By Jonathan Strauss
PERTH — How can one judge the significance of election results? Not by the number of seats won, if the February 6 WA elections are any guide.
In the lower house of WA's parliament, the Liberals (28 seats) and Nationals (six seats) now hold about 60% of the 57 seats and Labor (22 seats) 38%. There is a solitary (right-wing) independent. One seat (Perth) remains in doubt.
Lower house statewide primary votes, however, were 49% for the Liberals and Nationals and 37.6% for Labor (roughly corresponding to its seats).
The imbalance is partly a result of a gerrymander favouring non-metropolitan electorates, where a vote is worth nearly twice that of a metropolitan one. This works mainly in favour of the Nationals. With one vote, one value (and similar voting patterns), the Nationals would have only three or four seats.
The main cause of the imbalance is that the elections are held by preferential voting for small single-member seats, rather than by proportional representation for regional or statewide multi-member electorates. To win seats, a party's vote must be concentrated in certain electorates so as to give it (after preference distribution) more than 50% of the vote. Thus, for example, the Nationals won their seats with a smaller vote statewide than the Greens, who won no lower house seats.
This distortion of parliamentary numbers hides the underlying trend in the electoral strength of parties.
Both major parties are continuing to lose votes to the so-called minor parties and independent candidates. Of Labor's lost 4.9% between 1989 and 1993, the Liberals and Nationals picked up only 2.2%.
The aggregation of the minor party/independent vote, up 2.7% to over 13%, reveals little about the changed character of that vote, however:
- The ephemeral right-wing grouping, Greypower, which captured much of the non-two-party vote in 1989, has almost disappeared.
- Nearly 30% of all independent votes were gained in the two seats where Labor did not stand.
- The Australian Democrats' vote statewide rose by 0.9% to 2.3%, but this was achieved only by running in three times as many seats (37 in 1993 compared with 12 in 1989). Average votes per seat fell from 5.6% in 1989 to 3.15% in 1993.
- The Greens (WA), formed by a merger of a number of groups that stood candidates in the 1989 elections, took 30% of the non-two-party vote for a total of 3.9% statewide.
This vote for the Greens, which has remained unreported in WA's monopoly media, was achieved with only 38 seats contested. The average vote per seat was 5.7%.
The highest Greens votes were recorded in the far south-west seats of Warren (15.1%) and Vasse (11.5%) and the western suburbs seats of Nedlands (10.6%) and Cottesloe (10.3%). These are all blue ribbon Liberal seats, and here the Greens are already challenging Labor as the major opposition to the Liberals, gaining one-half to three-quarters of Labor's vote.
Other high Greens votes were recorded in the traditionally Labor seats of Ashburton (9.3%) in the north-west and the southern suburban Peel (8.3%) and Fremantle (8.1%).
In all but one seat contested by both the Greens and Democrats, the Greens' vote was higher, normally by 50-150%. During the campaign, the Greens largely displaced the Democrats as the "third force" in the commercial media.
- There were three independent candidates identified as standing to the left of Labor. Two (Aboriginal activist Clarrie Isaacs in Fremantle and juvenile law reform campaigner Scott Calnan in Glendalough) scored only about 1%. Kath Mallot in Perth received 7.1%, splitting most of the progressive vote with the Greens (7.2%).
- There were only two socialist candidates in the elections, standing in Perth and Fremantle for the Democratic Socialist Electoral League. Their vote was small but respectable, given Greens and left independent competition — in Perth, 1.5%, and in Fremantle, 0.7%.
In the upper house, elected by proportional representation from six regions (the gerrymander again gives the Nationals an advantage), the Greens may pick up a seat (Brenda Roy) in North Metropolitan with 7.1% of the vote or possibly even two (by electing Jim Scott in South Metropolitan, where the Greens took 5.1% of the vote).
The Greens' state upper house vote, however, when considered together with the Greens' 1990 federal election results in WA, raises danger signs for the Greens in the upcoming federal elections.
The Greens' main ambition on March 13 is the election of another senator. The quota for a Senate seat is over 14%, although this can be put together from preferences, as the Greens did with 8.4% of primary votes in the 1990 Senate elections (and with lower house votes generally between 6 and 10%).
Other state regional votes were less than 5%, however, and in East Metropolitan only 2% (in this region an Electoral Commission ruling stopped a simple, above-the-line vote for the Greens). In the South-West (and South Metropolitan), the upper house higher than that of the lower house, although not every lower house seat in these regions was contested.
Thus the statewide vote for the Greens in 1993 was lower than that in 1990, when the party had only just been formed, and generally appears to have been sustained only where on-the-ground strength has been built up (for example, all North Metropolitan seats were contested).
The message of the state elections for the Greens appears to be that electoral success cannot be developed by moving towards slick media campaigns. Instead, the organisation must be strengthened and new alliances must be built politically and in the community in order to broaden electoral support.