<< back to archive index

Democracy is a sham in NSW, and in Australia . The Parliaments are not really where the power is. In so far as it is with elected people, it is with the Premier or Prime Minister and the favoured few around them. Consider this:

1. Bob Carr got just under 43% of the vote, but 61% of the seats in the lower house. Since 61% always beats 39%, he got 100% of the power on 43% of the vote. Well, you might say, ‘Its over 50% of the ‘two party-preferred'? Yes it is. But what is the ‘two party preferred'. You simply take the 24% or so, who did not want either major party as their first choice, force their vote to one of the major parties as preferences, or let them simply exhaust, and one of the major parties win the seat. So there is effectively a gerrymander with the big parties getting far more of the seats than they got of the vote. So what's wrong with that? Well basically if you get 5% of the vote, you should get 5% of the seats. If that means that the government cannot get over 50% and win every vote, so be it.
2. Party discipline. Members are elected to a Parliament to make decisions for the good of their electors, but in real life it does not work like that. The party hierarchy makes its decision, and woe betide any member who thinks that they have the right to vary from the party decision on how members should vote. The penalty for not following the party line is not getting pre-selection for the next election.
3. The government controls the agenda with the media. There is a timetable of media stories, with a minister scheduled to make an announcement regularly. The journalists are given their story for the day, packaged to make it easy to run. There may be time for the Opposition to comment, but that is about all. Not much time for independent research. If a journalist has the temerity to ignore the ‘story', the next lot of stories is given as ‘exclusives' to his/her competitor. Naturally his/her boss will think that he/she is doing a bad job being scooped all the time, and he or she is moved. The government also has a virtually unlimited budget to monitor the media, to see what issues are causing concern, so it can change its rhetoric accordingly. One might expect that taxpayer-funded research on what voters think would be available to all politicians who want to represent them. Not so, it is a benefit of incumbency, so the governments use the information to improve their position. If spin doctors were not enough, the government increasingly uses advertising to say what a good job it is doing. And so, while economic times are good, incumbent governments have won the last 20 elections. That's what an advantage it is!
4. Governments hate Upper Houses, especially when they do not have a majority there. They have dealt with this is a number of ways:

1. In most cases it is not a problem. The Opposition in NSW either votes with the government, or does not need to vote at all because it agrees with the government, in over 90% of cases.
2. In 2003 the NSW voting system changed to a new system, called ‘Optional Preferential above the line'. This means that the small parties cannot lodge preference tickets and benefit from each other's votes. So their votes exhaust, and you guessed it, the major parties get a higher percentage of the seats than they got of the votes. The gerrymander is spreading to the upper house!
3. There is a large range of parties in the upper house in NSW representing the whole political spectrum, so if there is a conservative bill, it will be supported by the conservative cross bench, Nile 's Christian Democrats, One Nation, or the Shooters Party. If there is progressive legislation, it will be supported by the Democrats and the Greens, so the government can usually get its way.
4. Failing that the government simply withdraws the bill that might have been defeated. This means that the public hopefully need not realize that the upper house has the power to frustrate the government. The government can then either work on the cross bench until they have the numbers, wait until an event in the media is favourable for the passage of the legislation, or it can be taken away and re-badged as something else.
5. Finally if the government gets a bill through, but has an amendment that it does not like, it does not proclaim it. Bills have to be ‘proclaimed' by the Governor, and at times parts of them are delayed to allow th epublic service to gear up for the new activity etc. But if it is inconvenient, somehow it doeds not get proclaimed, so does not take effect. The list of unproclaimed legislation, whjoihis tabled every 3 months (thanks ot a Democrat motion) gets longer each time.
6. The governmet simply does not obey the law. In terms of complying with Freedom of Information legislation, setting up an independent advisory group for consumers in the building sector, or other laws it does not like, the government simply ignores it, or getrs a more controllable committee to look at the issue. There are no policemen for these laws…

What is the Solution?

What is needed is real Democracy, and what this means is proportional representation, which means that the seats in Parliament should be in proportion to how people voted.

There are two ways of doing this.

1. There can be a system that parties that have their votes widely dispersed so that they do not have any single member seats, can have ‘list seats' as in New Zealand, where small parties get seats in proportional to their vote and have a list of members who take up these seats. People have objected to this as it gives too much power to the party hierarchies of the small parties, so
2. The alternative is multi-member electorates. The electorates are larger, but there are a number of members, so that there is more chance that the voter will have an MP who is from a party that he or she prefers. There may also be more cooperation between parties if different parties have to represent the same constituency who are affected by legislation. There is more incentive to refer to the voters, than in a system where a party that has no seats in a certain area may introduce legislation that is detrimental to them without suffering direct harm to itself. Multi-member electorates have quotas that depend on the number of members in each electorate. An electorate with 5 members has a quota of 16.6%, which tends to get rid of parties that do not have a reasonable spread of support across a number of electorates. On the other hand, the major parties are unlikely to get a majority of seats in the Parliament and a ‘winner takes all' percentage of seats. It has been argued that without an absolute majority the government cannot govern, but his is nonsense.

It might also be noted that if there were proportional representation, only one house would be needed. Currently, there is a ‘house of review'; where in theory decision of the lower house can be reviewed. This is historically understandable in the UK , where the ‘Lords' having yielded power to the ‘Commons', wanted to review their decisions. Here is Australia , where the lower house is effectively a rubber stamp for the executive, clearly the bills need to be debated in a chamber where the government does not (in theory at least) have control. In Australia at present the lower houses main function is to provide daily TV footage of the Ministers at Question Time. The results of votes are rarely in doubt. It would be better to have a single chamber that made decisions in a better way, than to have two houses, one of which is a rubber stamp and the other which is much resented and used as a reward for party stalwarts, or the chosen ones who are being fast-tracked for office.

Reform is needed now. Business and the public service have had massive reforms in response to changes in technology that have made distances shrink and communications and travel easier. International competition means that we should get good government with the best people, and that transparency should be part of that. Government in Australia needs reform, and it is time. The present system suits the major parties, which simply exchange power every few years. Indeed, helped by corporate donations arguably the corporations simply favour one major party until the other offers to do more. The machinery of persuasion is then geared up, and there is a change of government. Indeed, recently I heard in the context of a communist government about how there was a ruling elite in one party, who assumed that they could do whatever they liked. How little different it seems from a situation where there are two elite clubs jockeying for power and wracked by internal corruption. The leaders of the two clubs take it in turns to run the State or Country.

It is time for a change. Government is for the people, and the job of government is to stand up to moneyed interests. Government is the people banding together for the common good against external or internal forces that might do harm. Government should be about pooling resource for the Common Good. This is being forgotten. The solution is to not vote for a major party, and work towards electoral reform!

Yours,
Dr.Arthur Chesterfield-Evans M.L.C.(ACE)

See Other Front Page Opinion Pieces >