Category: Electoral reform

The big electoral news for the week was the publication on Friday of proposed new federal boundaries for Victoria and Western Australia, which you can read all about on the dedicated post. Other than that:

• New South Wales Liberal Senator Hollie Hughes was dumped to fourth position on the Coalition ticket after running third in a Liberal preselection vote last weekend, the third position on the ticket being reserved to the Nationals. The top places will go to moderate incumbent Andrew Bragg and conservative challenger Jess Collins, who earlier ran unsuccessfully for preselection in North Sydney and for Marise Payne’s Senate vacancy. Hughes is part of the struggling centre right faction, but had endorsement from Peter Dutton, Jacinta Price and Michaelia Cash, while Collins was endorsed by Angus Taylor and Joe Hockey. Linda Silmalis of the Daily Telegraph reports that “while the right were claiming a major win, the left claimed it was the result of a larger and less factional state council”. A distribution sheet showed Bragg scored 196 votes in the first round of voting to 146 for Collins, 145 for Hughes and 51 for also-ran Lincoln Parker, which became a 191 to 167 vote win for Collins over Hughes after distribution of Parker’s votes and Bragg’s 16-vote surplus.

• The second position on Labor’s Queensland Senate ticket appears set to go to Corrine Mulholland, in-house lobbyist at Star casinos and the party’s candidate for Petrie in 2022. This follows the withdrawal of her two mooted rivals, former state minister Kate Jones and former Townsville mayor Jenny Hill. Jones had been backed by Left faction heavyweight Gary Bullock in a scheme that would have overturned a convention that the top two positions be shared between the Left, whose incumbent Nita Green will lead the ticket, and the Right, which is backing Mulholland.

• The West Australian reports preselection runner-up Howard Ong, IT consultant and former Australian Christian Lobby activist, has been confirmed as the new Liberal candidate for Tangney following the withdrawal of the initial winner, Mark Wales.

• Special Minister of State Don Farrell told Senate estimates on Thursday that the government had been seeking a cross-party deal on electoral reform that included doubling the number of Senators for the two territories, and that legislation could be expected “soon”. The government also hopes to introduce truth-in-advertising laws and real-time disclosure of campaign donations of greater than $10,000.

• I belatedly observe that Nine Newspapers’ report on Resolve Strategic’s quarterly state breakdowns includes data for Western Australia and South Australia for four sets of quarterly aggregations over the last year, where normally the pollster’s breakdowns are only for the three larger states.

We’re entering the final week of the Tasmanian election campaign, with a hotly contested by-election for the South Australian state seat of Dunstan to be held the same day. On the federal polling front though, it’s likely to be a quiet week. There is the following federally relevant electoral news to relate:

• Arch-conservative South Australian Liberal Senator Alex Antic, who was elected in 2019 from third position on the party ticket, will be the lead candidate after a preselection vote on Saturday that will reduce fellow incumbents Anne Ruston from first to second and David Fawcett from second to third. Paul Starick of The Advertiser reports Antic won the ballot for top position ahead of Ruston by 108 votes to 98. This was despite Ruston’s greater seniority within the parliamentary party as Shadow Health Minister, and Peter Dutton reportedly “using his personal authority” to protect her. A conservative challenger, Leah Blyth, lost to Ruston by 118 votes to 82 in a vote for second position and to Fawcett by 106 to 103 in the vote for third.

• New South Wales Nationals Senator Perin Davey, who made headlines last month after a tired and emotional performance at Senate estimates, narrowly survived a preselection challenge at a party ballot held on March 8. Andrew Clennell of Sky News reports Davey scored 42 votes against 37 for Juliana McArthur, the party’s federal secretary.

• Liberal sources cited by Paul Starick of The Advertiser say Nicolle Flint has been declaring interest in returning to the Adelaide seat of Boothby, which Labor won when she vacated it in 2022. Flint “appears to have effectively ruled out” a run for the state seat of MacKillop, which it was long thought she was planning in pursuit of leadership ambitions.

• It was reported last week that Labor is developing legislation to place caps on political donations, to be balanced by greater public funding. This would be most consequential with respect to Clive Palmer, whose company Mineralogy gave $117 million to his United Australia Party before the last election, and businessman Mike Cannon-Brookes, who donated $1.2 million to Climate 200. The cap is “likely to be in the tens of thousands of dollars”, with the government concerned it be able to survive the kind of High Court challenge that Palmer says he is “absolutely considering”. It is also proposed that a cap be imposed on the amount that can be spent on campaigning in any given electorate, which teals and the Greens complain would disproportionately affect those who target small numbers of the seats. Any changes would not take effect until after the next election.

The Joint Standing Committee on Electoral Matters has completed its inquiry into the 2022 federal election with a final report that addresses matters not covered in an interim report in June, and expands on some of its conclusions relating to campaign finance, truth-in-advertising laws and Indigenous enrolment. Highlights and observations:

• The most interesting recommendation is that Senate representation for the two territories should be doubled from two seats to four. In terms of representation per capita, this would elevate the Australian Capital Territory from the fourth-best represented jurisdiction to third, overtaking South Australia, without disturbing the Northern Territory’s second place behind Tasmania. The justification for having the territories at the top end of the scale is the federal parliament’s power to overrule territory legislation, as was done in past times in relation to euthanasia and same-sex civil union laws. The report quotes Kevin Bonham identifying the realpolitik of the situation in pointing to the high probability that four ACT seats would go three left and one right (it does not seem to have been suggested that the four Senators should be worked into the system of six-year staggered terms applying to the rest of the Senate, in which case only two would be elected at a time, except at double dissolutions). Naturally, the Coalition’s dissenting report gives this recommendation the thumbs down.

• A section curiously named “Proportional Representation – ‘One Vote, One Value'” ends with a recommendation about the tangentially related matter of the size of parliament, which it says should be considered by a separate stand-alone inquiry. Whereas folk wisdom would have it that parliament is a sty with too many snots in the trough, the committee prefers to think that “an increase in the number of electors in a division over time incrementally reduces the value of each elector’s vote and capacity to engage in the political process”. A bigger parliament would count as “one vote, one value” to the extent of ameliorating the over-representation of Tasmania (which has five seats due to the constitutional minimum for the original states) and the Northern Territory (which has two because that’s the way it goes). Here too the Coalition is opposed, noting the lack of a government mandate and the existence of a “cost-of-living crisis”.

• The committee has at last recommended ending the practice of parties mailing out postal vote applications with their own offices as the return address, allowing them to harvest data before passing the applications on to the Electoral Commission. This has long been held in low regard by everyone but the major parties, but the committee had always found spurious reasons for continuing it. To its great discredit, the Coalition dissenting report objects that the practice is in fact “an extremely useful part of supporting voter turnout”, for which one naively hopes it will cop a bollocking over the coming days in more consequential media outlets than this one.

• The majority report recommends removing the archaic three-day blackout on television and radio at the end of the campaign — but only as an extension of the truth-in-advertising laws recommended by the interim report, presumably on the basis that these would substitute for the blackout’s aim of scotching last-minute misinformation campaigns. The Coalition opposes the former by virtue of opposing the latter.

• Specifically with a view to improving Indigenous enrolment, it is recommended that voters be allowed to enrol at polling booths on election day, as can be done at state level in New South Wales and Victoria. The Coalition dissenting report opposes the idea without troubling to point out any problems with it.

• It is recommended that telephone voting, which is currently provided for blind and low-vision voters, be expanded to encompass those with disabilities or who are located overseas or in remote communities. The Coalition dissenting report seems surprisingly animated in its opposition, arguing the system is insecure and expanding it would impose undue burdens on the AEC.

• In revisiting the recommendations of the interim report, it is recommended that registered charities be exempt from a proposal for caps on donations to anyone involving themselves in the election campaign process. The Coalition protests that this would create “an uneven regulatory playing field” and “a partisan approach to electoral reform”, which I take as an acknowledgement that charities’ campaigns tend to be unhelpful to it.

• The Coalition’s dissenting report says the redistribution process that starts with the determination of state and territory seat entitlements should start three months rather than a year into the parliamentary term, which sounds like a good idea to me but apparently did not find further support.

The federal parliament’s Joint Standing Committee on Electoral Matters has released an interim report from its inquiry into the 2022 federal election, addressing terms of reference including political finance regulation and truth-in-advertising. We evidently still await what the committee has to say about “proportional representation of the states and territories in the Parliament in the context of the democratic principle of ‘one vote, one value’”, which appears to be code for increasing the size of parliament.

The committee’s 14 members include representatives of the main parties plus teal independent Kate Chaney, each motivated to bring particular concerns to the table. One common point of grievance is the nine-figure electoral spending of Clive Palmer, which the report recommends addressing through caps on donations and spending that extend to third parties and associated entities. However, the Coalition dissenting report rejects these recommendations as they stand, complaining of a failure to count union affiliation fees as donations and the potential for Labor to evade spending caps through a multiplicity of union campaigns.

The section proposing spending caps gives consideration to “campaigns with a corporate financial structure”, by way of suggesting measures to prevent Clive Palmer from continuing to conduct mass advertising through his company Mineralogy. Climate 200 argues that any spending cap should be higher for new entrants or independents, reflecting its feeling that caps in New South Wales and Victoria stymied crowd-funded independents’ efforts to make themselves known at the recent state elections. A submission from teal independent MP Monique Ryan further proposed exempting new candidates from donation caps up to a certain fundraising threshold.

The report revives Labor’s position that the threshold for public disclosure of political donations should be reduced from its current level of around $15,000, to which it was hiked from $1500 when the Howard government secured a Senate majority, to $1000, which Labor never managed to give effect to when it was last in government. It further recommends parties should be required to disclose donations in “real time”, where currently the public is none the wiser as to how campaigns are funded (to the extent the disclosure threshold allows it at all) until a year after the event. However, it doesn’t say exactly how real – the Coalition’s dissenting report says within a month should be enough, and that $8000 should suffice for a disclosure threshold.

One of the report’s showpiece recommendations is for truth-in-advertising legislation “based on the principles currently in place in South Australia”. In that state’s case, the Electoral Commissioner takes advice on complaints from the Crown Solicitor’s Office and can request removal or retraction of offending items, issue fines, and – in the event of non-compliance – declare an election void if it is felt on the balance of probabilities that the result was affected. The report favours the AEC to run the scheme over ACMA and the ACCC, notwithstanding the AEC’s own reticence. The Electoral Commission of South Australia also noted that the system presents it with multiple challenges, which were exacerbated when the number of complaints shot from 38 at the 2018 election to 122 in 2022. The Liberals and Nationals are opposed, arguing Labor has no specific proposal or electoral mandate, and expressing concerns about freedom of speech and subjectivity of meaning.

A recommendation to juice up the AEC’s efforts to encourage enrolment and participation among Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders is influenced by Labor’s feeling that it nearly lost its Northern Territory seat of Lingiari because the Morrison government strategically starved it of resources. The report notes shortages of interpreters and explanatory materials, deficiencies in the remote area mobile polling program and cuts at the AEC’s Darwin office, along with a claim the Indigenous Electoral Participation Program had been underfunded.

The Coalition’s dissenting report registers its displeasure with the teal independent phenomenon (or what is “now known as the Teal Party”, the veracity of which I leave to others to judge) by calling for independents “conducting their activities in a manner consistent with a registered political party” to be subject to the obligations of one. It also calls for the pre-poll voting period to be further reduced from two weeks to one, having already been cut back from three weeks in the previous term with the concurrence of Labor and the Greens. Also recommended are higher barriers for nominating candidates, given the “potential for candidates to be utilised purely for preference distribution”, and the creation of an offence of “electoral violence or intimidation”.

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.

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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.

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