By Allen Myers
On February 3, Helen Coonan, a Liberal senator from NSW and the government's deputy whip in the Senate, delivered a speech on "reform" of the Senate to the Sydney Institute, a right-wing think-tank. An abridged version of the speech, which advocated changing the method of election to reduce the number of independent and small party senators, was published in the Sydney Morning Herald the next day.
Laurie Oakes, in the February 9 Bulletin, reported that Coonan's speech reflects "the favoured Senate reform option at senior levels of government". John Howard, Oakes continued, "has started talking seriously in private about the possible need to bite the Senate bullet".
There is nothing accidental about the timing of the Coonan-Oakes trial balloon. A similar "reform" campaign — involving prominent Liberals such as John Hewson and former federal party director Andrew Robb, and the Australian newspaper — got under way last June, when the Senate was being pressured to pass Howard's racist Wik legislation.
Coonan's proposal is clearly intended to threaten the Democrats, Greens and independent Brian Harradine: if you block the GST, this will be used as evidence of the need to change the voting system, and you may lose out in the next election.
However, the threat will not go away once the Democrats or Harradine have made the eventual "compromise" that passes the GST. Coonan's proposal is undemocratic enough to appeal to the Coalition in general, and Oakes suggests that Labor might be willing to join in implementing it: after all, it collaborated with the Liberals in Tasmania to reduce the chances of Greens or other small parties winning seats in state parliament.
Reducing democracy
It should be pointed out that there are undemocratic aspects to the Senate and its system of election. These include the fact that all states have the same number of senators, regardless of population, the fact that only half the Senate is normally elected at one time and the sometimes long delay between the election date and the date when senators take their seats.
But Coonan is not proposing to change any of these undemocratic features. In fact, at the moment the government is using the delay between the election and the convening of the Senate to pass the GST with the votes of senators elected six years ago, many of whom have subsequently been replaced by the voters.
No, the government wants to make Senate elections less democratic, though it can't express the intention that openly.
The idea floated in Coonan's speech is to impose a threshold; parties that received fewer primary votes than the threshold would not receive preferences when these were distributed. In effect, voters' second or third preferences for small parties would be ignored and their votes either discarded or awarded to a larger party, depending on how far down the list preferences were distributed.
Not surprisingly, counting preferences for small parties as preferences for big parties would reduce the number of small party senators elected. Coonan calculated that a 10% threshold would have cost two Democrats and one Green their seats in 1993 and 1996, and three Democrats and Harradine theirs in 1998.
'Minority government'
This sort of fiddling of the result of Senate elections is necessary, according to Coonan and her fellow "reformers", in order to stop a "minority" holding the balance of power in the Senate and frustrating the government's program.
Thus Greg Sheridan wrote in the Australian during last year's "reform" campaign: "The voting system for the Senate means no government — Labor or Coalition — can implement its program".
Coonan wrote, "The point is whether minority representatives, who will not and cannot form government, should be in a position to act as a minority government ... steps should be taken to ensure that there is at least the prospect of the government of the day obtaining the majority in the Senate from time to time."
To hear them tell it, you would think there was a clause in the Electoral Act stating: "No party shall be allowed to have a majority of senators." In fact, for the government to get a majority of senators is quite simple: all it has to do is get a majority of votes for the Senate.
Indeed, it's even easier than that. In a half-Senate election, in which six senators are chosen, a quota is 14.28%. So the Coalition or Labor can get half the senators with only 42.84% of the vote. They can elect four senators — two-thirds of those elected — with only 57.12% of the vote.
In a full Senate election, for 12 senators, six quotas require just 46.14%, seven quotas 53.83%.
So if the Coalition and Labor have "no prospect" of getting a majority in the Senate, it's not because the electoral system is stacked against them; if anything, it's stacked in their favour. Their problem is that they can't get enough people to vote for them.
As for "minority government", could it have escaped Coonan's attention that we do indeed have one — but not in the Senate?
In the House of Representatives elections in October, the Coalition parties got something under 40% of first-preference votes. Even after distribution of preferences, on a two-party preferred basis, they came behind Labor in terms of votes. But undemocratic election rules and the accident of where votes were cast gave the Coalition a majority of seats. The Coalition is really a minority government.
Because the Senate is elected on a basis of proportional representation, its membership comes much closer than the House of Representatives to reflecting the way in which the public voted.
The problem for both the Coalition and Labor is that people are less and less inclined to vote for them. Coonan's proposal is intended to make the Senate more like the House of Representatives, to make it more likely that the Coalition or Labor can get a majority of seats with a minority of votes.