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.
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