the malapportionment from even being considered.
Potentially there’s some extremely creative solution someone can come up with, which lets the partisan balance match the national vote but allows states to choose which people make up those parties. For instance, Tasmanian (NSW, Qld etc) voters decide the order of the Tasmanian (NSW, Qld etc) lists but Australian voters as a whole decide how many Tasmanians (NSW people, Qlders etc) come from each of those lists.
Other than that, I think everyone in parliament will benefit from an enlarged parliament so I kind of expect it to happen. But every enlargement potentially makes the malapportionment worse, because the increase in sensitivity makes a partisan difference between Tasmania and NSW more likely. An extra two or four senators per state is probably tolerable, but it’s going to be a question we will face at some point.
e.g.w
It’s not a ludicrous prospect at all.
It happens in many parts of the world.
But in many countries only citizens are allowed to vote for Parliament.
A British friend of mine has been resident for over 5 years (the threshold) in the Netherlands. He can vote in elections to the city council but not to the Dutch Parliament.
In the UK resident Australians (and indeed commonwealth citizens) are allowed to vote in all elections from local councillor to MP.
Some US states and local governments permit non citizens to vote for state and local elections but not for federal office holders.
The logic is that non citizens are living in the country and pay taxes and receive and use services so they should have a say in who runs those services.
Worth noting that Australians in New Zealand can enrol and vote once they’ve lived in New Zealand continuously for 12 months or more. We do not need to be NZ citizens to do this.
https://www.vote.nz/enrolling/get-ready-to-enrol/are-you-eligible-to-enrol-and-vote/
As a dual NZ/Australian citizen I’m 100% in favour of this. It’s insane to have a population the size of NZers living and working in Australia with a) no reasonable access to citizenship for many of them and b) no voice for those people in parliament. I don’t think there is any particular reason to think that this will represent a bump for Labor here but it will enfranchise a significant part of the population.
Re Felix the Cassowary at 8.43 am
Very helpful comments. You have answered my query about this sentence: “Given long term voting patterns in these states, this could give the Coalition a swing to negate the roundabout of Labor’s likely advantage among New Zealand voters.” I couldn’t follow the logic of that, as the potential new enrolled voters, being Kiwi non-citizens of Australia, would hardly trend at all strongly to Dutton.
And Felix, this is a top sentence: “I’m perhaps uniquely of the view that the only way to remove the malapportionment in the senate is to make it politically unviable by adopting PR in the House of Representatives.” Did you have that view in the mid 1990s, i.e. after 1993? If so, perhaps if you had had some way of communicating it to Keating (no fan of “unrepresentative swill” in the Senate), then Labor might have had some debate about this. I once asked Carmen Lawrence, about a decade ago, if there had been any serious discussion among the Labor leadership of introducing PR in the Reps. She said, yes, quite briefly, soon after the successful MMP referendum in New Zealand in 1993, but it did not get far and was not returned to. Beazley, from Blewett’s diary, was not a Kiwi lover by inclination.
If Labor is serious about electoral reform, it would be promising if they are guided not by Don Farrell, who couldn’t organise a successful Senate campaign in SA in the most promising of local conditions, but by a person with nous (e.g. John Faulkner). It is no accident that Ardern and Albo have met often.
Could this reform (votes for Kiwi non-citizens of Australia, not just tourists) be introduced only for Kiwis, not other non-citizens? Yes, I doubt there is a constitutional obstacle. Politically, it could be explained and justified in terms of history and the importance of the trans-Tasman relationship.
The top 20 ranked electorates are unlikely to have changed much since 2016. Labor could not lose Lalor, nor Brand or Burt in WA (unless there is a farcical re-run of the shenanigans from twelve years ago) and they could not win O’Connor, but Durack could become even more marginal with Kiwi voters in the mix (especially given the incumbent’s poor appeal), while Labor margins in Pearce and Hasluck could be strengthened. Labor does not need padding in Oxley and Rankin, nor currently in Blair. It has no hope in Fadden, Fisher, McPherson, Moncrieff and Wright. The seats where the Kiwi voters could conceivably affect the outcome would include: Bonner, Bowman, Forde, Longman and Petrie. That’s enough to give Dutton the shakes, particularly as there would be some Kiwi voters in Dickson too.
Note that the Biddle & McAllister report (p 16) concluded: “Age and education were once again one of the key factors explaining voting choice.” (An ungrammatical sentence from two ANU professors but they might have done that before!) They stress the significance of education level as a key factor (a parallel with recent US elections). So it would be interesting to know about two additional factors for potential Kiwi voters: 1) education level; and 2) Maori or Pakeha?. There are a lot of Maori residents in Australia (colloquially they call themselves “Mozzies”). Even the less formally educated of potential Kiwi voters, especially Mozzies, will have worked out that Dutton has no regard for their interests. While the National Party in NZ has had many Maori MPs, Dutton is well to the right of National in NZ.
Reducing the minimum voting age to 16 is also likely to be examined. See Whitlam Institute report at:
https://www.whitlam.org/publications/2020/11/23/young-people-and-democracy-a-review
Because of the Teal rinse effect in formerly strong Lib seats at the 2022 election, the prospect of MMP being considered by Labor for Australia, which was already very low, is now miniscule. The irony is that, had MMP been used at the federal election, the result for the Libs would not have been as bad.
I think we have enough politicians and hangers-on as it is and am not persuaded that the current system is broken.
It seems to me that a new seat in Queensland would likely mean an extra seat for the Coalition regardless of what impact NZ voters might have. But as Felix notes, the point is moot because the entitlement isn’t determined that way.
Re William at 3.33 pm
Thanks for this thread, very topical and it’s just possible there might be some action in this area. The prompt statements are indicative of that, in contrast to the habitual waffling from LNP Sen McGrath.
What will Dutton do if there is follow through on the voting for Kiwi non-citizens suggestion? He will see this as a direct threat to his power base. He will probably claim that the proposed change will act as a magnet for further cross-Tasman migration from NZ, in particular to SE Qld (closer than WA). Somehow Dutton will present that extra migration to SE Qld as a bad thing. That’s how he will think. But if that occurred then your prediction would come to life temporarily – Qld will get an extra seat, until a certain demographic flip-over point occurs, as Maori in SE Qld then want to retire back home.
There’s a classic, amusing short story by the novelist Patricia Grace titled Ngati Kanguru at this link:
https://sci-hub.hkvisa.net/10.1515/9780824888015-035
Australians and New Zealanders should have dual citizenship while maintaining their separate Parliaments.
Rakali at 6.57 pm
Ever heard of Barnaby the self-promoting Kiwi-Australian media tart? Now finally out of power, the media have lost interest.
There are few tragedies in comedy. One was the late John Clarke not living to see Barnaby as a Kiwi.
So dual Aust and NZ citizenship is ruled out by s 44 of the Constitution. In 2019 Marcia Langton told the Garma Festival she expected narrow-minded politicians to amend s 44 for their own convenience before they bothered with the serious and urgent historical challenge of Indigenous recognition in what remains a colonial Constitution. Now it looks like Albo has his priorities right, not upside down.
So a more imaginative solution will be required to that other old dilemma, of how to appropriately recognise the historical relationship between Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand.
Here are the first two paras of a speech Michael Kirby gave to the Knowledge Wave Leadership Forum in Auckland on 19 February 2003:
‘I love New Zealand. That is why I am here. I love New Zealand so much that in my callow youth, undertaking a lecture series more than twenty years ago, I proposed that we should replace our de facto relationship with the solemn ties of constitutional matrimony. One Australian of my persuasion amidst 450 invited leaders from government, business and the community may be all that this conference can tolerate.
The Prime Minister of New Zealand of the time, Sir Robert Muldoon, was not one to mince words. “Who is this judicial comic?”, he asked and challenged me to a debate on Radio Pacific. When I turned up and sincerely praised him and Doug Anthony for the Closer Economic Relations Treaty (CER) Sir Robert seemed uncharacteristically disarmed. Few in New Zealand, including in his own Party, lavished such public praise upon him. When I promised that New Zealand, as part of the Australian Federation, would have two States and that bronze statutes of Sir Robert would be raised from Broome to Dunedin, he was notably mollified. He left the programme declaring: “Well, we would have to negotiate the terms and conditions very carefully”.’
Ardern faces a very challenging election due by the end of 2023, so she will not want to be distracted by trans-Tasman issues for most of next year. But it is possible that the Australian parliamentary inquiry about possible votes for Kiwi non-citizens in Australia will have reported by then. At least, she has finally been heard about the poor show of Australia deporting Aussie crims to New Zealand.
If Ardern is re-elected, then there will be a real chance to give effect to what Kirby dreamed of long ago. It will not be a two state solution incorporating NZ into Australia. It will not be joint citizenship. But it could lead to a much stronger, more genuine, less superficial and more enduring relationship.
Dr Doolittle, “Did you have that view in the mid 1990s, i.e. after 1993?”
I didn’t know what a senator or malapportionment was in 1993. The more interesting question to me is why didn’t Keating’s comment work? and if it didn’t work then, why would it work a generation or two later?
As I said, I don’t think most voters care too much about senate malapportionment, because the partisan representatives of almost all voters contribute to the process – government voters via government, opposition and crossbench voters through the balance of power in the senate. People care that they have a representative to put forward their concerns and who will be listened to much more than they care about political science measures of electoral fairness. A government attack on the senate feels like an attack on the representatives of most of the country – whether they voted for the opposition or a crossbencher.
But with PR downstairs, that changes. The winners and losers are decided in coalition negotiations, and then the coalition has to use whatever rhetoric it can muster to get its bills through. Majorities (of voters) in NSW and Victoria will see the reforms they voted and compromised for held up by people with an outsized voice. They will hear and be influenced by the representatives they elected.
How it plays out depends on how cooperative politicians feel. It could be very polarising. Or it could result in oversize/grand coalitions to make sure the government has a majority in both houses (maybe Tasmanians will always vote for the Tasmanian party that is always part of cabinet). But whatever happens, the malapportionment will be felt, because most voters throughout the country will be just as well off without the senate as with it.
After all, what is the point of having two houses elected by the same method, just one is deliberately less representative than the other?
If NZ permanent residents are allowed to vote, then the case should be made that all permanent residents should be allowed to vote to not demonstrate favourtism to any particular country. If Albanese is serious about this proposal, I’d suggest revisiting section 44 in its entirety to address the issue of dual citizenship for candidates.
Great thread William.
I’m actually for long term citizens getting the vote, but it needs to be for all countries, not just NZ. Only issue I see is the paperwork required to keep track of official residents and when this may change, eg if a NZ citizen’s contract means they head home for 2 months when do they stop being an Australian citizen?
As for the enrolment quotas, it looks all but certain that Victoria will lose the seat it gained at the last election. I can see the seats of McEwen, Hawke, Casey and Aston being condensed into 3 seats. WA looks likely to get its 16th seat back, and NT will be under the gun again to go to 1 seat.
Felix the Cassowary @ #6 Monday, July 11th, 2022 – 8:43 am
Do you actually think Tasmania would give up what we have and let the other states ride rough shod over us?
Already been done once, never again.
Bert, to some extent it’s not up to Tasmanians. If the major parties of government win enough seats to pass every law between them, they can just come up with an agreement that says they’ll wave it through on the second go round to avoid the cost of repeated double dissolutions. And if the opposition defects, then there will be a double dissolution, a joint sitting, and the bill would pass into law against the objection of every single Tasmanian MP and Senator if it has to. So politically, it’ll have basically the same result. In such a world, Tasmanians will certainly have more influence if they choose to cooperate and less influence if they choose to oppose.
But I do think Australians are all at heart democrats. I think that under that circumstance, Tasmanians would be convinced to give up their claim. There are many things that could give Tasmanians a fair democratic influence, that also respect the federation, like a guarantee of at least one minister from each state.
Felix, isn’t that what happens now?
Good law/bill support it, bad law/oppose.
I honestly don’t get what your problem is along with a few others on here that have a problem with Tasmania’s representation.
Felix the Cassowary at 1.10 am
Thanks for the answers. One reason I asked about the mid-1990s is that I’m a historian. The other reason is that, as a consequence of the Teal rinse in Kooyong etc at the 2022 election, MMP is most likely off the agenda for discussion in the foreseeable future, not that it was ever really on the agenda.
We can discuss hypothetically using MMP or another form of PR as a way of the “unrepresentative swill” being downsized, but Bert and Ye Old Taswegians really have nothing to worry about, forever.
The reality is that PR in the Reps would have given the Libs more seats at the 2022 election than they got. In the current system crucial heartland losses in Kooyong etc are debilitating, a chronic loss that is a millstone round the LNP, not just a well-deserved comeuppance for the pathetic former member.
In the NZ MMP system although Teals could win electorate seats, the key millstone effect would not occur, as the second, list vote would determine the party’s total seat number.
According to PR advocates, Australia’s electoral system (particularly the Reps) is only “three star”:
https://theconversation.com/is-our-electoral-system-truly-democratic-how-australia-stacks-up-on-4-key-measures-180868
With all due respect to Professor Andrew Scott and his colleagues, that assessment has no way of leading to any electoral reform that would introduce PR in the Reps, because of the Teal victories.
The 2022 election has been historic, but not all of this has been about changing the status-quo. While the Teal wins are a historic change, at a deeper level they have helped to entrench a lack of PR in Reps.
Truth in political advertising is long overdue. Social media has changed the game fundamentally and there needs to be a counter to that. The US and Brexit have demonstrated quite clearly that lies and half-truths are not self-correcting and are extremely damaging.
Why do we get exercised by the thought of allowing permanent residents from NZ to vote when we allow a particularly evil foreign citizen to determine who forms our government (mostly)?
I’m not so convinced that increasing the size of the Parliament would be deeply problematic from a political perspective. It might well get multiparty support- including potentially from the Nats given the 80s experience. And there’s a clear and valid case to be made for it in terms of better and more effective representative democracy. It’s been nearly 40 years since the last expansion and the national population has increased by around 2/3 since then.
The one word of warning I would give to an “accelerationist” approach to Senate reform like that proposed by Felix the Cassowary and others who have followed is to look at the examples of Canada and the UK. Both their respective upper houses are objectively undemocratic yet reforms are forestalled by an inability of reformers to agree on a suitable alternative. There is also no shortage of pundits and stakeholders willing to defend the status quo despite the self-evidently undemocratic nature of it. I think an attempt to force a clearly undemocratic outcome in the Australian Parliament would ultimately lead to much the same thing, chronic indecision treated by even less democratic bandage conventions. As Felix notes, the transition would be painful indeed.
Perhaps bandage conventions where the Senate remains as essentially a figurehead, unable to substantially alter House legislation, is preferable to some. I would say that if you’re after a structure that merely works well enough then we have it already. You won’t have eliminated state-based malapportionment, you will have only removed one bandage (the two-party dominant system and its tendency to override state interest) and replaced it with another. And to show for it, we would have a vestigial chamber in Parliament in place of one which once played a meaningful role in legislating.
Some immediate improvement might be achievable by reducing the 10% enrolment variation tolerance to 5% and reviewing the boundaries more frequently?
‘From the founding of the country [US] until 1926, 40 states at various points allowed noncitizens to vote in local, state and federal elections, said Ron Hayduk, a professor of political science at San Francisco State University, who has written about this issue. Noncitizens could not only vote, but also hold office.’
https://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-analysis/blogs/stateline/2021/07/01/noncitizens-are-slowly-gaining-voting-rights
Noncitizen voting is not uncommon outside the US either. Most Commonwealth countries and Ireland allow all Commonwealth citizens to vote.
The proposal to enfranchise New Zealanders has the potential to open a real can of worms.
It’s worth noting that Australia shifted to a citizenship-based franchise in 1984 in response to the May 1978 Report of the Review of Post-arrival Programs and Services for Migrants (aka the “Galbally Report”), which had recommended that “all migrants be placed on equal footing in their voting rights”. Subsequent legislation at the federal and State levels was painstakingly negotiated and passed with across-the-board support. The proposal to re-enfranchise just one selected group of migrants would up-end the Galbally principle. Plainly migrants from other parts of the world would have every right to feel thoroughly insulted. How would that help, for example, the government’s renewed efforts to rebuild relationships with other Pacific nations?
The bottom line is that it’s highly questionable whether voting rights should be treated like reciprocal arrangements for health care or payment of pensions.
It’s also pretty unwise of the government to have gone public on this so prominently, when it’s by no means clear that it would be able to get legislation through the Parliament to give effect to the proposal.
Bert, I don’t have a huge problem with the senate as it is currently constituted. I am not saying “we should do x to achieve y”, but “if we decide we want to achieve y, we pretty much have to do x”. As I said, it has widespread community support at the moment and any attempt to remove the malapportionment would be met with widespread concern, as much in the larger states as in the smaller states. And the low number of senators elected per state means it is actually reasonably proportional by international benchmarks. From my perspective, I see arguments on both sides, and I think the senate’s contribution to the close competition in every state of Australia is undervalued.
Dr Doolittle, I completely agree with you that the recent election results make MMP or any system of PR in the lower house less likely. Not only that, but any more fractured election results that the lower house election system can deliver will result in a lower house less likely to adopt PR. In order to adopt PR, we would need MPs who would be reasonably confident they could be reelected under a changed system, or MPs who could be directed by party leaders to choose something not in their interest. Fundamentally, that means a fewer stronger parties. No MP is going to say “I just worked out how to be successful in this system, I know what I will do, I will radically re-write the rules so that they don’t obviously reward my actions”. They got elected because a local community compromised around them, and they will want to legitimise that standing.
Dryhad, I completely reject your characterisation of my argument as “accelerationist”. I’m not advocating an accelerationist position, I’m arguing that people don’t solve problems they can’t see, and warning that making the problems visible will be unpleasant, potentially polarising etc. Even if I was advocating for the method in question, it would not be accelerationist because almost anyone who thinks malapportionment is bad enough to fix probably thinks PR in the lower house is a good idea or at least an acceptable one. But whether or not we should take that course of action is a different question that I haven’t really argued a position on – I’m somewhat ambivalent. If you want to argue against me, you should either argue that people are so trusting of technical arguments that they will vote yes to a referendum without ever feeling the problem, or you should argue that there is some likelihood of the malapportionment becoming visible to voters without PR in the lower house — these are the negations of the core arguments I’m defending. Anyway I take the UK and Canadian experiences as examples in my favour. No-one inherits the right to veto legislation in the UK any more, and I think there was basically one occasion in Canada in the 1990s when a majority government struggled to get a bill through their senate. Both countries can be understood as fundamentally unicameral without too much loss.
https://kevinbonham.blogspot.com/2022/07/the-spurious-linking-of-one-vote-one.html
The Spurious Linking of “One Vote, One Value” With Territory Senator Numbers
Kevin Bonham says:
Wednesday, July 13, 2022 at 11:48 pm
https://kevinbonham.blogspot.com/2022/07/the-spurious-linking-of-one-vote-one.html
The Spurious Linking of “One Vote, One Value” With Territory Senator Numbers
—————
Thorough and insightful commentary as always Kevin. Yes, unless there is also a proposal to increase the size of House of Reps, it would be very misleading to describe an increase in Territory Senators as addressing “malapportionment”.
Apologies for misrepresenting your argument, Felix. However, you have misunderstood me even more than I you if you imagine the thrust of my post was that Senate malapportionment could be removed in some other way. Rather, my intention is simply to point out that removing it by forcing the mostly-theoretical-so-far flaws to become readily apparent would *at best* result in an unsatisfactory half-measure. If this doesn’t argue with you then I guess I don’t want to argue with you (I also don’t believe I said that I did?)
It sounds as though despite this you do still disagree that a half-measure would be unsatisfactory, since you consider the UK and Canada to be success stories. Reasonable people can disagree as to the relative merits of bicameralism and unicameralism but I should think that it is uncontroversial that a functionally unicameral Parliament with a dead-weight second chamber that lacks all power and purpose is inherently worse than both. The only benefit that could be said for it is that it works well enough, and the technically undemocratic chamber doesn’t negatively impact the function of democracy – but both of these can be said for the current Australian Parliament as well. If I must choose between the Senate as it exists in Canberra or the one that exists in Ottawa I will chose Canberra every time. A little malapportionment is far better than appointment for life.