Australian electoral system

The Australian electoral system has evolved over nearly 150 years of continuous democratic government, and has a number of distinctive features including compulsory voting, preferential voting (known elsewhere as instant runoff voting) and the use of proportional voting to elect the upper house, the Australian Senate. This article deals with elections to the Australian Parliament. Different systems are used for the states and territories.

Gerrymandering and malapportionment

Gerrymandering is the drawing up of electoral boundaries in such a way as to favour one party at the expense of another. (The word comes from the American politician Elbridge Gerry, who designed an electoral district in Massachusetts which was said to resemble a salamander.)

Related Topics:
''Gerrymandering'' - Elbridge Gerry - Massachusetts - Salamander

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Malapportionment is the allocation of more electoral districts to one part of a country or state than its population would merit, and conversely the allocation of fewer electoral districts to another part.

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Australian political history has seen very little gerrymandering of electoral boundaries, which have nearly always been drawn up by civil servants or independent boundary commissioners. But Australia has seen systematic malapportionment of electorates, and indeed until fairly recently this was considered a perfectly natural and defensible practice in some states.

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All the colonial legislatures before Federation, and the federal parliament after it, saw country districts allocated more representation than their populations merited. This was justified on several grounds: that country people had to contend with greater distances and hardships and thus deserved greater representation; that country people (and specifically farmers) produced most of the nation's real wealth, and thus deserved greater representation; and that greater country representation was necessary to balance the radical tendencies of the urban population.

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In the 19th century these assertions usually reflected genuinely held beliefs. By the 20th century, and especially after the rise of the Labor Party, they became increasingly self-serving rationalisations by politicians (usually conservatives) who benefitted from the malapportionment. In the later 20th century these arguments were increasingly and usually successfully challenged, and the malapportionment was reduced and finally abolished in all states.

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The most conspicuous examples of malapportionment were in South Australia and Queensland.

Related Topics:
South Australia - Queensland

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In South Australia the 1856 Constitution stipulated that there must be two rural constituencies for every urban constituency, and this remained in force until 1968, by which time the urban-rural voter ratio was almost exactly reversed: that is, there were two urban voters for every rural voter. As a result, rural seats had on average one-quarter the number of voters that urban seats had. This gross distortion enabled Sir Thomas Playford to hold office as Liberal premier of South Australia from 1938 to 1965, despite losing several elections by wide margins in terms of votes. This arrangement was popularly called "the Playmander," although it was not strictly speaking a gerrymander.

Related Topics:
1856 - 1968 - Sir Thomas Playford - Liberal - 1938 - 1965

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In Queensland the malapportionment initially benefitted the Labor Party, since many small rural constituencies were dominated by rural workers organised into the powerful Australian Workers Union. But after 1957, the Country Party / National Party governments of Sir Frank Nicklin and Sir Joh Bjelke-Petersen were able to manipulate the electoral system so that the National Party could win elections with only a quarter of the vote. This "Bjelke-mander" was not overcome until the final defeat of the Nationals in 1989.

Related Topics:
Australian Workers Union - 1957 - Country Party / National Party - Sir Frank Nicklin - Sir Joh Bjelke-Petersen - 1989

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Western Australia retained a significant malapportionment until 2005. On 20 May2005 the state Parliament passed new electoral laws, removing the malapportionment. Under the previous system, votes in the country were worth up to four times the value of votes in Perth, the state's capital city. Under the new laws, electorates must have a population of 21,343, with a permitted variation of 10%. Electorates with a land area of more than 100,000km² (40,000 mi²) are permitted to have a variation of 20%, in recognition of the difficulty of representing the sparsely populated north and east of the state. http://www.findlaw.com.au/news/default.asp?task=read&id=23585&site=LE

Related Topics:
Western Australia - 2005 - 20 May - Perth

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