Category: General

The earlier post on Senator Julian McGauran’s defection from the Nationals to the Liberals generated a productive discussion in comments, in sad contrast to subsequent efforts fingering the entrails of the WA Labor Party. Professor Malcolm Mackerras, recent recipient of the Office of the Order of Australia for services to psephology, offers an erudite contribution in today’s Crikey email replete with a number of choice words for the Senator.

Now that Julian the Apostate has completed his journey of treachery it is time to consider this in historical terms. Before I do, however, it is worthwhile to ask this question: why, oh why, would the Victorian Liberals actually want to poach this scumbag? I believe the explanation goes back to the Victorian Coalition agreement of 1989. The Liberals have been looking for an excuse to tear it up, hoping to ensure the Nationals never have a Victorian senator again.

Let me begin at the beginning. In July 1987 there was a double dissolution election. In the Senate election for Victoria Julian McGauran was elected on a separate National Party ticket. He was elected as one of the 12 senators. He was also elected as one of the six senators in the re-count under section 282 of the Electoral Act. These senators should have been given the six-years terms. However the Senate itself (under section 13 of the Constitution, with Labor and Democrat senators combining to outnumber Liberal and National senators) decided to relegate McGauran to a three-year term …

A note of attempted clarification. Since an entire Senate is elected after a double dissolution, the 12 Senators in each state must then be divided into two halves – six who will face election again at the end of the normal three-year election cycle, and six who will serve six-year terms and contest the subsequent election, thus setting in place the normal Senate cycle. The constitution leaves resolution of the matter up to the Senate, but the rules have been codified in the Electoral Act so that the order of election after a "recount" determines which is which. I do not claim much authority on this matter, but it appears that the result of the "recount" at the 1987 election pleased Labor and the Democrats less than the original order, and their collective Senate majority gave them the power to do something about it. McGauran was reduced to a three-year term and ended up with the unwinnable fourth place on the Coalition ticket at the 1990 half-Senate election, before returning from the number two position in 1993. Back to Mackerras:

In 1989 the Liberals and Nationals drew up an agreement for a joint ticket in Victoria whereby the Nationals would take the fourth place in 1990 and the second place in 1993. And so on. It is clear what the Liberals are determined to do in the future. In 2007 they will offer the Nationals the fourth place on the joint ticket because that is what the agreement provides. However, at the following election, presumably in 2010, they will tell the Nationals that they are being unreasonable in asking the Liberals to give one of their senators up to the National Party …

As hard as it is to see McGauran winning a significant spot on the Liberal ticket in 2010, he evidently considered it a better chance than the existing agreement being renewed beyond the next election. Mackerras says this will be the end of the Victorian Nationals in the Senate unless one of four hypothetical scenarios plays out:

First, Labor may win the 2007 general election. If so then a double dissolution of the parliament would be highly probable. The National Party would have no trouble in winning one of 12 places on a separate ticket at a double dissolution election. Second, the Liberal Party might relent from its present bloody-mindedness and agree to keep the joint ticket agreement going into the future. Third, McGauran might be run under the proverbial bus. In that event the Nationals would be entitled under section 15 of the Constitution to choose his successor. Fourth, McGauran might be shamed into doing the right thing, resign from the Senate, and give his seat back to its rightful owner.

This last possibility is what Cheryl Kernot did in October 1997. However, McGauran and the Liberal Party are so shameless I rate the chance of that at about one in a thousand.

UPDATE (13/2/06): Antony Green has much, much more on the future or otherwise of the Nationals.

Victorian Senator Julian McGauran’s defection from the Nationals to the Liberals has attracted widespread criticism on talk radio and blogs (here and here and here and here), much of which has echoed Nationals leader Mark Vaile’s critique – that "the honourable thing for Julian to do would be to step down from that position and allow the National Party to fill the position", since Victorian voters "elected a National Party senator and they expect to see one there now".

Did they though? McGauran owes his position to an arrangement in which the Coalition parties run a joint Senate ticket in Victoria, depriving above-the-line voters of a choice between the two. The Nationals take second and fourth place on the Coalition ticket at alternating elections, which means certain re-election for McGauran at the end of his six-year term, and certain defeat for the filler candidate who comes in between. It also means that a Coalition vote in Melbourne is as much a vote for the National Party as a Coalition vote in Gippsland, such that it makes no sense for either critics of McGauran or McGauran himself to talk in terms of his "role of representing country people".

By way of comparison, the Coalition parties in Queensland have not run a joint ticket since 1977, and the Nationals have won at least one seat on their own strength at every election since – with the exception of 1998, when Bill O’Chee lost his seat to One Nation (interestingly enough, there has been talk over the years that O’Chee might return to politics as a Liberal). In Victoria, nobody quite knows how the Nationals would go if left to their own devices. The last time voters across the state had an opportunity to vote for the party was after the 1987 double dissolution, when they scored 5.7 per cent. Given that their goal is to out-score the Liberal Party’s surplus over 28.6 per cent (the total required to elect two Senators), this would leave them struggling to win a seat at their expense – and there is little doubt that their vote has fallen since.

There may be details of the Coalition agreement that I am missing here, but surely the National Party would opt out if they thought they stood a better than 50 per cent chance of winning at a half-Senate election. As for the Liberal Party, they have apparently suffered the arrangement largely because McGauran delivers preferences from the Democratic Labor Party – not legally the same party that came out of the 1950s Labor split, but a new group that refused to accept its eventual demise in 1976. The DLP owes its continuing existence to support from the McGauran family during a legal challenge against the Australian Electoral Commission, which sought to deregister it because it refused to prove it had 500 members (the party sought an activist ruling invoking implied constitutional rights, of a type that would not normally win favour among conservatives).

There have been times when the McGauran-DLP link has come in handy. At the aforementioned 1987 double dissolution election, the DLP gave the young McGauran a valuable 2.0 per cent boost that helped secure him the eleventh out of the available 12 seats. The party’s support since has proved remarkably resilient, hitting a peak in 2001 (for some reason) of 2.2 per cent – which helped a struggling Coalition to a third seat, without which it would not hold its current majority. In 2004, their 1.9 per cent was higher than the vote for Family First, from which Steve Fielding achieved a remarkable victory.

Nevertheless, many in the Liberal Party have taken the understandable view that a Senate seat was a big-money sacrifice for a small-change preference deal, and one which seemed likely to decline in value with the passage of time. McGauran’s decision to jump ship is very likely a signal that the Liberals were about to pull the plug on the arrangement, and that Liberal preselection seemed a more likely prospect than Nationals victory from a separate ticket.

UPDATE (25/1/06): A link from Crikey (always good for a midday hit-counter spike) draws attention to this analogy regarding the National Party from commenter Hudson: "They are like a pig being swallowed by a constrictor, but being pigs they will not remove themselves from the trough long enough to extricate themselves from the snake". The Poll Bludger is not sure that the National Party is as doomed as many are saying and might get around to explaining why some time. Also in comments, this interesting explanation from Stephen L for why the DLP did so well in Victoria in 2001:

Many DLP voters are not actually looking for a conservative Catholic party – a quick look at their preferences in lower house seats shows that. Instead they attract a large number of people whose eyesight is poor and see the word ‘labor’ and think that this is the ALP column. The DLP vote rises when they have a position on the left of the Senate ballot paper, particularly when they are well to the left of the ALP. This occured in both 2001 and 2004. They did slightly worse in 2004, probably because the presence of Family First meant that some of the people who really did mean ot vote for them in 2001 found a new home. If the next election draw sees the DLP placed to the right of the ALP on the ballot I predict their vote will plummet.

Saturday’s Mercury informs us that speculation about an early Tasmanian election has not gone away, with little change in the dates under discussion – late February or early March still being the popular tip. Crikey is reading significance into an appearance by Paul Lennon and wife Margaret in the Australian Women’s Weekly issue scheduled to hit newsstands on January 23, noting that Bob and Helena Carr featured in a "paid puff piece" in the magazine shortly before the 2003 election in New South Wales.

For my part, I’m still sorting my way through the sewers of South Australian politics to prepare my intricately detailed guide for their election on March 17, which is still about two weeks away from completion. Antony Green’s effort is currently up and running a ABC Online, complete with attractive turquoise colour scheme.

UPDATE (12/1/06): Looks like that early Tasmanian election is now off the menu.

UPDATE (13/1/06): Or maybe not. Professor Richard Herr of the University of Tasmania tells today’s Mercury that the need for Lennon to avoid parliamentary scrutiny over the Betfair issue might make an early election more likely (tip of the hat here to Christian Kerr at Crikey).

Derek Chong, Sinclair Davidson and Tim Fry go in hard against compulsory voting in a paper for the Centre for Independent Studies’ Policy journal, entitled "It’s an evil thing to oblige people to vote". Good economists all, the authors characterise compulsory voting as "a wealth transfer from those individuals who would not vote, and from the Australian Electoral Commission, which expends substantial sums of money tracking down individuals in order to enrol them to vote, to political parties". They also cite various legal precedents to muddy the waters for pedants who argue that Australia has "compulsory attendance at a polling booth" rather than "compulsory voting". In partisan terms, the study concludes that compulsion is bad for the Coalition, broadly neutral for Labor (except insofar as what’s good for the Coalition is bad for Labor), good for the Greens and independents and a disaster for the Australian Democrats.

Tip of the hat here to Andrew Leigh at Imagining Australia.

The Poll Bludger has been taking it a bit easy lately, so the following developments had passed unremarked:

As predicted, the Australian Electoral Commission’s calculation of the states’ representation entitlements will see New South Wales lose a House of Representatives seat and Queensland gain one (its second gain at successive redistributions). Antony Green suggests that the most likely outcome in New South Wales is that Riverina will be abolished, with all electorates up the Hume Highway through to south-western Sydney sucked south-westwards to fill the vacuum. Other rearrangements will be required by stagnation in Labor’s south Sydney heartland, which could pull the Prime Minister’s already precarious electorate of Bennelong into Labor’s orbit. A respondent to Antony in Crikey argues that the shortfall in south Sydney is greater than that in the outer west, and that the AEC will be compelled to wield the knife here instead.

Special Minister of State Eric Abetz has issued a press release announcing a package of electoral law amendments to be introduced to Federal Parliament. They include the contentious proposal to close the electoral rolls on the evening the writs are issued; a requirement for authorisation of electoral advertising on the internet that will expressly "not extend to ‘blogs’"; proof of identity requirements for enrolment and lodgement of declaration votes; and various measures regarding donations to political parties and their disclosure.

South Australian Premier Mike Rann has come out for the abolition of the State’s upper house, announcing that it will be one of three options put to voters at a referendum in conjunction with the 2010 election. The other two will be maintenance of the status quo, and reform to shorten MLCs’ generous eight-year terms. In one of the dopier editorials of recent memory, The Advertiser endorsed abolition by arguing that advocates of "checks and balances" suffer a "fundamental misunderstanding of the strength of our democratic system", namely that there are – wait for it – elections held every four years. The editorial acknowledged "the infamous excesses of Queensland’s system over the years" (which occurred under three year terms), then said nothing further about them.

Speaking of South Australia, their election is fixed for March 18 and the Poll Bludger’s seat-by-seat guide should be up and running in a few weeks. Life could get complicated if there is substance to mounting speculation of an early election in Tasmania, widely tipped to be called for one of the three Saturdays between February 25 and March 11.

Pollbludger is no longer @ ihug.com.au, so if anyone’s dropped me a line in the past few days there’s a good chance I won’t have received it. The new address: pollbludger AT bigpond.com.

More bedtime reading on the contentious electoral reform proposals from the Liberal-dominated Joint Standing Committee on Electoral Matters. The inestimably estimable Dr Graeme Orr of Griffith University (who, as well as being big on electoral minutiae, also looks a bit like me) goes through the debate with a fine-tooth comb, and in doing so adds a rare note of sobriety to Margo Kingston’s Webdiary. And in case you missed it, committee chair Tony Smith mounted a less than persuasive rebuttal of criticisms from Brian Costar and Colin Hughes in The Age last week.

Two opinion pieces in today’s papers give the thumbs down to major recommendations of the report of the Joint Standing Committee on Electoral Matters. In The Age, Colin Hughes and Brian Costar concede that the report "contains much useful information about the electoral system and makes sensible recommendations about how to improve it", but argue that moves to eliminate the seven-day period between the issue of the writs and the closure of the electoral roll threaten "Australia’s well-earned reputation as a world leader in democratic practice":

The committee advanced two major justifications for abolishing the statutory period of grace. One was that by not keeping their enrolment up to date 284,110 souls were guilty of offences under the Electoral Act and should not be allowed any leeway. This excessive legalism runs counter to the sensible, long-established practice whereby the Australian Electoral Commission does not pursue prosecution for non-enrolment if the neglect is remedied.

The committee also claims that the current arrangements "present an opportunity for those who seek to manipulate the roll to do so at a time where little opportunity exists for the AEC to undertake the thorough checking required ensuring (sic) roll integrity". This argument fails on at least two counts. First, the AEC, in its submission to the inquiry, stated categorically that it applies its established procedures during the seven-day period after the writs are issued “with the same degree of rigour as it does in a non-election period”. Second, the committee itself admits that there is minimal evidence of actual roll fraud, but insists that it must take measures to prevent it occurring in the future.

This second assertion ignores the thorough review of the electoral roll conducted in 2002 by the Australian National Audit Office, which concluded "that, overall, the Australian electoral roll is one of high integrity, and can be relied on for electoral purposes". There are adequate safeguards in the current electoral laws and procedures to deal with any future attempts at fraud without stripping the vote from hundreds of thousands of citizens.

Before we all start stocking up on firearms and tins of baked beans, Hughes and Costar note that a potential constitutional loophole promises salvation for our cherished democratic freedoms, should state governments choose to make use of it:

This arises from the fact that the governor-general, on the advice of the prime minister, issues the writs for the House of Representatives and the four territory senators, but the state governors, acting on the advice of their premiers, issue the writs for Senate elections. The constitutional power clearly exists for one or more of the state premiers to advise their governors not to issue Senate writs for, say, seven days after the prime minister announces the election date, thereby keeping the rolls open in those states.

Writing in the Australian Financial Review (not available online), Malcolm Mackerras differs from Hughes and Costar in that his "overall reaction is hostile", because the recommendations are "relentless in their pursuit of the electoral interests of the Liberal Party". Restrictions of space compel him to limit his criticisms to the familiar matter of full preferential above-the-line voting for the Senate:

Such a change would massively drive up the informal vote. Why do we have this Faustian pact between the Liberal Party, the Democrats and the Greens? The Liberal Party wants to drive up the informal vote because that advances its electoral interests. The Democrats and the Greens are in the business of punishing Family First because, in their view, Steve Fielding won a seat in Victoria that they believe he should not have won. These politicians will vehemently deny my assessment …

Lack of space prevents me from a full explanation of why I call chapter nine a disgrace. I content myself with three points. First, the chapter (page 230) grotesquely mis-describes the system of "first past the post" in an attempt to justify the prejudices of many of our politicians. Second, the chapter (pages 208, 210, 214 and 226) commits a real howler in using the term single transferable vote in a way that is not only internally inconsistent but flies in the face of the international literature on electoral systems. Third, the chapter gives some objections to the current (reasonably sensible) system of group voting tickets and then (page 216) says: "The decision of the Family First party in some states to favour a preference distribution to other minor parties that advocated policies radically at variance with Family First’s declared core values, may be an example of this type of strategic behaviour, and its consequences."

No evidence is given. However, the main value of this sentence (not intended, of course) is that the politicians have given themselves away as to their target.

Mackerras seems unusually relaxed about Family First’s success in winning a seat with neglible support thanks to huge volumes of preferences from oblivious voters. I would be interested to know if this is because space prohibited him from advocating what seems to me the obvious solution, namely optional preferential voting. For much, much more on this topic, see the comments thread for this earlier post.