Pimp My Parliament

On September 14 this year, Australians will elect the 150 members of the House of Representatives, a number unchanged since 2001, and which has only increased by two since 1984, and by twenty-nine since 1949. By contrast, our fellow Westminster democracy across the Pacific will increase the size of its House of Commons from 308 to 338 in time for its next general election, so as to accommodate the rapidly-growing suburban areas of Ontario, British Columbia, and Alberta. On the measure most often used by political scientists to estimate the size of a country’s legislature, the cube root rule, Australia is an outlier in terms of its ratio of population to seats, and our current parliament looks even less adequate when one considers the difficulties of representing super-sized electorates such as Durack, O’Connor, Lingiari, Grey, and Kennedy.

The size of the House is a function of the size of the Senate; the constitution requires that the Representatives from the states be twice as numerous as the Senators from the states, but gives parliament some leeway in determining what formula to use. The size of the Senate, however, is entirely at the mercy of parliamentary legislation, with the proviso that the six Original States must have the same representation and at least six Senators each. On two occasions, preceding the 1949 and 1984 federal elections, parliament has increased the number of Senators per state, causing a commensurate enlargement of the House.

If Australia had the same ratio of MHRs to population as Canada or Britain, it would have between 200 and 250. New Zealand, with one-fifth our population, has 70 electorate MPs and 50 list MPs. If we adopted the sliding scale originally proposed for the United States in Article the First, we would have between 350 and 400. And having a House of 500 or 600 members would align us with Germany, France, and Italy – all nations with three times our population but a much more even spread of people.

The small size of our parliament is harmful to our democracy. It forces parties to focus on a narrow set of marginal seats in order to win office, so that every three years we get saturation coverage of the minute goings-on in Lindsay and Eden-Monaro. The small number of electorates to go around means that some are ridiculously large (remember the pre-2010 Kalgoorlie?) and lacking in community of interest (eg. Albury and Broken Hill being united in Farrer, or the Sydney-Grayndler boundary splitting Balmain from Leichhardt and Newtown from Marrickville). The small size of the House also meant that Australia’s parties couldn’t adopt the British tradition of a non-partisan Speaker. Finally, the constitutional requirement that Tasmania receive five MHRs (when its population currently hovers just over 3.5 quotas), means that the mainland states (and the ACT) are slightly under-represented, a problem which would be accentuated if Australia had states with much smaller populations than Tassie.

My proposal is that Australia imitate one of the best-governed little jurisdictions in the democratic world – New Hampshire – and elect a 400-member lower house; getting there would require an enlargement of the Senate or a constitutional amendment to break the ‘nexus’ clause. The advantages of a 400-member House of Representatives are manifold:

* smaller electorates means cheaper campaigns and more chances of winning seats for independents and minor parties whose support is geographically concentrated (eg. the Greens presently have much more chance of winning the state seat of Brunswick than the federal seat of Wills);

* more parliamentary seats means more nominations to go around for female, young, and racial minority candidates;

* smaller electorates means that geographically-concentrated racial minorities have more chance of dominating particular seats – the current federal division with the highest Aboriginal population is Lingiari (represented by white Labor MP Warren Snowdon) where they form less than two-fifths of the enrolment; with 400 seats, majority- or near-majority Aboriginal seats could be drawn in the Territory, the Kimberley, North Queensland, and north-western NSW;

* a larger House means that front-benchers would make up a smaller percentage of its members, and thus back-benchers could exert more power over their party’s leadership;

* more electorates means that redistribution commissioners would be better able to draw sensible boundaries; federal seats would better reflect the natural socio-cultural regions of our cities and states, rather than random agglomerations of different areas named after obscure historical figures.

Of course, such a proposal will always be unpopular with the general public, among whom arguments about better representation can’t compete with mindless anti-politician populism, and with politicians themselves, who would rather have 1/150^th of the federal pie than 1/400^th. Still, one can dream…

Lower the Vote!

Jonathan Bernstein makes some good points here about the proposal to extend suffrage to sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds in Takoma Park, Maryland. He makes three main arguments in favour which I wanted to touch upon here.

Firstly, he notes the oddity that teenagers are allowed to participate in politics by campaigning, lobbying, or donating, but not by voting or holding office. This is especially odd since voting is significantly easier than most other forms of political participation.

Secondly, he makes the argument that since all humans have interests, all humans should cast a vote. I agree with what he is saying, but don’t follow his suggestion that parents could be given extra votes to cast on behalf of their children. The idea of giving parents extra votes would a) cause conflict when a parent has political views different from those of their children; b) cause conflict between the parents as to who gets to cast the vote; and c) orient political debate even more towards the wants of families – every politician would sound like the 2007 campaign trail edition of Kevin ‘Working Families’ Rudd.

(On a related note, if we want to safeguard the political representation of geographical areas with high ratios of children to adults, all we need to do is draw electoral boundaries on the basis of population rather than voter registration. Australia uses the latter method, while the United States’ use of the former is currently being challenged in the courts in a case called Lepak v. City of Irving.)

Thirdly, Bernstein makes the case that voting will become a life-long habit if people can start younger. I’ve heard of research which backs up this point – in Britain, people who were eighteen years of age during a general election are more likely to continue voting for life than those who are 22 or 23 (the most probable reason is that voting, as a symbol of adulthood, is more precious to an 18yo still at school and living at home than a 22yo living away from home, owning a car, etc.). Bernstein makes a good point that if people begin voting while at university (which in the U.S., more so than in Australia, usually means living in a different place to where they grew up) they will care less about the local issues than if they were voting in their home town.

As for his suggestion of what age young people should be allowed to vote, I don’t see the problem with 12 or 14. But in the United States, where there is a clear distinction between general-purpose local governments and school districts, perhaps we could start by lowering the voting age to twelve for school board elections, and keep sixteen or eighteen as the limit for other types of poll. At the ages of twelve through to sixteen, most interaction that a person has with the state occurs through the education system, and it might solve the problems which plague school board elections in America – such as low turnout and the capturing of school districts by the Religious Right and other special interests.

The objections to lowering the voting age are easy to bat away. If teenagers don’t pay tax, don’t own property, or aren’t fully educated, it shouldn’t matter, because in a modern democracy the suffrage is no longer linked to taxation, property ownership, or education. And any predictions of the partisan effects of lowering the voting age would no doubt be proven wrong; recall that after the passage of the Twenty-Sixth Amendment, the Conventional Wisdom inside the Beltway was that the Youth Vote would defeat Nixon in 1972 (he won it by similar margins as he did the other age brackets).

Lowering the voting age seems not only the right thing to do, but also a way of diversifying political debate away from contests over who can best represent ‘working families’ and Baby Boomers. For that reason alone, it should take its rightful place as the next great battle to extend the franchise.

Elective ministries

In the early decades of Australia’s post-Federation history, one of the most common suggestions for constitutional reform advanced by progressives (i.e., the ALP, Deakinite liberals, the agrarian radicals of the early Country Party, feminists such as Vida Goldstein, and quasi-republican nationalists such as John Boyd Steel) was the idea of elective ministries. Instead of a prime minister commissioned by the Governor-General (or Premier commissioned by a Governor) appointing her own cabinet, each individual member of the executive would be voted on by the entire parliament. The idea is similar to the way the Swiss legislature elects its Federal Council, except that there the members cannot be removed mid-term. Ministers would be personally responsible to the legislature, and would not form a collective body expected to resign upon failure to secure supply, nor would they be expected to resign if they disagreed with a decision reached by the entire executive.

A similar idea would be to establish an executive committee, with the same structure as other parliamentary committees. Whichever party or coalition had a majority on the floor would have a majority in the executive committee, but the opposition would be represented and entitled to issue minority reports where it disagreed with the decisions of the committee’s majority. This would be a modern-day update of how the French Committee of Public Safety was supposed to work, had it not become the instrument of Robespierre’s personal rule. The office of minister, with all its British and monarchical overtones, would be abolished, and the entire executive committee would directly oversee the executive branch.

The idea of an elective ministry was never implemented, though it influenced the pre-Rudd practice of the ALP caucus electing its front bench. A skeletal version has made an appearance in Britain in recent years – the devolved legislatures of Scotland, Wales, and the Six Counties all elect their chief minister, who then appoints her cabinet. But the original idea has been all but forgotten, and critics of the ‘elective dictatorship’ of the Westminster system are focused on various other panaceas – proportional representation, stronger parliamentary committees, and bicameralism.

Recently, Julia Gillard was able to shore up her floundering leadership by daring Kevin Rudd to challenge her in a leadership ballot. When he shrunk from the challenge, almost all of her ministers who supported him either resigned or were replaced. Effectively, this means that as the forty-something percent of ALP MPs who support Rudd cannot serve in the cabinet, Australia is currently ruled by the faction which commands a slim majority of the caucus which holds 71 of the 150 seats in the House of Representatives. The ability of the prime minister to use the monarchical powers delegated to her (dissolving parliament, appointing and dismissing ministers, etc.) has ensured that no Australian government has been defeated on the floor of the House since Fadden’s in 1941, and none has been defeated due to a back-bench rebellion since Bruce’s in 1929.

If the cabinet system were replaced with an executive committee, the ALP would have 71/150ths of its seats, and the pro-Rudd faction would receive its proportionate share of that tally. We might evolve something like the American system, but without its increasingly imperial and plebiscitary presidency. The distinction between private member’s bills and government bills would vanish, and minority factions of the majority party could combine with the opposition and cross-benchers to pass bills – as has happened in the United States recently with Hurricane Sandy relief and the Violence Against Women Act.

Cabinet government was blindly copied from Britain – just like the monarchy, the Union Jack on our flag, imperial honours, and imperial measurements. It belongs to an age when the duty of parliaments was to secure taxation revenue so that the monarch could go about his business of making war, feathering his own nest, and generally oppressing people. In a true democracy, the members of the executive – be they an executive committee or elected ministers – should carry out the will of the legislature, not the other way around.