Alice's Unrepresentative Council: Cause for Intervention?

Abstract

The troubles of Alice Springs have been widely discussed in the Australian media since The Weekend Australian published Nicolas Rothwell's (2011) feature article ‘Destroyed in Alice’ in February. Discussion has covered many things: violence, drugs, alcohol, sex, town camps, property crime, Aboriginal people coming in from outlying communities and the idea of another Commonwealth intervention. One topic that has not been mentioned is Alice's highly unrepresentative town council, built on a little-known electoral system used in Northern Territory local government called ‘exhaustive preferential’. This paper explains and critiques this electoral system and suggests that it is causing significant problems for both Alice Springs Town Council and other local governments in the Territory.1 It notes that the Northern Territory government is currently reviewing the system and is possibly moving slowly towards change. If change is not effected soon, it asks: is this electoral system cause for another Commonwealth intervention?

¹A version of this article was published in April 2011 in the Canberra Times monthly supplement The Public Sector Informant. Their by-line for the article was ‘A town like Alice needs an intervention’.

Notes

¹A version of this article was published in April 2011 in the Canberra Times monthly supplement The Public Sector Informant. Their by-line for the article was ‘A town like Alice needs an intervention’.

²On reading this article in The Public Sector Informant, a representative of the Proportional Representation Society of Australia Inc. (Victoria-Tasmania) pointed out that their preferred terminology for this system is ‘multiple majority preferential vote counting’ and that it also continues to be used in a small number of local government councils in New South Wales. They also noted that the term ‘exhaustive preferential’ is used by some authorities to describe a system in which one person is elected through a series of repeated votes where the candidate with the least number of votes is eliminated between each round of voting.

³A similar phenomenon of large towns winning all seats and smaller towns missing out in multi-member electorates was noted in Victorian local government when this system was used there from the mid-1990s to 2003 (see Sanders 2009, 21).

⁴A representative of the Proportional Representation Society of Australia pointed out that this system was used in some local governments in South Australia until 1999 and was referred to as ‘bottoms up’ vote counting.

⁵If the quota is not a whole number it can be, and often is, rounded down to the whole number below. Thus the quota effectively becomes >1/m+1 of the votes, where there are m positions available.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

William Sanders

Dr William Sanders is a Senior Fellow at the Centre for Aboriginal Economic Policy Research, Australian National University.