My Latest Senate Reform Proposal in Brief
Letter to Senator Don Farrell
Special Minister of State
23 November 2023
As you would be very well aware I have been promoting reform of the Senate electoral system for many years. While you and I have met many times over the years there are two recent letters I wrote to you specifically as part of my drive to ensure that Australia has a decent Senate electoral system. I do not describe the present system as “decent”. It is a disgrace.
I enclose copies of two letters you sent to me recently and I now follow up on the hand-written note ending your letter sent in September 2022. You wrote: “Let’s catch up again soon.” Furthermore, we bumped into each other recently on the House of Representatives side of the Parliament House building and you invited me to visit you again. The day was Monday 16 October.
As advised by your good self I sent a submission to the Joint Standing Committee on Electoral Matters, and it was dated 25 August 2022. It was the fifth submission to be posted on the JSCEM website.
It is clear to me that my submission was well received. I surmise that opinion from the fact that the JSCEM invited me to appear in an “academics roundtable” which took place on Friday 23 June 2023. Three other “academics” were invited along with me. They were Sydney psephologist and blogger Ben Raue (submission 265), Canberra academic Brendan Long (submission 404) and Tasmanian psephologist and blogger Kevin Bonham (submission 405). I put the word “academics” in inverted commas purely because Kevin Bonham once objected to me using that word to describe his occupation.
Enclosed herein is the speech I gave to open my appearance followed by notes in relation to the roundtable discussion. For me the main value of the roundtable was that it caused me to change my position marginally in relation to the Senate representation of territories. That was mainly the consequence of my reading and fully understanding the submission 404 from Dr Brendan Long. What I now plan to do is describe my current proposal for reform of the Senate voting system – and note that Brendan Long, in effect, has contributed to it.
At present each state has 12 senators and each territory has two. That makes for a total Senate of 76. Half-Senate elections are for six senators. As an example, I enclose the 2022 Senate ballot paper for Victoria. I propose the number of senators for each state be increased from 12 to 14 while each territory would have four. The total, therefore, would be 92, up 16 from the present 76.
I enclose the Senate ballot paper for Victoria as it applied in May 2022. I would like that returned to me at some stage. I also enclose my model ballot paper for a normal half-Senate election at a future date. As I have plenty of copies of the model you may keep this one.
Let me describe the present ballot paper which begins on the top left-hand corner this way: “Senate Ballot Paper 2022: Victoria – Election of 6 Senators”. Below that it reads: “You may vote in one of two ways, Either” followed by: “You may vote in one of two ways, Or”.
Then the above the line vote instruction reads: “By numbering at least 6 of these boxes in the order of your choice (with number 1 as your first choice).” I assert that instruction is both dishonest and deceitful. I say that because it is required by law that a single first preference vote for a party be counted as a formal vote.
The below the line instruction reads: “By numbering at least 12 of these boxes in the order of your choice (with number 1 as your first choice).” I argue strongly that the BTL instruction is dishonest and deceitful – just as much as that ATL is best described in those words. I say so because it is required by law that six preferences be counted as a formal vote – although the instruction deceives the voter into believing that the vote is informal unless going 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12.
The dishonesty noted above makes the Senate voting system uniquely bad. It is so bad no state would so demean itself as to think it should copy the Senate voting system. No state has so copied.
Contrast the dishonest present ballot paper with the alternative designed by me. It is headed “Ballot Paper: Election of 7 Senators”. The honest instruction for the voter who chooses to vote above the line is: “Placing the number 1 in the box above the group of your choice. You can show more choices if you want to by placing numbers in the other boxes starting with the number 2.”
The instruction for the BTL vote likewise would make it easier for the voter, with honesty replacing dishonesty. It would now read: “You may vote by numbering at least 7 of these boxes in the order of your choice.” You would then be told truthfully that your vote would not count unless you numbered candidates 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 and 7. Failure to do that would make the vote informal. The elector would know that.
So, my reform would make Senate voting honest and the ballot paper would be voter friendly. It also, to a minor degree, would help smaller parties and would make results more proportional and, therefore, fairer between political parties.
All the above is so obvious that one may think I do not need to bother any more. Unfortunately, there is a lion in the path – the representation of territories.
There is no problem with the Northern Territory. At the May 2025 election both Malarndirri McCarthy (Labor) and Jacinta Nampijinpa Price (CLP) will be re-elected and there is no reason to doubt the two NT seats will always go that way – which means NT Senate elections are uncompetitive, as they have always been. The Liberal Party accepts that because it means the NT vote does not affect the balance of left-right voting as established by the results in the six states.
The big problem is the ACT. Common sense tells me that there should be three ACT Senate seats – but my common sense does not prevail in such cases. The Liberal Party would not have a bar of such a statistical concept of common sense. Reasonably in my opinion the Liberal Party wants to keep the ACT Senate election result as it was recorded in 1975, 1977, 1980, 1983, 1984, 1987, 1990, 1993, 1996, 1998, 2001, 2004, 2007, 2010, 2013, 2016 and 2019. At all those elections the top Labor candidate was elected to the first vacancy and the top Liberal candidate was elected to the second vacancy. Therefore, neither the NT result nor the ACT result affected the balance of left-right voting as established by the results in the six states.
The Liberal Party received a rude shock in May 2022 when Zed Seselja was defeated by David Pocock on surplus votes from Labor and preferences from the Greens and Professor Kim Rubenstein. That meant the state of parties in the present Senate was affected by 13 results, in 2019 and in 2022 in New South Wales, Victoria, Queensland, Western Australia, South Australia and Tasmania and the 2022 result in the Australian Capital Territory. The left-leaning Canberra voters produced the present left leaning Senate by giving two ACT Senate seats to the left and none to the Liberal Party.
The Liberal Party would dearly love to get that seat back but no one in Canberra doubts that in May 2025 David Pocock will be re-elected along with Katy Gallagher. The Liberal Party will miss out again. So, here is what I propose, the objective reasoning for which you could find in submission 404 from Brendan Long, referred to above. His reasoning is objective. My reasoning comes to the same conclusion but is party political.
My Senate reform plan would include an automatic extension of the terms of Jacinta Nampijimpa Price, Malarndirri McCarthy, David Pocock and Katy Gallagher so that they would be deemed to have been elected from the states to terms beginning on 1 July 2025 and expiring on 30 June 2031. Then, at the May 2028 election two senators for each territory would be elected to serve for six-year terms beginning on 1 July 2028 and expiring on 30 June 2034.
I believe the Liberal Party would accept my plan. It would calculate that it is odds on to win a place in 2028 with a reasonable chance in 2031 of knocking off David Pocock who, by then, would have been nine years in the Senate. In that scenario the division of Senate seats in the ACT would revert to being 50-50 between the two big parties.
In describing my Senate reform my attention is now directed to a by-product of that reform. It would create some two dozen more members of the House of Representatives. So, I now set out a table showing the numbers I calculate:
State/Territory 47th Parliament 48th Parliament 49th Parliament
New South Wales 47 46 55
Victoria 39 38 45
Queensland 30 30 35
Western Australia 15 16 18
South Australia 10 10 12
Tasmania 5 5 5
ACT 3 3 3
Northern Territory 2 2 2
Australia 151 150 175
A cheap-jack populist such as Paul Murray would rail at the wickedness of what I am proposing so I give you some statistics to quote in defence of South Australia seeing its House of Representatives numbers increase from 10 to 12.
At the December 1984 election there were 13 electoral divisions in South Australia and the average was 69,714 electors, the total electorate being 906,278. These were the numbers: Adelaide 74,290, Barker 69,832, Bonython 67,107, Boothby 69,655, Grey 70,024, Hawker 71,984, Hindmarsh 72,154, Kingston 65,897, Makin 66,033, Mayo 67,689, Port Adelaide 71,105, Sturt 69,931 and Wakefield 70,577.
At the most recent SA redistribution in July 2018 there were 10 electoral divisions, and the quota was 119, 503 electors. The total number of electors enrolled was 1,195,031. These were the numbers: Adelaide 119,793, Barker 117,394, Boothby 122,901, Grey 119,682, Hindmarsh 120,587, Kingston 116.847, Makin 119,451, Mayo 118,942, Spence 116,179 and Sturt 123,255.
I imagine you would not be satisfied with South Australian figures alone, so I give some information about the current redistributions. So, in NSW there are 5,566,489 electors and the quota is 121,011, in Victoria there are 4,441,980 electors and the quota is 116,894 while in Western Australia there are 1,816,126 electors and the quota is 113,508. All the above numbers are as at 9 August 2023.
Finally, I should tell you that you are not the only politician I wish to meet in this matter. For that reason, I enclose a copy of the letter I sent to Senator Jane Hume, your shadow minister. She responded positively, and I met her on Thursday 9 November. She gave me an hour of her time and notes of our conversation were taken by one of her staffers.
It is also my intention to seek another conversation with Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus. His office has given me every indication that he would like to meet me again. Now that the referendum for the Voice is over, I am confident that Dreyfus and I shall meet again.
Also, I enclose a copy of a letter I have sent to the shadow Attorney-General Senator Michaelia Cash who has yet to respond.
Kind regards
Yours sincerely
Malcolm Mackerras
My Second Latest Senate Reform Proposal in Brief
My proposal now (as at August 2022) is that the size of the Senate be increased from 76 to 90. Each state would have 14 senators, up from the present 12 – and they would serve six-year terms. Each territory would have three senators, up from the present two – and they would serve three-year terms.
My objection to the present system is to its dishonesty and to its unfairness. It is unfair to voters, unfair between parties and unfair between candidates. My original proposal was to make the system fair to voters, fair between parties and fair between candidates. That was illustrated by the model ballot paper shown in the previous section. That was the ballot paper for the predicted half-Senate election of November 2021. It did not have above-the-line voting, it had Kimberley Kitching at the top of the Labor list, Richard Di Natale at the top of the Greens, and Mitch Fifield at the top of the Coalition.
I have come to the view that the ballot paper of the previous section cannot be sold to the 47th Parliament. The reason is that it would create fairness between candidates. No party in the 47th Parliament wants that. They all want to retain such contrivances as will ensure parties get their senators elected in the “correct” order. For that reason, I now propose the model ballot paper below for a half-Senate election predicted to be held in November 2027. It includes above-the-line voting, and the main candidates are senators elected in May 2022.
When I revised this website in March 2022, I posted my rejected Quarterly Essay following the photo of Bogey Musidlak. I have now changed that to follow here. Since an election has intervened, I have updated the first two tables resulting from the May 2022 election. The most important addition is the last table here titled “47th Parliament, Comparing Whole Senate Seats with 2022 Votes”. It shows that in the present Senate the Coalition is over- represented by 7.9 per cent, Labor by 4.1 per cent, the Greens by 3.1 per cent and the Jacquie Lambie Network by 2.4 per cent. All others are under-represented.
All the additional statistics come from the website of the Australian Electoral Commission.
Malcolm Mackerras
8 August 2022
As can be seen, the above is dated 8 August 2022. As a result of my submission being accepted by the Joint Standing Committee on Electoral Matters I have been invited to appear before them on Friday 23 June 2023. At that appearance I plan to present a minor change to the above and to my submission number 5. As before my purpose is to fulfill the principle “Never let the perfect be the enemy of the good.”
Malcolm Mackerras
9 June 2023