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ABSTRACT
The Australian Senate is one of the most powerful upper houses in the world, so the design of its electoral system is unusually important. The 2013 Senate election saw the highest non-major party vote since the introduction of proportional representation in 1949. Several of the minor party and independent candidates that were elected won miniscule proportions of the first preference vote, highlighting the widespread use of sophisticated ‘vote harvesting’ co-ordinated by party strategists. To address this problem, the Senate electoral system was changed in 2016 to abolish group voting tickets and replace it with preferential voting above the line. This paper traces the debates leading up to the 2016 reform, the reasons for it and evaluates how voters adapted to the new system.
Acknowledgements
Our thanks to two anonymous reviewers from this journal for their constructive and helpful comments on an earlier draft of the paper.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes
1. Four candidates were also elected from the Greens. One of the minor party candidates subsequently lost his seat following a recount in Western Australia, but was replaced by another minor party candidate.
2. See McAllister (Citation2015) for a longer discussion.
3. Australian Financial Review, 24 October 2013.
4. The Australian, 9 September 2013.
5. The Australian, 9 September 2013.
6. Only one double dissolution election was held prior to 1939. Since then, six have been held in 1914, 1951, 1974, 1975, 1983, 1987 and 2016.
7. This is also known as ‘Hare-Clark’ in several Australian jurisdictions, notably Tasmania where it was first developed.
8. This section draws on Farrell and McAllister (Citation2005).
9. The debate surfaced in, among other places, a royal commission report (1914–15), parliamentary motions (1909, 1911, 1914) and in a government bill (1906). See Reid and Forrest (Citation1989) and Uhr (Citation2000).
10. The transfer method was subsequently changed to the inclusive Gregory method in 1983; see Farrell and McAllister (Citation2003) for an explanation of the Gregory method of transfer value calculation.
11. In 1996 (the earliest survey for which data are available), 56% of voters reported using a ‘how to vote’ card. Use declined steadily after 2004, to a low of 34% in the 2016 election (Cameron and McAllister Citation2016, 19).
12. Inconsistencies also exist between the vote formality rules for federal and some state and territory elections, which likely leads to some informal votes due to voter confusion.
13. While comparisons using survey estimates prior to 1987 are less accurate, the evidence suggests that there was considerably lower levels of split-ticket voting in the 1960s and 1970s. For example, when asked in a 1979 survey about their voting intention, only 9% of the respondents said that they would split their vote between the 2 houses.
14. The Guardian, 13 September 2013.
15. Sydney Morning Herald, 10 September 2013.
16. Jones’s victory came about thanks to preferences from 22 other parties, including the Marijuana Smokers Rights, the Three Day Weekend Party, the Gay and Lesbian Party (which apparently had no gay and lesbian members), Animal Liberation, the Four Wheel Drive Party, the Marine Environment Conservation Party and the Women’s Party/Save the Forest. See Antony Green blog, http://www.abc.net.au/news/2013-09-11/green-hand-the-power-of-preferences-back-to-the-people/4951020 .
17. There is also a website providing this information, http://www.belowtheline.org.au/.
18. Labor’s Lisa Singh had been elected in 2010 but was relegated to the sixth position on the party ticket in 2016. Following a campaign by her supporters, she was elected from that position on the ticket, effectively overturning Labor’s ticket order.
19. The Weekend Australian, 6 November 2004.
20. Antony Green quoted in Sydney Morning Herald, 29 October 2004.
21. Other topics the JSCEM investigated were voter proof of identity at polling places; the electoral roll (including the impact of direct enrolments) and public access to the roll; the circumstances surrounding the lost Western Australian Senate votes; and the feasibility of, and options for, electronic voting.
22. The report also contained a dissenting report from Labor, arguing that the legislation was ‘driven not by the democratic interests of the Australian people, but, rather, the political self-interest of the Liberal Party and the Greens’.
23. The sitting lasted 28 h and 26 min, without a break. A total of 39 senators spoke in the debate.
24. A High Court challenge to the changes was made by two minor party senators, Bob Day of Family First and David Leyonhjelm of the Liberal Democrats. While Labor opposed the changes, it declined to join the High Court challenge. The complainants argued that the changes were unconstitutional because of the ‘effective disenfranchisement’ of a significant minority of voters. The High Court unanimously dismissed the challenge in May 2016.
25. H. Aston in Sydney Morning Herald, 17 February 2016.
26. As voters were instructed to allocate six preferences above the line, it is likely that many voters had exhausted the minor parties they cared or knew about before they had allocated all six preferences, and thus allocated at least one preference to a familiar major party. This is particularly the case in the smaller jurisdictions where there were rarely more than six groups above the line to choose between.
27. The precise figures are one preference (3.2%), two preferences (1.2%), three (1.2%), four (0.7%), five (0.8%), six (86.9%) and more than six (6.1%).
28. Vote exhaustion occurs where votes indicate no preference for one of the candidates remaining in the count and therefore would not count against a final candidate.
29. Unfortunately, it is not possible to tell what the voters intended by leaving their ballot papers blank, but they may have included not wanting to vote at all, but wanting to avoid a fine, or not wanting to give any of the candidates on the ballot a preference.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Ian McAllister
Ian McAllister is Distinguished Professor of Political Science at The Australian National University. He has co-directed the Australian Election Study since 1987.
Damon Muller
Damon Muller is a senior researcher in the Politics and Public Administration Section of the Australian Parliamentary Library. The article does not represent the views of the Parliamentary Library.