Senator Andrew Bartlett
Sunday, February 27, 2005
 
West Australian election

The Western Australian election result continues the curious situation of the Labor Party being very dominant with all 8 State and Territory Governments, yet the Liberals being stronger than ever at the federal level. I think it shows the power of incumbency more than anything else and how the main Opposition party often struggles to define itself in an era when the general philosophy of both the major parties is much more closely aligned than they would like us to believe.

First up, I should note the drop of nearly 10% in the vote for minor parties (or the rise of 10% for the majors if you prefer), basically derived from the collapse of the huge One Nation vote, the sizeable Libs For Forests vote and the moderate Democrat vote from 2001 - but with no net gain in votes for the Greens from all of this either. I am disappointed but not at all surprised at the low Democrat vote in the Upper House seats – I know all of the lead candidates and I know there are some good quality people amongst them, but I learnt long ago that sadly the quality of an individual candidate does not impact greatly compared with the overall support the party attracts.

There appears to be the usual total silence on the Upper House from the mainstream media (and just about everywhere else). Who won Government is obviously most important, but the possible Upper House result contains a couple of things that are definitely worthy of comment.

The Poll Bludger is probably the best place to go get a detailed outline of the Upper House contests. There are still a fair number of outstanding votes, so it’s a bit dangerous to make too many predictions but from my reading of the results so far, combined with the preference allocations, there’s a few interesting points worth noting.

Firstly the 3 people elected under the One Nation banner in 2001 have all lost. In addition, out of the 5 seats won by the Greens in 2001, 2 of those are definitely gone and a 3rd seems in serious doubt. So 5 (and possibly 6) of the 8 minor party seats have gone.

Secondly, it seems that Labor may now have the chance to pass its one vote-one value legislation. WA remains the last serious offender amongst state and territory electoral systems in breaching the fundamental principle of one vote, one value. Votes in ‘regional’ seats are worth more than twice those of metropolitan seats. This is something that was notorious in Queensland for many years, but which has now been pretty much addressed. An effort by the WA state government to fix this in the previous Parliament failed to validly pass the Upper House for reasons which are interesting but too detailed to go into now. Although Labor backed away a little bit from the principle during this campaign, they should now have the numbers to address this injustice. (I’m sure some readers will want to point out the massive malapportionment which currently exists in electing the federal Senate – far worse than WA or Qld have ever been, with votes in some states worth around 12 times that of others. I support changing that, but as it would need a referendum to amend the Constitution, I think change is unlikely).

On my reading of the figures, out of the 34 Upper House seats, it seems Labor may win 16, Liberals 14, Nationals 1 and Greens 2. The last one – in South Metropolitan - seems to me to be going either to Labor or someone from the “Fremantle Hospital Support Group”. This ‘party’ seems like it might do the same as Family First did in Victoria at the federal election and win a seat with less than 2% of the primary vote – even more of an anomaly as the quota required is higher than for the Senate at 16.6%.

Another oddity is that this ability to remove the rural gerrymander may occur because the Greens seem likely to win one of their seats (in the electorate of South-West) as a result of a decision of the National Party to preference the Greens ahead of both Family First and the Christian Democrats! I think the person who made that decision might have some explaining to do if the vote of that Green MP turns out to be the pivotal one that allows ‘one vote-one value’, which will undoubtedly weaken the electoral prospects of the National Party in the future.


2 March UPDATE - The Upper House result in a couple of seats is still unclear, as the preference flow can't be predicted with certainty. It seems either Labor or the Fremantle Hospital Group will win the final seat in South Metro. The final South-West seat still seems highly to go to the Greens, but the final seat in Agricultural may end up going to the Nationals or the Christian Democrats rather than Labor. If that happens, it makes the chances of electoral reform for ‘one vote-one value’ less likely to make it through. (I must say I am assuming the Fremantle Hospital people would support electoral reform as it ensure the votes of Fremantle electors have the same value as voters in the rest of the state. However, this may prove to be mistaken)

Some recent summaries of the likely results can be found by Charles Richardson at Crikey and by Antony Green on the ABC site.

posted by Andrew Bartlett @ Sunday, February 27, 2005 Permalink
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