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Choosing a government-lower
houses as electoral colleges
Prolonged
post-election turmoil, with minority governments or unstable coalitions, does
not sit well with the public in any of our four countries. Nor do voters
appreciate too-frequent elections to resolve political instability. Voters want
a stable government with the power to implement the broad policies on which it
has been elected. This does not mean that voters necessarily support all the
items in a government’s election policy-the so-called ‘mandate’ much beloved by
politicians-but they do want a clear election result and a government which is
preferred by a majority of voters, and we should look first at how successful
the various electoral systems have been at achieving this.
The first issue is whether the
country has been fairly divided into equal electorates, and also whether the
voting system produces the desired result. The question of public financial
support for election campaigns should also be considered, to ensure that in
these days of mass media, victory is not almost automatically to the richest
party.
Of course elections will not always
be decisive, and sometimes MPs prefer minority governments to another election.
Some of these minority governments have been surprisingly successful.
The parliament of course retains the
power to remove a government by passing a vote of no confidence in it.
Parliament has less say in a change of prime minister or premier, with the
decision being left to the government party.
The twenty parliaments we are
considering have various terms, varying from three years to five. It is worth
looking at the various terms to see which is best. Then there is the question
of the desirability of a fixed term for the parliament, removing the power of
the prime minister or premier to cut short the term for political advantage.
Then there is the possible role of
the upper house in forcing an unwanted election on the lower house. How and
when (where it exists) could this power be used?
Finally, what is the role of the
head of state in appointing or dismissing the prime minister or premier, and
also in approving the dissolution of parliament?
In the United
States the role of choosing the president
(who is both head of government and head of state) is not normally performed by
the legislature, the Congress, but by a separately-elected body called the
Electoral College. In the Westminster
system, the electoral college role in the choice of head of government is performed
by the lower house of the legislature.
The original concept of the American
Electoral College was that delegates from each state should meet, discuss and
choose the most suitable individual to be president, but inevitably candidates
soon began standing for the Electoral College pledged to vote for a particular
individual. In most of the states there is not even the pretence of voting
otherwise. There are 538 electors, each state having a strength equal to the
number of its senators and congressmen, and the District
of Columbia, which has no voting representation in
the Congress, has three Electoral College votes. The election in each state is
on a ‘winner takes all’ basis, that is, the presidential candidate who gets the
most votes in a state is deemed to have all that state’s Electoral College
votes. There is no central authority conducting the elections. There are 50
quite independent state electoral authorities, all operating under different
laws and supervising various methods of casting and counting votes, which
concern not only the presidential elections but also elections for Congress,
state governors and legislatures, and local legislatures. Most of the states
have passed the responsibility for the voting systems down to the counties and
cities, some 3000 of them, who have to pay for the voting methods they choose.
A presidential candidate needs 270
Electoral College votes to be elected. If no presidential candidate has that
many, and cannot gain them by negotiation, the election is decided by the House
of Representatives from among the top three candidates, each state having one
vote. Because of the way in which the Electoral College delegates are chosen,
it is possible for someone to gain the presidency with fewer nationwide votes
than another candidate. This occurred in the 2000 presidential election, when
George W. Bush won a majority of votes in the Electoral College after prolonged
legal disputes, but was 500 000 behind the other major candidate, Al Gore,
in the nationwide vote. This has happened on only three other occasions-John
Quincy Adams (1824), Rutherford B.
Hayes (1876) and Benjamin
Harrison (1888). The use of the House of
Representatives to resolve a deadlock in the Electoral College has been
necessary three times, in 1800, 1824 and 1876. Occasionally there have also
been electors who have broken their voting pledge (this has happened six times
in the past ten presidential elections) but it has never affected the result.
One further point should be made.
Because neither voting nor even registration as a voter is compulsory (and the
latter is sometimes administratively tedious), voter turnout is rarely more
than 50 per cent. The 64 per cent turnout in 1960 was the highest in modern
times.
So much for the American system.
Turning to the Westminster system,
Bagehot thought that choosing the executive was the most important task of the
lower house of parliament. Let us look then at how well the various lower
houses have performed this task between 1970 and 2000.
Most voters in
the four countries we are considering seem to want the result of an election to
be a decisive choice of government, and it is obviously desirable that the
government chosen should, if possible, be one preferred by a majority of
voters. It is also important that the voters should have sufficient
information, particularly in the financial area, to enable them to judge the
performance of the incumbent government and its future plans. Governments often
suppress such information, and sometimes issue grossly misleading forecasts.
United Kingdom
There were eight
elections between 1970 and 2000. Seven of them were won by a party with a
workable majority in the House of Commons, together with the largest percentage
of the national vote. There was one minority government after an election. In
February 1974, Labour won 301 seats out of 635, the Conservatives 297, the
Liberals fourteen, Ulster Unionists eleven, Welsh and Scottish Nationalists and
others three. Labour was in fact 0.8 per cent behind the Conservatives in the
national vote. The Wilson Labour Government was not immediately challenged in
the Parliament, because no party wanted another election so soon. Wilson
held on for eight months before he obtained a dissolution in October 1974. He
managed to win an absolute majority of only three, despite being 3.4 per cent
ahead of the Conservatives in the national vote.
There were no coalition governments
during the three decades, nor were any seriously contemplated as a means of
dealing with a minority government or one with an unworkably small majority. It
is true that Conservative Prime Minister Edward
Heath (1970-74) negotiated with the Liberals
before resigning after losing the February 1974 election, and there was a
Liberal-Labour pact to support the October 1974 Labour government after it lost
its narrow majority. This pact lasted from March 1977 until May 1978. The
Liberals gained no ministerial offices from the pact, but perhaps benefited
slightly from regular consultations with ministers. In any case neither Labour
nor the Liberals wanted an election.
It is worth noting that none of the
eight governments won more than 50 per cent of the national vote. The highest
was 46.4 per cent by the Conservatives under Heath in 1970 and the lowest 37.1
by Labour under Wilson
in February 1974. The reason is of course the presence of the Liberals and the
various national parties. The Social and Liberal Democrats are the result of
the merging of the Social Democratic Party (a right wing breakaway from the
Labour Party) and the Liberals. The nationalist parties are the Plaid Cymru (in
Wales), the
Scottish National Party and the Ulster Unionists. The Ulster Unionists have
close links with the Conservative Party.
The voting peak for the Liberals and
Social Democrats was 25.4 per cent of the vote in 1983 (which gave them 23
seats) and for the nationalist parties 6.7 per cent in October 1974 (which gave
them 26 seats). The Liberals always suffered in representation because their
support, though sometimes substantial, was always diffused. Moreover the
percentage of votes won by the minor parties is misleadingly low, because they
do not contest all seats. The major parties, on the other hand, are becoming
more geographically concentrated, with Labour the party of Scotland,
Wales and Northern
England, while the main strength of the Conservatives is in the
south.
It cannot be said that the House of
Commons performs very well as an electoral college making a decisive choice of
government which reflects the wishes of those interested enough to vote. After
all, since 1970 there has been one elected minority government and one with
such a narrow majority that it soon became a minority. On the credit side,
voter involvement is much higher than in the United
States, where only about half those eligible
actually vote. In the UK
the typical figure is three-quarters, ranging from a post-war high of 84 per
cent in 1950 to a low of 71.5 per cent in 1997. In the 2001 election the figure
fell even further, to 59 per cent, the lowest since 1918. Undoubtedly the
overwhelming support for the Blair Government was the key factor in voter
apathy, but it must be a worry when an MP can be elected on a voter turnout of
39 per cent, as happened to a Labour MP in Shropshire,
and when nearly eighteen million of Britain’s
44 million registered voters abstained. Fewer than one in four eligible voters
under 25 cast a ballot.
Canada
Although the
Canadian House of Commons is elected for a five year term, there were seventeen
elections between 1945 and 2000, so the average life was little more than three
years. Of these seventeen elections four were inconclusive, with no party
having an absolute majority. When this arises the custom has been followed that
if the incumbent government is the largest party after the election it remains
in office and faces the House of Commons, while if the opposition is the
largest party, the government resigns and the leader of the opposition is
invited to form a government.
The parties in the House of Commons
are numerous, and tend to be geographically based. The Liberal Party’s
political philosophy has been middle-of-the-road, trying to project an image of
competence, and to appeal to the middle class of Ontario
and Quebec, and to francophones.
The Progressive Conservatives are basically a conservative party, with the
progressive part of the name the result of an earlier amalgamation. Their power
base used to be Ontario and the
prairies, but they were almost annihilated in the 1993 election and are
recovering slowly. The Reform Party (now the Alliance Party) was established in
1987. It is a right wing populist party, anti-French and anti-Ottawa. Its power
base is the western provinces, and it is taking many votes from the Progressive
Conservatives. There have been moves to unite with the Conservatives, but so
far these have come to nothing. The Social Credit Party owes little to the
fundamentalist economic policies of Major Douglas,
and is now conservative both socially and economically. The New Democrats
(CCF/NDP) Party is the equivalent of the Labour parties in the other countries,
though perhaps rather more left wing. The Bloc Qubcois represents the
interests of Quebec only, and was
sufficiently strong to become the official opposition for a time.
An inconclusive election obviously
offers a wonderful opportunity for deals between the major and minor parties,
but Canada has
developed some unique ground rules. There is never a suggestion of a coalition
between the major parties. There is never a suggestion of a minor party going
into coalition with a major party to form a government. Instead, the minor
parties look to influence the government program so as to achieve some of their
political objectives. Finally, the minor parties and Independents are aware
that in an election to resolve a hung parliament the voters tend to look to the
major parties, and the minor parties suffer. This given them a strong incentive
not to force a premature election.
The Canadian government has an
unusual discretion in deciding the date of a by-election to fill a casual
vacancy in the House of Commons. A seat may remain vacant for many months if
public opinion is running against the government. Prime
Minister Trudeau once called fifteen
by-elections on the same day.
In the 1957 election the long
Liberal reign came to an end. From then until 1968 there was much instability,
with no less than four more elections. Some stability returned in 1968. In that
year Liberal Pierre Trudeau succeeded Lester
Pearson as prime minister, and called an
early election. The Liberals gained 155 seats to the Progressive Conservatives
72, the New Democrats 22 and the Quebec
version of Social Credit fourteen. Such stability could not last, and the 1972
election saw the Liberals and the Progressive Conservatives again neck-and-neck,
109 seats to 107, with the New Democrats holding the balance of power with 31
seats. It was touch and go which of the major parties would have the greater
number of seats, one riding (the Canadian description of an electorate) being
won, after recounts, by only four votes. The Liberal government faced the House
and was sustained for sixteen months, though losing eight out of 81 votes,
before being defeated on a vote of confidence. At the ensuing election (1974)
the Liberals won an absolute majority.
Again it could not last, and the
1979 election returned to the indecisive pattern. The House of Commons was
enlarged to 282 members, but the largest party, the Progressive Conservatives,
won only 136 seats, and 35.9 per cent of the popular vote. Either the New
Democrats (26 seats) or Social Credit (six seats) could have given the
Progressive Conservatives a majority-only just in the latter case-but both
would have been needed to sustain a Liberal government. In the event, the
Liberal government resigned immediately after the election, and a Progressive
Conservative government tottered on for a few months. The prime minister, Joe
Clark, did not face the House for five
months after the election, and two months later was defeated on a vote of
confidence.
The Liberals won an absolute
majority at the 1980 election, and set the pattern for the next four
elections-Progressive Conservatives in 1984 and 1988, and Liberals in 1993 and
1997, though only the Progressive Conservatives, with 50 per cent in 1984, won
a majority of the popular vote.
The 1993 election was dramatic, with
the governing Progressive Conservatives being reduced from 151 seats to two. It also marked the defeat of Mrs
Kim Campbell, Canada’s first woman prime minister. She had held office for only
a few months, after the resignation of her predecessor, Brian
Mulroney. The Liberals gained a massive
majority, gaining 177 seats in the 295 seat House of Commons. The Liberals
swept Ontario and Atlantic Canada, winning all but one seat in each of them,
and won an unprecedented number of seats in the west. The election marked the
rise of two new regional parties, the Bloc Qubcois with 54 seats, and the
Reform Party with 51 seats, all but one in the west and mostly taken from the
Progressive Conservatives. The Bloc Qubcois, as the largest non-government
party, became the official opposition. The party leader gave an undertaking
that the Bloc would not be obstructive in the House just to show that Quebec
would be better off as a sovereign state because federalism did not work.
Neither the Progressive Conservatives nor the New Democratic Party achieved the
twelve seats required for recognition as official parties in the House.
The general election in 1997 saw the Liberal Party win a second
consecutive majority government, but the Liberals were reduced from 177 to 155
seats, giving them only a narrow majority in the 301 seat House of Commons. The
Liberals’ strength came largely from Ontario,
and many seats were lost in Atlantic Canada, where the seats held fell from 31
to eleven out of 32 available. Two Cabinet ministers lost their seats, and all
the Liberal seats in Nova Scotia
were lost. The Reform Party increased its numbers to 60, all from the west, and
became the official opposition. The Bloc Qubcois fell from 54 to 44 seats,
and from 49 to 38 per cent of the vote in Quebec,
which meant that they won less than half of the votes of the francophones. The
Progressive Conservatives staged something of a recovery from their 1993
disaster, and won 19 per cent of the popular vote and twenty seats, chiefly in
Atlantic Canada. The conservative vote in the west mostly went to the Reform
Party.[24] The New Democratic Party also
staged a comeback, increasing its numbers from nine to twenty.
Canada has made a decisive choice of
government in each election of the last two decades of the century, but the
lack of effective nation wide parties competing for government is damaging to
national cohesion.
Australia
All the 22
national elections in Australia
between 1946 and 2000 were fought out between the Labor Party and the
Liberal-National Party Coalition, with the exception of the 1987 election when
the Coalition split, and lost an election it should have won. The Liberal Party
is roughly equivalent to the British Conservative Party, and the Labor Party
(the ALP) to the British Labour Party. The National Party (formerly the Country
Party) is a very conservative rural party, in favour of considerable government
involvement in rural marketing. There have been occasional Independents and
minor party MPs, but since 1943 they have never held the balance of power in
the House of Representatives. Each election has resulted in an absolute
majority, and none of the governments has had any real difficulty in getting
its legislation through the House, even when there was only a narrow majority,
as there was in 1961-63, when the coalition
government had only a one seat majority. Such is the power of party
discipline.
Unlike Canada, the major parties are
nation wide. The balance between Labor and the combined Liberal and National
Party votes is remarkably consistent around Australia.
But although decisive electoral results are expected, it is not the case that
the combination of single member electorates and preferential voting has always
produced the government desired by a majority of voters. In 1954, 1961, 1969
and 1998, when the Coalition won the elections, a narrow overall majority of
voters would have preferred a Labor government, and in 1990 the Coalition was
just preferred by the voters, but Labor won government with a safe eight seat
majority. Single-member electorates disadvantage parties such as the Australian
Labor Party, which tends to have excessive numbers of voters (many more than
are needed to win) concentrated in electorates in industrial areas. Parties
such as the Australian Democrats, with a relatively small number of widely scattered
voters, are also disadvantaged.
An interesting new party emerged in
1996. Pauline Hanson had been selected as the Liberal
candidate for the safe Labor seat of Oxley, in Queensland.
During the campaign she wrote an anti-Aboriginal letter to the local newspaper,
and she was disendorsed by the Liberal Party. She continued as an Independent,
and won the election, which she never would have done as a Liberal. The reason
for her success was that she advanced ideas which were firmly held by many
country people, but which were unacceptable both to Labor and the Coalition.
She campaigned against more Asian immigration, and for fewer benefits for Aborigines,
cheaper loans for struggling farmers, and no tightening of the gun ownership
laws. Her position as an Independent in the House of Representatives was used
to form the One Nation Party, but as the party developed and began to produce
broader policies-on taxation, for example-the intellectual limitations began to
appear. Nevertheless One Nation managed to win eleven seats and gained 23 per
cent of the vote in the Queensland state election in 1998, and in the federal
election later in the same year, although Mrs Hanson was not re-elected and her
party did not win any seats in the House of Representatives, they did manage to
elect a senator from Queensland, taking a seat from the National Party. Across
the country, One Nation won 8.4 per cent of the vote, considerably more than
the Nationals (5.3 per cent) and the Democrats (5.1 per cent). It was typical,
though, of the highly centralised and generally incompetent management of the
party that the successful Senate candidate turned out to be ineligible, because
she was not an Australian citizen. Her place was taken by the second candidate
on the One Nation list.
Problems soon emerged in Queensland.
One of the One Nation MPs resigned only four months after he was elected, and
the state Labor government won the by-election, turning it into a majority
government. Soon afterwards five other One Nation MPs left the party and sat as
Independents, leaving only five One Nation MPs. Then the courts ruled that One
Nation had not been properly registered for the 1998 state election, and had to
refund the electoral funds it had been given, driving the five surviving One
Nation MPs to leave One Nation and form their own party.
But the issues which led to the
sensational rise of the One Nation Party have not disappeared, and it may well
be a significant influence in future elections.
The federal government has taken
action to ensure that the voters are properly informed on fiscal matters before
an election. After winning the 1996 election it issued a ‘Charter of Budget
Honesty’, to ensure ‘that no other government in the future behaves in the way
the Labor government behaved in the March 1996 election’, when it ‘assured the
Australian public that the accounts were in balance when in fact, as the
outcome for that year showed, the government deficit was $10 billion.’
To achieve this goal, the
secretaries of the treasury and finance departments are required to prepare a
pre-election report providing assessments of the fiscal and economic outlook.
This report is to be released within ten days after the announcement of an
election. Such a report would certainly prevent the government from making
unrealistic promises, and could help the opposition in developing its plans.
New Zealand
All the
elections between 1935 and 1993 resulted in a clear win for either the
Nationals or Labour, though the 1993 election was a very close-run thing, with
the Nationals finishing with a one seat majority. Otherwise the only two
elections when the party strengths were close were 1957 and 1981. In 1957
Labour had a majority of two over the Nationals, and in 1981 the Nationals had
a majority of two over the combined numbers of Labour and Social Credit. Labour
Party discipline in New Zealand
is such that no real difficulty was experienced by the 1957 government, and the
Parliament ran its usual term. National Party discipline is slightly, but only
slightly, more relaxed. In 1983 two National MPs voted against key clauses of
an industrial relations bill, causing a government defeat on the issue. Prime
Minister Muldoon called for a pledge from
party members not to cross the floor in 1984, an election year. One MP
qualified the pledge by saying she would not accept the party policy on
disarmament, visits by nuclear ships, and rape. Muldoon
immediately called a snap election, which he lost.
The single member electoral
districts and first-past-the-post voting did not always award power to the
party preferred by the majority of the voters. Of the seventeen elections
between 1946 and 1993, nine were clearly won by the more popular party. In the
other eight elections neither of the two major parties had an absolute majority
of the votes cast, minor parties receiving a substantial proportion of the
votes, such as 20.6 per cent for Social Credit (and two seats) in 1981 and 12.2
per cent (but no seats) for the New Zealand Party in 1984. In the 1978 and 1981
elections the Nationals won government with an absolute majority of seats,
despite having smaller shares of the overall vote than Labour.
The National Party is conservative
but more rurally influenced than the Australian Liberal Party. The Labour Party
is very similar to the Australian Labor Party. The Social Credit Party’s main
strength was among the poorer farmers of the North Island;
in all except financial matters (where it was populist) the party was ultra conservative.
It was renamed the Democrats Party in an attempt to broaden its appeal, and in
1991 formed the Alliance Party by merging with the Greens, New Labour and the
Maori Party. The New Zealand First Party was formed by Winston
Peters after he was dismissed from the
National ministry in 1991, but the party held the balance of power after the
1996 election, and Peters was re-admitted to the Cabinet only
to be dismissed again. The party split, but still survives. The ACT Party is a
party to the right of centre.
Concern over the lack of
representation of significant minor parties led to the adoption by referendum
in 1993 of the West German Additional Member System, which the New Zealanders
called the Mixed Member Proportional System, usually shortened to MMP. MMP was
first used in the 1996 election. The size of the House of Representatives was
increased to 120 members, 65 members from individual electorates (six of them
Maori), and 55 from party lists. Under the MMP system, electors had two votes.
One was by first-past-the-post voting to choose a member for their particular
electorate. The other vote was for a party list. Party list votes are
calculated nationally and parties are allocated seats from their lists so as to
make their total number of MPs equal to their percentage of the national party
list vote. Parties which win less than five per cent of the national party list
vote are not allocated any seats.
As was inevitable, neither of the
major parties won an overall majority in the 1996 election, and the smaller
parties won substantial numbers of seats. There were no less than nine parties
represented in the Parliament, as well as four Independents. The National Party
had 44 of the 120 seats and the Labour Party 37. The largest of the smaller
parties was the New Zealand First Party, and other significant ones were the
left leaning Alliance Party and the right wing ACT. After eight weeks of
negotiations the ruling National Party managed to achieve an alliance with the New
Zealand First Party, which gave them a
majority. This was despite the fact that New Zealand First had been bitterly
opposed to the Nationals during the election campaign.
Such as alliance could not last. In
August 1998 the leader of the New Zealand First Party, Winston
Peters, at that time Deputy Prime Minister
and Treasurer, led his party members in a walk-out from a Cabinet meeting
called to decide on the terms of the sale of the government shares in Wellington
International Airport.
The outcome was the dismissal of Peters from the Cabinet, and
the dissolution of the coalition. Although four of Winston Peters’ former
colleagues rejoined the government as Independents it still had only 48 of the
120 seats, relying on sufficient votes from minor parties and Independents to
enable it to survive on votes of confidence.
New
Zealand went to the polls for the second
time under the MMP system on 27
November 1999. On election night the Labour Party and its ally the
Alliance Party seemed to have won, and a formal coalition agreement was signed
on 6 December and a Cabinet of twenty ministers (sixteen Labour and four Alliance)
was announced. (A great improvement on the nine weeks it took to form a
government after the 1996 election.) There were some delays in finalising the
vote counting, because of recounts, some irregularities in procedure, and the
additional work of vote counting for two citizens-initiated referendums. The
Green Party’s overall vote eventually rose above 5 per cent, entitling it to
have additional seats to bring its strength up to its share of the national
vote. This gave the Greens seven seats, and reduced the Coalition to 59 seats
in the 120 seat House of Representatives. Although the Coalition was
technically a minority government, it could rely on support from the Greens on
every important issue.
Summary
It can be seen
that the election results for the four national parliaments have been erratic.
They have by no means always produced a decisive result, which causes either a
minority government or a post-election coalition. Even when they have produced
a decisive result, it has not always been a decision which reflected the wishes
of a majority of the voters. There are two factors which must be considered
here. Are the electorate boundaries fairly drawn, without gerrymandering or
malapportionment? And is the voting system employed one which is most likely to
produce a fair and decisive result? Let us look at these problems in turn.
Introduction
Eighteen of the
twenty lower houses we are considering now use single member electorates as the
source of their MPs. The odd ones out are Tasmania, which has used proportional
representation since 1909, now with five members being elected from each of
five constituencies; and New Zealand, which since 1996 has used the MMP system,
a mixture of single member constituencies and proportional representation.
Whichever method is used, the fairness of the drawing of constituency
boundaries is important.
It is claimed that in 1812 Governor
Gerry of Massachusetts,
a Republican-Democrat, endeavoured to have the state electoral boundaries
redrawn so as to concentrate the opposition federalist vote in a few districts.
One of the electoral districts was so oddly shaped that it was claimed that it
looked like a salamander, and the process was named ‘gerrymander’ after the
Governor. It worked. The Republican-Democrats won the election in terms of
seats, in a landslide 29-11, although the federalists won more votes. It later
emerged that Gerry was actually opposed to the
re-distribution.
Gerrymanders survive. The US Supreme
Court recently ruled that a famous Z-shaped congressional district in North
Carolina was not unconstitutional because it had been
gerrymandered for political rather than racial reasons.
Gerrymanders are not the only way to
distort election results. Another way is to have different numbers of voters in
different electorates. There is always pressure from rural electorates to be
given a smaller quota of voters, partly because of the vast size of some rural
electorates, and partly because country people regard themselves as the true
creators of wealth. The process of varying the number of voters in electorates
to meet political pressures or gain advantages is called malapportionment by
the Americans.
United Kingdom
It cannot be said
that the British system of drawing constituency boundaries works very well.
There are four boundary commissions, one each for England,
Scotland, Wales
and Northern Ireland.
Each has a judge as de facto
chairman, two other members, usually barristers, and is assisted by the
registrar-general and the surveyor-general. A commission’s first task is to
recommend the total number of seats for the country for which it is
responsible. This apportionment has continued to be badly skewed. The 1986
Parliamentary Constituencies Act laid down that the number of constituencies in
Scotland should
not be less than 71 and in Wales
not less than 35, while in Northern Ireland
the number should not be greater than eighteen or less than sixteen. If one
allowed a uniform electoral quota throughout the United
Kingdom, thirteen Scottish seats and six
Welsh ones would be abolished. Alternatively, it would be possible to avoid any
decrease in the number of seats for Scotland
and Wales by
increasing the size of the House of Commons to 783, with 129 new seats going to
England, a
solution which seems very unlikely.
When the Scottish Parliament was
established in 1998 the Parliamentary Constituencies Act was amended to remove
the guarantee of 71 seats for Scotland
at Westminster, though nothing was
done about the Welsh or Northern Irish quotas. The amendment also provided that
the English quota should apply in deciding the number of seats for Scotland,
though the Commission is required to take into account the boundaries of local
government areas and geographical considerations (the amendment to the Act
specifically directed that Orkney and Shetland should remain a separate
constituency). It seems certain that the next review will result in fewer seats
for Scotland,
though the Scots will undoubtedly fight hard against any serious reduction. In
any case, the Commission will not report until some time between 2003 and 2007.
The commissioners have regarded the
avoidance of crossing county and London borough boundaries, and geographical
considerations, as being higher priorities than achieving an equal number of
voters in each constituency. The result has been that the constituency with the
highest number of voters (the Isle of Wight, with
101 680 electors in the 1997 election) has nearly five times the number of
the constituency with the fewest (22 938, in the Western Isles of
Scotland). Moreover, redistributions are infrequent-eight to twelve years after
the presentation of the previous report-and have to be approved by Parliament,
with much opportunity for political manoeuvring and delay. There may be a great
deal of voter movement between a commission beginning its investigation and Parliament
approving the result.
Canada
Canada
has had great problems in producing a fair system of distributing parliamentary
seats. There must be some limit on the number of MPs in relation to population,
but on the other hand provinces with a falling proportion of the national
population do not like to have their number of MPs reduced, and the smaller
provinces have successfully fought to retain a minimum number of MPs.
The number of federal seats for each
province is determined by a complicated formula based on the decennial census
population (excluding the population of the three territories) to establish the
average population per seat (about 90 000). The appropriate number is then
assigned to each province. The three territories each have one MP. The system
is complicated by the constitutional requirement that no province shall have
fewer MPs than it has senators, and the statutory requirement that no province
will lose seats by a redistribution. The result has been a slow rise in the
size of the House of Commons.
Redistributions normally take place
every ten years to take account of shifts in population, and one was due during
the rule of the 1993 Liberal government. Faced with the prospect of changes
which would increase the number of MPs from 295 to 301, the increase being in Ontario
and the western provinces (not a good area for the Liberals), the Liberal
government introduced legislation to defer the process until after the next
election. This was blocked by the Senate, a popular move which restored some of
the Senate’s tarnished reputation.
The redistribution system does have
anomalies. Because of the senatorial rule, Prince Edward
Island has nearly three times as many seats as its
population would justify, and the other Maritime Provinces
are advantaged to a lesser degree. Canadian opinion seems to be that these are
distortions that can be tolerated in the interests of having all the regions
effectively represented in the House of Commons.
The distribution of the seats
allocated to each province is done by independent provincial boundary
commissions. Each of the commissions is chaired by a judge, selected by the
Chief Justice of the province, and there are two members selected by the
Speaker of the House of Commons. These two members cannot be MPs. The
commissions are intended to produce electoral districts of equal population,
but in special circumstances may vary them up to 25 per cent either way. The
special circumstances include such matters as density or growth of population,
and community or diversity of interests. The drawing of the boundaries and the
use of the population discretion naturally excite fierce controversy,
particularly from MPs who may criticise the commissions, but cannot overrule
them. The process is lengthy, and a redistribution may take three years or more.
The
Canadian provinces
In the past,
there have been allegations of electoral gerrymandering in some of the
provinces and of malapportionment in all of them. There have also been
suggestions that provincial parliaments have been slow to make redistributions
when population shifts have occurred. By the end of the 1990s, all but one of
the provinces had taken some steps to reduce the likelihood of a gerrymander by
appointing as chairman of the electoral boundaries commission a judge, a
retired judge or (in Quebec) the chief electoral officer, though many feel
there is still substantial gerrymandering.
The rural and remote area bias has
been the subject of a long-running debate in Canada. The appeal of an equal
value for votes, ‘rep by pop’ as it is called, is strong. On the other hand,
many feel that the regions need special representation, and in the absence of
upper houses the only way this can be done is by a regional bias in the assemblies.
The situation was complicated by the adoption in 1982 of a Charter of Rights
and Freedoms as part of the Canadian Constitution. As far as voting is
concerned, the Charter provides that ‘every citizen of Canada has the right to
vote in an election of members of a ... legislative assembly’, that ‘every
individual is equal before and under the law and has the right to the equal
protection and equal benefit of the law’ and also that the right is ‘subject
only to such reasonable limits prescribed by law as can demonstrably be
justified in a democratic society.’
A number of disputes over whether
electoral boundaries meet the requirements of the Charter have been taken to
the courts. In 1987 the Chief Justice of British Columbia held that there was
no requirement for absolute voter parity and that the provincial parliaments had
the right to permit deviations, but that limits should be set and the
permissible reasons for variations should be laid down. It has also been held
by the Supreme Court of Canada that the right to vote includes:
- the right to
cast a ballot;
- the right not
to have the political force of one’s vote unduly diluted;
- the right to
effective representation; and
- the right to have the parity of the votes of
others diluted, but not unduly, in order to gain effective representation, or
in the name of practical necessity.
Most of the provinces now follow
these rules, and stay within plus or minus 25 per cent of the mean numerical
size of electorates. Typical factors to be considered by the boundaries
commissions are density of population, accessibility and community of
interests. British Columbia and Quebec
permit the 25 per cent to be exceeded in ‘special [or exceptional]
circumstances’, or ‘when necessary or desirable’, and Saskatchewan
permits 50 per cent variance in the north of the province. The effect can be
considerable. Moreover, the discretion of the boundaries commissions is limited
in some provinces by instructions in the Act that there are to be a specified
number of seats in particular areas. In Alberta, for instance, the Electoral
Boundaries Commission Act provides for 83 seats in the Alberta legislature, of
which 43 are to be allocated to seven cities which account for more than 60 per
cent of Alberta’s population. In Newfoundland
and Labrador there must be special consideration given
to the aboriginal people in Labrador, and to those
affected by the inaccessibility of the coast of Labrador
and the south-west coast of Newfoundland.
Difficulty may arise if the population balance changes, for an amending Act
would be required, and this might not be forthcoming.
Ontario
uses the federal electorates for the provincial parliament, so that they are
regularly reviewed every ten years. The maverick provinces are New
Brunswick, Nova Scotia and Prince
Edward Island, where the legislative assemblies make
up the rules whenever there is a redistribution, which is not very often. In Nova
Scotia in the 1999 general election 17 939 votes
were cast in one electoral district and 6169 in another. Until the 1998
election Prince Edward Island had sixteen dual member electorates, but this was
changed at that time to 27 single member electorates. It is clear that in all
the Canadian provinces the effectiveness of the provincial parliaments as
electoral colleges is reduced by the rural and remote area over-representation,
but the distortion seems to be in accordance with the wishes of the voters, or
at least accepted by them, though if the distortions are excessive it seems
inevitable that there will be legal challenges under the Charter of Rights and
Freedoms.
Redistributions generally occur
either every ten years or after every second general election, though Quebec
has a redistribution after every election. Again, Nova
Scotia, New Brunswick
and Prince Edward Island are
different, for they have a redistribution only when the government thinks one
is necessary, which is not very often.
Australia
Under the
Australian Constitution the number of members of the House of Representatives
from each state or territory must be in proportion to its population, with the
proviso that no state shall have fewer than five members. To maintain the
two-to-one ratio between the House and the Senate, the formula is that the
‘population quota’ is the combined population of the six states divided by
twice the combined number of senators from those states. This population quota
is then divided into each state’s and territory’s population to calculate the
number of members to which each state and territory is entitled.
Early in each parliament there is an
examination of the latest census figures to determine whether the entitlement
of any state or territory has changed. If it has, the number of members from
that state or territory is amended, and a redistribution is required in that
state or territory. Otherwise redistributions are carried out every seven
years, or earlier in any state or territory where a third of the electorates in
that state or territory are beyond the permissible 10 per cent variation from
the average.
The Electoral Commission appoints a
Redistribution Committee for each of the states, the membership including the
Electoral Commissioner himself and the state Surveyor-General and the state
Auditor-General (or their nominees or deputies). The committees must draw
electoral boundaries so that the number of voters in each electorate is within
10 per cent of the average for the state or territory, and must endeavour to
ensure that three years after the redistribution the number of voters in each
electorate will be within 3.5 per cent of the state or territory average. The committees
hold public hearings, and they must ‘give due consideration’ to such things as
the means of communication and travel, community of interests and existing
electoral boundaries. The rules for the committees are laid down in the
Electoral Act, which of course could be amended by parliament, but otherwise
parliament has no role in the timing or result of redistributions. The
Electoral Commission’s decisions are final. They cannot be challenged in any
court.
The
Australian states
There is little
modern evidence of gerrymandering, though in a redistribution in Queensland
in the 1980s an Aboriginal reserve (whose inhabitants would vote overwhelmingly
Labor) was excised from a marginal National Party seat and placed in a
neighbouring safe Labor seat. (The government was National Party.) Such cases
are rare. Much more common was malapportionment, which was achieved by using a
system of electoral zones, with numerically much smaller electorates in the
country. The justification for the electoral zones was that it was very
difficult for an MP to service a far-flung electorate, and also the (usually
unspoken) feeling that primary producers had a ‘stake in the country’ and
therefore deserved greater political power. All the states except Western
Australia and Queensland
have taken action to make their electorates equal in voter population, and to
keep them so with regular redistributions. Tasmania
has been exemplary in this respect. Its House of Assembly is now made up of 25 members,
with five elected by proportional representation from each of the five federal
electorates, which are maintained in equality of numbers by the Federal
Electoral Commission.
In Queensland,
after the long-serving National Party government was ejected in disgrace in
1989, action was taken to reduce the malapportionment. But the 1992 Act did
allow for a decrease in the number of enrolled voters in electorates of more
than 100 000 square kilometres, which applied to five enormous electorates
in Western Queensland. They have only two-thirds of the
average number of voters in the other electorates.
Western
Australia has a unique problem. The remote
communities are as likely to be mining settlements (and therefore Labor voting)
as they are to be rural areas (and therefore Liberal voting-the Nationals are
weak in Western Australia). There
is therefore no real pressure from any party for voter equality. The distances,
too, are immense, and vast areas are barely inhabited. The federal electorate
of Kalgoorlie, for instance, in
order to reach its quota of voters has to cover an area of more than two
million square kilometres. State electorates have fewer voters, but some still
cover enormous areas. In the 1994 redistribution, Perth
electorates had an average of 22 370 voters, whereas remote rural and
mining areas averaged only 11 887. It seems likely that electoral zoning
will persist in Western Australia
for the foreseeable future.
New Zealand
New
Zealand used single member constituencies as
the sole basis for the House of Representatives until the 1993 election. In the
1996 election the system was changed to be partly proportional, partly single
member electorates. There were 65 members elected from single member
electorates (five of them Maori) and 55 members elected by nationwide
proportional representation. The system of drawing electorate boundaries
remained the same. A seven-member commission (from which MPs are excluded)
draws new boundaries after each five yearly census. The commission has to aim
for equal size electorates, but is allowed a 5 per cent leeway, to take
into account existing electoral boundaries, community of interest,
communications and topography. Neither Parliament nor the government has any
control over the result.
The seven
Australian parliaments use preferential, compulsory voting. The other thirteen
parliaments use optional voting, and the voting system is first-past-the-post
in all of them, except for the 55 members of the New Zealand Parliament elected
by proportional representation.
The advantages of first-past-the-post
voting are that it is easily understood and the results can be promptly
announced. The voters choose a single candidate, and the one who gains the most
votes is the winner. The disadvantages of such a voting system are that two or
more candidates may take votes from each other, and another candidate who
certainly would not have been the preferred choice of the majority of voters
may win. At various times the UK
has toyed with the idea of preferential voting, but nothing has come of the
proposals. Preferential voting overcomes the problems of first-past-the-post,
but it is complex and the result of an election may take some time to become
clear. If not distorted by party deals, it may allow similar candidates to
offer themselves to the voters without risking both of them being losers-a
variant of the American primary system. But party organisers do not like such
contests, so they rarely happen. The more complex the voting system, the more
it tends to be controlled by party organisers. Voters are usually required to
indicate their order of preference for all the candidates, and many of the
voters, particularly the reluctant ones, may be marking large parts of their
ballot papers in blind ignorance. To overcome this, party workers usually
distribute ‘how to vote’ cards at polling places, showing their supporters
where to place each sequential number on the ballot paper, with the sequence
designed to maximise the vote of their party
candidate as the preferences are distributed, and disadvantage the principal
opponent. Frequently there are deals done between candidates (or usually
between the party machines) to exchange preferences. It all increases the power
of the party machines.
Compulsory
voting
A bill to
introduce compulsory voting passed the Australian Federal Parliament in very
casual fashion in 1924. At this time Queensland
was the only state to have compulsory voting, though compulsory enrolment was
general. A backbench government party senator introduced a private member’s
bill to bring in compulsory voting for federal elections. Only five senators
spoke in the debate and only three MPs when it reached the House of
Representatives. No party leaders spoke on it at all, yet the bill was passed,
without divisions in either house. The effect of compulsory voting, which is
now used in all federal and state elections in Australia,
is to relieve party workers of the tasks of inducing voters to enrol and to go
to the polling place. Parties concentrate on the swinging voters, which has the
effect of pushing the major parties towards the middle ground.
The argument advanced in 1924 for
compulsory voting was that if eligible voters were forced to vote, they would
have to consider political issues and become better informed voters as a
result. There is no evidence that this has happened. Making the vote compulsory
when using the complicated preferential voting system has also introduced a
random distortion. Between two and three per cent of the voters, uninterested
in the result and nicknamed ‘donkey voters’, number their votes from top to
bottom of the ballot paper. A much smaller proportion number their votes from
bottom to top, and others scatter their numbers around the ballot paper. The
scatterers have no effect on the outcome, but there is a considerable advantage
for a candidate being higher up on the ballot paper than his or her principal
opponent. The names of candidates used to be listed in alphabetical order, and
this gave parties a strong incentive to find candidates with advantageous
surnames. To overcome this, candidates now draw lots for positions on the
ballot paper, but the result is that a significant advantage, which could be
decisive in a marginal seat, is given by random chance to whichever of the two
strongest candidates draws a higher position on the ballot paper. This defect
could be removed by the use of Robson rotation, which is described when
proportional representation is considered.
One of the great benefits of
compulsory voting is that it prevents pressure groups from having excessive
influence. Such pressure groups can often persuade nearly all of their members
to vote, and if the total number of voters were only 50 per cent of those
eligible, the voting power of the pressure group would be doubled. With
compulsory voting, when typically more than 96 per cent of those eligible do
vote, the strength of the pressure group is put in proper perspective.
Compulsory voting is not unique to Australia.
Other countries which use compulsory voting are Argentina,
Belgium, Brazil,
Greece, Italy,
Liechtenstein, Luxembourg,
Singapore and Venezuela.
Proportional
representation
Proportional
representation is widely used in democracies around the world, but only two of
the twenty parliaments we are considering use it for their lower house
elections. There are many varieties of proportional representation, but all
follow one of two alternatives-the party list method or the quota-preferential
method.
Under the party list method, the
voter is offered several party lists of candidates from which to choose one
list. Seats are usually allocated to the parties in proportion to the number of
votes their lists received, and the winning candidates are usually selected in
the order in which their names appear on the party lists. This method, of which
the best known is that of d’Hondt, is favoured by party organisations, which
control the names on the list, the order of election, and the filling of casual
vacancies. The voters have no say in any of these matters. The party list
method is much used in continental Europe and in South
America. A refinement which advantages the major political parties
is to require a certain percentage of the vote-5 per cent is used in Germany-before
a party is entitled to a seat.
In 1993 New
Zealand adopted the party list method for
the 1996 and subsequent elections, when the voter chose, on a second ballot
paper, the 55 members not elected from single member constituencies. New
Zealand adopted the German requirement for a
party to get 5 per cent of the vote on the party list, or win a single member
constituency, to qualify for consideration for additional party list members.
MPs were selected from the party lists so that the total number of MPs (those
elected in single member constituencies plus those from the party list) fitted
the pattern of the party list voting.
In the quota-preferential method,
voters list the candidates in the order of their preference. A quota is set,
according to the number of seats to be filled. Each candidate gaining a quota
is elected and any surplus votes are distributed according to the second
preferences. If all seats are not filled at the end of this process, the
candidate with the lowest number of votes is eliminated, and his or her next
preferences distributed, and so on, until all the vacancies are filled. Casual
vacancies are filled by a recount of the vote, with the vacating member
eliminated. Unlike the party list method, this procedure does not require a
minimum quota to keep out Independents and tiny parties, for the size of the
quota is determined by the number of seats to be filled. The quota-preferential
method, which was developed independently by Carl Andrae in Denmark in 1856 and
Thomas Hare in England in the following year, gives the voter wide freedom of
choice, and is therefore not at all to the liking of the major party
organisations. All sorts of devices have been developed to make its outcome
more like the party list method. One was to change the method of filling casual
vacancies, so that it is filled by the parties, not the voters, thus
eliminating the need for a party to nominate more candidates than it can hope
to elect. To control the voters, how-to-vote cards are distributed to voters,
guiding them how to fill in their ballot papers in accordance with the wishes
of their political party. As a refinement of this, there is pressure for voters
merely to have to tick a ‘party box’ on the ballot paper, and their ballot
paper will be counted in accordance with their party’s wishes.
Tasmania
is the only one of our twenty parliaments which uses the quota-preferential
method of election for its lower house. To its credit it has resisted much of
the pressure from party organisations to reduce the effective choice of
individual voters. Casual vacancies are filled by a recount of voters’ ballots,
not by a decision of the political party concerned. There is no marking of
‘party boxes’, and how-to-vote cards have been rendered pointless by a system
called Robson Rotation. Under this system ballot papers are printed in batches,
each batch having the names of the candidates in a different order. The ballot
papers are shuffled and distributed at random, so that each candidate gets
equal exposure in key positions. Everyone seems to agree that the result is
fair. The important point is that how-to-vote cards are useless, because party
workers have no way of knowing which version of the ballot paper a voter will
receive. The result is that voters wishing to vote for a particular party have
the ability to choose which of that party’s candidates they want to see
elected. In a way, they are combining the roles of an American primary election
and the election for the actual seat.
Nevertheless Tasmania
has not been immune from effective party political pressure. In 1998 the number
of members from each electorate was reduced from seven to five (and the quota
increased from 12.5 per cent to 16.7 per cent) in a blatant, and successful,
attempt to reduce the number of MPs elected from minor parties.
A consequence of the electoral
system is that Tasmanian assemblymen are even more involved than other
politicians in attempting to achieve benefits for their electorates and even
busier attending functions and knocking on doors. The reason is that although Tasmania
has about the area of Scotland,
it has only 330 000 voters, and is very parochial. Tasmanians tend not to
follow party tickets, but rather to vote for those they know and like, or at
least have heard of. Some Tasmanian state politicians therefore spend more of
their time campaigning against their colleagues than against the opposing
party.
The only other use of proportional
representation for full lower house elections was in New
South Wales between 1920 and 1926. The
quota-preferential method was used, with five-member electorates in the city
and three-member electorates in the country. Unfortunately the system was not
well worked out-there was initially no procedure for the replacement of members
who died or resigned, for instance-and there was general relief, anyway from
the major parties, when the system was dropped. Three Canadian provinces, Alberta,
Manitoba and British
Columbia used the Hare system of proportional
representation for a few multi-member ridings, but proportional representation
has not been used since 1956.
Although proportional representation
is probably the best way of choosing a representative legislature, it is not so clear that it is the best way of choosing
a government. The normal consequence
of proportional representation is that no party has an absolute majority, and
the smaller parties and Independents are substantially represented. There are
often prolonged post-election negotiations-sometimes up to six months-to try to
put together a majority coalition. The resultant government might well be one
which would not have received a majority of the votes if put to the voters at
the time of the election.
If the result of
an election is not a decisive win for a party or a coalition, there are several options. A major party can
attempt to form a new coalition with minor parties and Independents which would
give them a majority, or if this is not possible, to attempt to reach an
agreement of support on votes of confidence and budget bills with sufficient
MPs to make the government secure. If this also is not possible, a government
may soldier on as a minority government, hoping for the best, possibly waiting
for a suitable issue on which to call an election.
A good example occurred in Ontario.
After 32 years in office the Progressive Conservative government failed to gain
an absolute majority at either the 1975 or 1977 provincial elections, but
remained in power until it regained its majority in 1981. The other two
parties-the Liberals and the New Democrats-were roughly equal in strength, but
one or the other always supported Conservative Premier Davis in confidence
motions, so the elections were held when the premier wanted them to be held. Premier
Davis was the man in the middle and was
able, by negotiating sometimes with one, sometimes with the other opposition
party, to pass most of his legislation without unacceptable amendments. Indeed,
he was sometimes able to use his minority situation to head off unwelcome
demands for legislation from zealot supporters.
In the early days of a hung
parliament, it is usually fairly easy for a minority government to reach some
sort of accommodation with those holding the balance of power, for a very early
election would focus attention on the major parties at the expense of minor
parties and Independents, who would tend to be blamed for the instability. As
time passes, this fear declines.
Minority governments have been not
uncommon in the four national parliaments in the 30 years since 1970. There
have been none in Australia
during that period, unless one counts the minority Fraser Government of 1975,
appointed by the Governor-General after he had dismissed Labor
Prime Minister Whitlam. After Fraser
had been in office for only a few hours an election was called, which he won by
a landslide.
In Canada
federally there have been two minority governments, both in the 1970s. Elected
in 1972, a minority Liberal government lasted for sixteen months before being
defeated on a vote of confidence. The Liberals easily won the resultant
election. In 1979 a minority Conservative government lasted for seven months
(not facing parliament for the first five) before being defeated on a vote of
confidence. The Liberal opposition won the election.
In the 1993-96 Parliament in New
Zealand, when it was known that MMP voting
would be used for the next election, some members broke away from the major
parties and formed splinter groups. The National Party lost its majority and
continued until the 1996 election as a minority government, with a guarantee of
basic support from a minor party, the United Party. Parliament passed out of
government control, and a Business Committee, with the Speaker as chair, was
set up to take control of parliamentary business. Some private members’ bills
were passed, including one which was opposed by the government at all stages.
In the two general elections held in New Zealand since MMP was introduced, no
party has held an absolute majority, but on each occasion it has proved
possible for the largest party to form a coalition with one or more minor
parties to give it a majority, though in August 1998 the National Party’s
coalition partner, the New Zealand First Party, walked out of the coalition,
leaving the National Party as a minority government until the election in the
following year, which was won by the Labour-Alliance Coalition, but it too was
a minority government.
At Westminster
there have been three minority governments in the past 30 years, under Wilson
from February to October 1974, under Callaghan from March 1976 until March 1979, and under Major in
the last months of the 1992-97 Parliament. Wilson
survived for a few months because none of the non-government parties wanted
another election so soon, and Callaghan because of an
agreement with the Liberal Party (the ‘Lib-Lab Pact’) which kept Labor in
office as a minority government, but the Liberals eventually ended the
agreement and voted with the Conservatives and Scottish Nationalists to throw
the Labor government out. After the 1992 election Major’s Conservatives had a
small majority over the Labour Party, but this was whittled away by defections
and by-election losses. He was never in serious danger of defeat on a
confidence motion because of the support of the Conservative defectors and the
Ulster Unionist Party on such motions, but he had no reliable majority for his
legislation, particularly on the deeply divisive European Union issues.
The only examples of minority
governments in the Canadian provinces during this period were the 1975-81 and
1985-87 Ontario governments,
1988-90 in Manitoba and 1998-99
in Nova Scotia. The 1975-81
minority governments in Ontario
have already been described, but the 1985-87 government was nearly as
interesting. After the 1985 election the Progressive Conservatives were the
largest single party, but did not have a majority. Two weeks after the start of
the new Parliament the other two parties combined to defeat the Progressive
Conservative government’s motion for an Address in Reply to the Speech from the
Throne. The premier resigned without asking that Parliament be dissolved. The
Lieutenant-Governor than accepted a formal ‘Accord’ between the Liberals and
the New Democrats, based on an agreed program, and promising that the New
Democrats would ensure the survival of a Liberal government for two years. This
they did, and in the 1987 election at the end of the two year period the
Liberals won an overwhelming victory.
Five of the six Australian states
have had minority governments at some time during the past 30 years. The only
exception is Western Australia.
As might be expected with proportional representation, Tasmania
has had the most, with minority governments in 1969-72 (Liberal), 1981-82
(Labor), 1989-92 (Labor) and 1996-98 (Liberal). Minority governments in the
other states occurred in New South Wales (1991-95), Victoria (1999-2003), South
Australia (1975-77, 1990-93 and since 1997), and Queensland (1996-98).
Some of the ways minority
governments won office and survived are interesting. In Tasmania
in the 1989 election the Labor Party won only thirteen seats in the 35-member House
of Assembly, with the Liberals winning seventeen and the Greens five. The Labor
leader managed to do a deal with the Green Party so that he could form a single
party minority government. The price was high. The Greens had 100 conditions
for the accord with the Labor government, including the cancellation of a major
new project to use waste timber from sawlog operations, the setting up of new
parliamentary committees, a register of the pecuniary interests of members,
public disclosure of election donations, and the ‘abolition of subsidised
liquor to members’. The Greens were also given equal status with the Liberal
Party in the chamber, and were guaranteed consultation on legislation and
public service appointments. The arrangement lasted for a little over two
years, but the parties then parted acrimoniously. The Liberals won an absolute
majority in the resultant election.
In South
Australia, after the 1990 elections the Labor
government had only 22 seats in the 45-member lower house. There were three
Independent members, all with Labor Party backgrounds, and Premier
Bannon arranged that one Independent should
be Speaker, and another should be Chairman of Committees. In 1992, when Labor
numbers had fallen to 21, the third Independent was offered the chair of the
Economic and Finance Committee. When Bannon resigned in 1992, his successor
gave ministries to two of the Independents, and left the third as Speaker.
‘Independent’ had taken on a new meaning.
There are also sometimes ‘minority
oppositions’, when no party is clearly entitled to the role. There are
considerable advantages in being the official opposition, for the Leader
usually receives the same benefits as a minister, as well as extra funds to run
the Leader’s office. In the House, the opposition asks the first question
during question time, and has the opportunity to respond first to the budget
and to ministerial statements. As well, the chairs of important committees may
fall to the official opposition.
But what is to be done when two
non-government parties are of identical size, and have no wish to go into
coalition? This happened after the election in Nova
Scotia in 1999. The Progressive Conservatives won a
majority government with 30 seats, and the non-government parties had eleven
Liberals (the previous government) and eleven New Democrats (the previous
opposition). The Speaker decided that there should be no official opposition,
and that the procedural advantages in the House should be alternated between
the Liberals and New Democrats. The financial benefits would be split between
the two parties. The Speaker’s decisions seem to have been accepted.
United Kingdom
In the UK there
is no public financial support to the political parties for election expenses,
though each side in the 1975 referendum on membership of the EU received 125 000.
Limits are put on how much each candidate may spend in an election campaign,
though it is a matter of judgement as to what constitutes an election expense,
for the law has not been tested since 1929.
Canada
In Canada
there is no annual funding of registered political parties at the federal
level, though it is done in the provinces of New Brunswick,
Prince Edward Island and Quebec.
On the federal scene, candidates who receive at least 15 per cent of the valid
votes cast in their ridings in a federal election or by-election are entitled
to a reimbursement from the government of 50 per cent of their election
expenses. All candidates are entitled to a full refund of their one thousand
dollar deposits. Registered political parties who obtain at least 2 per cent of
the total valid votes cast, or 5 per cent of the valid votes in the ridings
where they have candidates, have the right to a reimbursement of 22.5 per cent
of their election expenses. The Income Tax Act provides for tax credits to
individuals or organisations for financial contributions to candidates and
registered political parties up to a maximum
of five hundred dollars in any one calendar year.
Most of the provinces supplement
these arrangements; the only ones who do not are Alberta
and Manitoba. Even in the
provinces which do provide support it varies quite markedly, in some cases
providing support for the general expenses of registered political parties,
while in others the support is limited to provincial election expenses. In British
Columbia, for instance, registered political parties
may claim tax deductions for contributions, but there is no particular
assistance for electoral expenses. In Saskatchewan,
if a candidate in a provincial election or by-election receives not less than
15 per cent of the valid votes, the candidate receives an amount from the
government which is equal to one-half of the eligible election expenses, though
there is a limit as to how much is allowed. In Ontario
there is partial reimbursement of the election expenses of candidates in
elections or by-elections if they receive 15 per cent of the valid votes, and
registered political parties may have part of their electoral expenses
reimbursed if they receive an aggregate of 15 per cent of the valid votes in
the electoral districts in which they have candidates.
During a federal election every
broadcaster is required to make 62 hours of airtime available for purchase by
registered political parties. The Broadcasting Arbitrator allocates the
available time among the registered parties based on their performance at the
last general election.
Australia
In Australia,
the first federal election campaign for which there was public funding for the
parties was in 1984, under the Hawke Labor Government. To qualify for the
funding a candidate or Senate group must obtain 4 per cent or more of the
formal first preference votes in the electorate contested. The scales were
initially set at 66 cents for each House of Representatives vote and 33 cents
for each Senate vote, but the rates were indexed to inflation, so that
following the 1993 election the political parties received nearly fifteen
million dollars in public money.
There was a dramatic increase in
1995, when the funding went up to one dollar and fifty cents for each House of
Representatives or Senate vote. Using this system (indexed for inflation) the
funding payments for the 1998 federal election reached nearly thirty-four million
dollars. Two of the states, New South Wales
and Queensland, provide similar
support. The New South Wales
scheme was introduced in 1981, three years before the federal scheme, and was
in fact used as the model for that scheme. Queensland
introduced a similar scheme in 1994.
There
is little support given through the income tax system. Donations of up to one
hundred dollars by individuals to registered political parties are tax
deductible, and that is it.
New Zealand
In New
Zealand the only assistance given by the
government to political parties is the provision of some free broadcasting on
radio and television during election campaigns. This is given only to political
parties which were registered at least three months before the dissolution of Parliament
for a general election, and who are contesting at least five seats. The
Electoral Commission allocates the available time, on the basis of the votes of
the parties at the previous election and the current number of MPs, and also
makes financial grants to the parties on the same basis to pay for the
production costs of broadcasts and the costs of the broadcast time.
In 1994 the Legislative
Assembly of British Columbia passed an act which enabled the voters to remove a
sitting member during his elected term. The Act was passed by the Legislative Assembly,
reluctantly, as a result of an overwhelming vote in its favour in a referendum.
Forty per cent of voters in the relevant electoral district have to vote in
favour of a petition asking for the member’s removal for it to be successful,
and a petition cannot be initiated within eighteen months of a member’s
election. The initiator of the petition has 60 days in which to collect the
required number of signatures, and if the signatures meet the requirement the
Chief Electoral Officer declares the seat vacant, and a by-election is held.
The recalled member can be a candidate in the by-election.
As might be expected, the recall
procedure has been often used for blatantly political purposes. If the
government has a narrow majority, the procedure can be used in an attempt to
force by-elections which the government might lose. It can also be used to mock
the parliament. The first seven petitions fell into these categories, with
reasons given for the recall such as ‘we can’t blame everything on El Nino’ and
‘they desire recall so that they may elect someone less boring.’ All failed to
reach the necessary number of signatures.
The eighth petition was less
trivial. It was established that a member of the Legislative Assembly had
written a number of letters to the newspapers, using fictitious signatures, in
which he criticised opponents and praised himself. The petition was heavily
supported, and the member resigned without waiting for the official dismissal.
None of the other parliaments has
followed the example of British Columbia.
Of course the
role of a lower house as an Electoral College does not end with the choosing of
a government after an election, as happens with the American Electoral College.
As Bagehot wrote, the British House of Commons ‘lives in a
state of perpetual potential choice; at any time it can choose a ruler and
dismiss a ruler.’
In fact the potential choice has not
been exercised much recently. Since 1970 there has been only one occasion on
which the UK House of Commons has removed a government by a vote of
no-confidence. The Labour government’s three seat majority (319 out of 635
seats) after the October 1974 election was lost by 1976 in by-elections and
defections. The Labour Party was deeply divided over membership of the European
Community, and there were serious economic and union problems and difficulties
over Scottish and Welsh devolution. The Callaghan Labour Government was kept in
office by the thirteen Liberals in 1977 and 1978, but in March 1979 the
Liberals joined with the Conservatives and Scottish Nationalists to throw it
out. No alternative government would have been possible in that House, so there
was no dispute about Prime Minister Callaghan’s
request for an election. He lost, to Margaret
Thatcher.
In Canada
federally there have been two occasions since 1970 on which a government has
been ‘dismissed’ by the House of Commons. After the 1972 election, a minority
Liberal government survived for sixteen months before being defeated on a vote
of confidence. This proved to be a serious error of political judgement, for
the Liberals won the consequent election with an absolute majority. In 1979 a
minority Progressive Conservative government lasted for seven months (not
facing the parliament for five of them), sustaining itself with thirteen
billion dollars’ worth of special warrants, which do not require parliamentary
approval. The government was voted out soon after meeting the House of Commons,
and the Liberals easily won the ensuing election.
There have been no ‘dismissals’
since 1970 by the Australian or New Zealand Houses of Representatives.
While the lower
house has the power, even if little exercised, to ‘dismiss a ruler’, it
normally has no say in the choosing of a new prime minister should this become
necessary before the parliament’s term is up. This important task is left to
the majority party.
United Kingdom
Since 1970 there
have been two changes of prime minister, other than as a result of a General
Election. On the Labour side Callaghan replaced Wilson
in April 1976, and John Major
replaced Margaret Thatcher
as Conservative prime minister in 1990. Wilson
retired voluntarily, and his successor was elected by the Parliamentary Labour
Party, a system which was used from 1922 to 1981. At a special conference in
January 1981 an election system for the Leader and Deputy Leader was adopted by
which they should be re-elected each year with 30 per cent of the vote
allocated to the parliamentary party, 40 per cent to the trade unions and 30
per cent to the constituency parties. This was changed in 1993 to allot
one-third of the votes to each of the three groups.
Although Wilson
went quietly, Margaret Thatcher
had to be forced out. The Conservatives were doing poorly in the polls, there
had been resignations of important ministers, including the deputy prime
minister, Sir Geoffrey
Howe, and she was challenged for the
leadership by Michael Heseltine,
a former Defence Secretary. The Conservative leader is chosen by the
parliamentary party, by a body called the 1922 Committee. When the
Conservatives are in opposition the 1922 Committee includes the entire
parliamentary party, while in government only backbenchers are eligible for
membership. If there is no clear winner on the first ballot (defined as being
15 per cent clear of the next candidate), the election goes to a second ballot.
If no one gets more than 50 per cent of the votes, it goes to a run-off between
the top candidates. Thatcher won the first ballot, but not with the 15 per cent
margin over Heseltine which she needed to be proclaimed leader. She withdrew
from the second ballot, new nominations were called, and it was won by one of
her supporters, John Major.
He defeated Heseltine and Hurd, but did not get 50 per cent of the votes.
Heseltine and Hurd then withdrew from the race, and Major was proclaimed
leader, although by Conservative Party rules there should have been a third
ballot. In the cases of both Wilson and Thatcher
the election of the new prime minister was made by the party members in the
House of Commons. From the point of view of responsible government, it should
be noted that the House of Commons as a whole was in no way involved in either
of these proceedings, not even being asked to give a formal vote of confidence
in the new prime minister.
The rules for a challenge to an
incumbent Conservative leader were changed after the 1997 election defeat, and
15 per cent of the parliamentary party must now endorse such a challenge before
an election can be held.
Canada
Because of the
method of choosing a party leader it is difficult to replace a Canadian prime
minister in office. In both the Liberal and Progressive Conservative parties,
the parliamentary leader is chosen, not by the parliamentary party, but by a
national convention. The conventions consist for the most part of delegates
elected at public meetings in the various ridings, with the addition of
senators, provincial assemblymen and some appointed delegates-at-large from the
provinces. The parliamentary party has no role in the matter. The only prime
ministers to be replaced in office since 1970 were Pierre
Trudeau in 1984 and Brian
Mulroney in 1993. Both retired voluntarily.
Australia
Since 1970 two
Australian prime ministers have been replaced, apart from those who lost office
as the result of electoral defeat. John
Gorton, of the Liberal Party, took office in
1968, and soon alienated some of his colleagues by a high-handed and sometimes
lackadaisical attitude to administration, and an open liking for
centralisation. The leadership of the Liberal Party is decided by the Liberal
members of the two houses, and in 1971 Gorton was in trouble,
facing the probability of a no-confidence motion in the House, and with his
deputy, William McMahon,
industriously trying to organise a coup. A motion of confidence in Gorton
was moved in the Liberal Party room. The ballots were secret, but, by party
decision, were counted on the table in front of the prime minister, and the
vote was tied. When a recount confirmed the tie, Gorton used
his casting vote against himself. In many ways this was typical of Gorton-dramatic,
noble, but ill-founded, for the chairman of a meeting has a second and casting
vote only if the rules of the meeting give him one, which the rules of the
Liberal Party’s meeting did not do. The MPs, other than the Liberals, first
heard that their new prime minister was William
McMahon from the media.
During the Hawke Labor Government
from 1983 to 1991, the Treasurer was Paul
Keating. Keating was ambitious, but had no
ambition to be leader of the opposition. He wanted to be prime minister before
the life of the Labor government had expired. In 1988 Hawke promised Keating,
his deputy leader, in the presence of two witnesses, that he would resign in
favour of Keating at a decent interval after the next election. In return,
Keating was in future to come to Cabinet meetings on time and was to be polite
to his Cabinet colleagues.
Labor won the 1990 election, but
Hawke showed no sign of honouring his commitment to resign after a decent
interval. (Whether Keating honoured his
two commitments has never been made clear.) Hawke believed that he alone could
win the next election, his fifth in succession, and his promise to Keating was
void. Keating organised a leadership challenge in the Labor parliamentary
caucus (comprising both MPs and senators) in June 1991, but lost by 66 votes to
44. Keating retired to the backbench.
Things began to go badly wrong for
Hawke. Keating’s successor as Treasurer, John
Kerin, was not a success, and was removed by
Hawke in December 1991. Unemployment rose each month, and the economy was
dormant. In November 1991 the opposition released a dramatic policy statement,
proposing major economic reforms. The response of Hawke and Kerin was grossly
inadequate, and Labor members were desperately missing Keating’s force and
power of analysis. Hawke’s support was evaporating, and in December he
resigned, leaving Keating to take over.
New Zealand
Since 1970 prime
ministers in office have been changed five times-twice by resignation, three
times by party room coups. Both the resignations were of long-serving prime
ministers who had established their deputies as their successors. The three
coups were dramatic. As in most of the other parliaments, the leader is elected
by the parliamentary party. David
Lange (Labour) became prime minister in
1984. For the first three years he worked apparently amicably with his
reformist finance minister, Roger Douglas, as New Zealand embarked on a program
of radical economic reform, but he eventually became worried at the pace of
change, rising unemployment and departure from traditional Labour principles.
There was also probably an element of pique at playing second fiddle to Douglas.
In any event, the two fell into open conflict, and Lange
dismissed his finance minister. Six months later the Labour caucus, which
elects the ministry, voted to reinstate Douglas
in the Cabinet, against Lange’s wishes. Although it is
probable that most of the caucus wanted Lange to continue as
prime minister, his position was untenable and he resigned.
It was August 1989 and an election
was due in little more than a year. The caucus chose Geoffrey
Palmer as the new prime minister, but
Labour’s electoral prospects continued to deteriorate as unemployment rose. In
desperation, the caucus replaced Palmer with the
more aggressive Michael Moore,
but it was too late, despite some last minute dramatic changes of policy. The
Labour government was trounced.
The winning prime minister was the
National Party’s James Bolger,
and he lasted for seven years. There was however growing dissatisfaction with
his leadership by 1997, and while he was in Britain
at a Commonwealth Heads of Government meeting a coup was organised. The fifth-ranked cabinet minister, Jenny
Shipley, had the numbers and threatened to
force a vote at the regular caucus meeting after Bolger
returned. Eventually, to avoid the political uproar of such a contest, he agreed to resign, but after a few weeks to make it more dignified. On 8 December 1997 Jenny
Shipley was sworn in as New
Zealand’s first woman prime minister.
As
in the other countries, the New Zealand Parliament played no role in the change
of prime minister.
If the lower
house is to perform efficiently as an electoral college, its membership must be
changed at reasonable intervals so that it, and the government it chooses, are
representative of community opinion. On the other hand the intervals must not
be too short, for this would make for ineffective government. Of the 139
parliaments listed in 1999 with the Inter-Parliamentary Union in Geneva,
only seven have terms of three years while another three have shorter terms,
leaving the remaining 129 with terms of four years or more. Of the four
countries being considered, Australia
and New Zealand
have three year terms, Canada,
the Canadian provinces and the United Kingdom
five years. All the Australian states except Queensland
now have four year terms. The other countries to have three year terms are Congo,
El Salvador, Libya,
Mexico and the Philippines.
Three year terms, even if they are
completed (and they rarely are in Australia),
are really too short. The benefits of many desirable new government programs
frequently take some time to become evident, and a government facing an
imminent election will almost certainly be forced into short term measures.
This rarely makes for good government. The problem is exacerbated because
parliaments rarely see out their full term, occasionally because of defeat of
the government in the lower house, usually because of the use by prime
ministers or premiers of their power to call elections at dates which suit
their political advantage.
United Kingdom
Of the fourteen
elections in the UK
since 1945, only one was held at the end of the term of Parliament. The Parliament
elected on 8 October 1959
lasted until 15 October 1964,
the first peacetime Parliament to run its full term since 1722. The 1992-97 Parliament
lasted until it was within twenty days of its full term, almost certainly
because Prime Minister Major was desperately hanging on, hoping that something
favourable would turn up. It didn’t. Three of the early elections might be
thought to have been justified because there was either a minority government
or an unworkably small majority. The Wilson Labour Government was in a minority
from February to October 1974. The governments which held very small majorities
were Wilson (October 1964 to March 1966) and Attlee
(February 1950 to October 1951), although Attlee maintained
control of the Commons throughout.
That leaves ten other early
elections to be accounted for. The 1979 election was forced by the Commons
themselves, but the other nine parliaments were shortened by an average of
eleven months by the decisions of the incumbent prime ministers. It seems clear
that the motive in each case was to take advantage of what was thought to be a
favourable electoral climate which might not last if the parliament went its
full term. Of course the prime ministers did not say this. The reasons they
gave varied from Anthony Eden seeking a mandate as a newly installed prime
minister (1955) to Edward Heath asking the people to choose whether they wanted
the trade unions to govern (1974). The people narrowly voted for the unions, or
anyway against Heath. One could make a case that every prime minister who was not chosen as a result of a general
election should seek a mandate as Eden
did, but no other prime minister similarly chosen has done so, and Eden
did not really want a mandate. He wanted an extended period of secure
government.
Canada
Since 1945 the
average life of a Canadian Federal Parliament has been little more than three
years. Even when the government had an absolute majority, no parliament saw out
its full five years. With the exception of the 1988 election, there is no
evidence of any motive other than party political advantage in the calling of
the early elections. The 1988 election was a quasi-referendum on the free trade
treaty with the United States, after the Senate threatened to hold up the bill
until an election was held. It may have been a mere coincidence that the
election was called when the government was leading in the polls for the first
time in nearly three years.
Australia
The maximum
term of the House of Representatives is three years, the term starting from the
first sitting of the House after an election. Only four of the 21 parliaments
since the Second World War have run to their full term or near it. These were
the parliaments of 1946-49, 1969-72, 1990-93 and 1993-96. It is no coincidence
that the government was in three cases defeated in the election, and in the
fourth (that of 1993) won a surprise victory. Public opinion was running strongly
against the government of the day, which held on grimly to the end, hoping that
something would turn up.
The motive of a prime minister in
calling an early election is always party political advantage, whatever he may
say publicly. An Australian prime minister has, however, a unique problem in
exploiting this. Senators have fixed six year terms, with half retiring every
three years, and the Senate election must be held in the last year of the
retiring senators’ term. It is usual for the elections for both houses to be
held simultaneously, for a separate Senate election is treated by the voters as
a by-election, and the government vote suffers. A prime minister will think very
carefully before he calls too early an election.
He has a way out. The Australian Constitution
provides for a method of resolving legislative deadlocks between the two houses.
If the Senate rejects or unacceptably amends a bill passed by the
Representatives, and if after an interval of not less than three months the
same thing happens again, there may be a dissolution of both houses. If the
deadlock persists after such an election it may be resolved by a joint sitting
of the two houses. Before 1951 the double dissolution procedure was used only
once, but it has been used much more since then. In 1951 there was a double
dissolution over the Senate’s failure to pass a bill to dissolve the Communist
Party. This was probably the only genuine use of a double dissolution as a
means of resolving a legislative deadlock, though even then there was political
advantage seen in fighting a premature election on such an issue. The 1974 and
1975 double dissolutions came about because of the failure of the Senate to
vote supply, though the ostensible grounds were deadlocks over other
legislation.
It seems that prime ministers now
view double dissolutions not as a means of resolving deadlocks over legislation
but rather as a method of removing a restriction on the calling of elections
whenever they choose. There is no obligation to call an election within any
prescribed period after a deadlock has been established, and a government can,
if it wishes, store up one or more deadlocks for exploitation at a convenient
moment. There is, however, one problem a prime minister must consider. At a
double dissolution, all of the twelve senators from each state are up for
election and, with quota-preferential proportional representation, the quota
for election is only 7.7 per cent. This offers a real chance for minor
parties-the Australian Democrats, environmentalists, anti-nuclear groups and so
on-to elect senators who may hold the balance of power in the Senate. A prime
minister must consider who such groups would favour. Generally they are more
likely to favour Labor than the Liberal-National coalition.
Turning back to the nineteen
parliaments since 1945 which have not run their full term or near it, if one
disregards the five double dissolutions called to resolve legislative deadlocks
between the two houses, and the 1963 election which could be argued, with some difficulty,
to have been necessary because of the government’s narrow majority, one is
still left with thirteen short term parliaments. Three lasted less than two
years, one as little as fifteen months. The average was 29 months, seven months
shorter than the prescribed period. It is difficult to see any justification
for this constant pattern. It seems to be generally agreed that three year
parliaments are really too short, yet Australia
is doing much worse.
The complex voting system used in Australia
poses another problem. The new Parliament cannot meet until the writs are
returned, and there is inevitably a substantial gap between polling day and the
return of the writs to permit the counting of the votes (including absentee and
postal votes) and the distribution of preferences and quotas. Since 1970 the
average interval between polling day and the first meeting of the new federal Parliament
has been 58 days. Limits on the intervals between the issue of the writs,
closing of nominations and polling day, and between polling day and the return
of the writs, are set by an act of Parliament, but in practice the nation may
be without a parliament for four months, and the responsible government with no
one to be responsible to. This system subverts the intention of the Constitution
to keep to a minimum the time the nation would be without a parliament, but the
authors of the Constitution did not envisage the voting systems now employed.
This problem should be kept in mind
by politicians considering the theoretical advantages of various voting
systems. An extreme example occurred during the first election of the Legislative
Assembly of the Australian Capital Territory
in 1989. A modification of the d’Hondt system of proportional representation
was used. The ballot paper was a metre wide, and it took more than two months
to count the votes and distribute preferences. The result was indecisive.
New Zealand
New
Zealand has had the most orderly electoral
college of any of the countries, states and provinces we have considered. With
two exceptions the elections have been called meticulously at regular intervals
in November of each third year. The two exceptions were the 1951 and 1984
elections. The 1951 election was called only 21 months after the previous
election because of a disastrous waterfront strike which had crippled the
economy, and the election in 1984 was called four months early because of a
threatened defection by a National Party MP. Until 1986, however, the New
Zealand Parliament did not have to meet at any prescribed time after an
election. The only limit was that it had to meet before 30 June, when supply
runs out. It was quite common for Parliament not to meet for six months after
the election, so that the actual life of the Parliament was often less than
two-and-a-half years. The Constitution Act of 1986 now requires the Parliament
to meet within six weeks of the day appointed for the return of the election
writs.
Except in New
Zealand and Western
Australia, prime ministers and premiers have been
ruthless in their exploitation of their power to call elections whenever they
see a window of political opportunity. The power to determine the date of an
election is obviously a great advantage to an incumbent, but why should such an
advantage be given? It has a downside, too, for a year or more before the end
of a parliamentary term speculation starts about when the election will be
held, the uncertainty frequently causing economic damage. Often the speculation
has been stirred by the prime minister or premier, who then calls an early
election to end the uncertainty.
So far the only parliament to adopt
a fixed term is New South Wales.
In 1992 the New South Wales Parliament passed an act adopting a fixed four year
term for its Parliament, and this was endorsed by three-quarters of the
electorate at a referendum in 1995. The Parliament can be dissolved earlier
only if a motion of no confidence is passed, or the Legislative Assembly
rejects or fails to pass a supply or appropriation bill, and a government which
has the confidence of the Legislative Assembly cannot be formed within eight
days. A similar act was passed by Tasmania
for the 1992-96 Parliament only, and it has not been re-enacted. Because the
upper house-the Legislative Council-has the power to block money bills, the
Tasmanians also provided for a dissolution of the lower house if either house failed to pass the
necessary funds for the ‘ordinary annual services’ of the government, thus
continuing to make it possible for the upper house to force a premature
election on the lower house.
Why should not all our parliaments
have fixed terms? Such a step would remove a great deal of unnecessary
uncertainty, reduce the excessive frequency of elections, and take away an
unwarranted advantage given to incumbent governments. There would of course
have to be an early election if no government possessing the confidence of the
lower house could be formed.
Objections have been raised to the
fixed term concept, but they seem to have little substance. Bagehot thought
that a prime minister’s power to order an election was essential to party
discipline, and the idea was put in modern terms by David Butler when he wrote
that ‘if government MPs know that a defeat on a major issue will lead the prime
minister to dissolve parliament, they have a powerful incentive to ensure to
vote loyally on key occasions.’ There is no evidence that any modern prime
minister has called an election for such a reason, and any such threat would be
simply not credible. It is true that Harold Wilson, in March 1967, warned the Parliamentary
Labour Party that votes against the government might result in their ‘dog
licences’ not being renewed, and the chief whip later told a meeting of the
parliamentary party that failure to carry the Industrial Relations Bill would
mean a dissolution. Wilson claims that he gave the chief whip strong advice to
the contrary, which is reasonable, because whatever bluff a prime minister
might use to try to discipline party members, including calling for a vote of
confidence, a premature election with the party in a state of turmoil would not
be an attractive option. Instead, finding some Labour MPs bitterly opposed to
the legislation, Wilson
modified it substantially, as many prime ministers have done in the past and
many more will do in the future. A desperate prime minister might call for a
vote of confidence in the House, which if lost would result in an election, but
this possibility is covered by the fixed term concept.
The
second argument advanced against fixed terms is that the election date is not
flexible, and may fall on an inconvenient date, perhaps during a grave crisis.
This is undoubtedly true, but the danger can be exaggerated. In Australia,
for instance, if elections had been held at three year intervals after the
first election on 31 March 1901,
on no occasion would the election date have been politically inconvenient,
whereas at least one date chosen by a prime minister was very awkward. Australia
was in the middle of an election campaign when the First World War broke out.
It is true that as a parliament’s
term draws to a close, great events may be happening which would render an
election most inopportune, but this would apply whether there was a fixed or
flexible term. The New South Wales
fixed term can be cut short by up to two months if it would fall ‘at the same
time as a Commonwealth election, during a holiday period or at some other
inconvenient time’. National governments may have more serious problems. In
both World Wars Britain avoided elections by extending the life of the House of
Commons, which can be done by a simple act of Parliament. Canada
has a constitutional provision that ‘in time of real or apprehended war,
invasion or insurrection’ the House of Commons may, by a two-thirds majority,
extend the life of the Parliament indefinitely. Under New
Zealand’s Electoral Act an extension of the
life of the Parliament can be obtained either by referendum or a vote of
three-quarters of the members of the House of Representatives. There is no
limitation on the duration or purpose of the extension. To extend the life of
the federal Parliament in Australia
would require an amendment to the Constitution. This would have to be passed by
a referendum which, in the crisis situation envisaged, would probably be nearly
as disruptive as an election campaign.
Although it is clearly desirable
that national parliaments should have some power to defer elections in time of
crisis, there should be some control over the method of extension and the
acceptable purposes. The Canadian model seems suitable, though the New Zealand
three-quarters majority is better than the Canadian two-thirds, for it is far
from unknown for a government to have two-thirds of the members of a lower
house. It is important that both government and opposition should be in favour
of the extension. It should be noted that these controlled arrangements for
extending the life of parliament are desirable whether the normal term of the
parliament is fixed or flexible.
The only other apparently cogent
argument against fixed terms is that they would prevent a government from
obtaining an electoral mandate for a substantial change in the policy on which
it was elected. As an opponent of fixed terms put it, a government ‘may wish to
make a serious change of policy, but may wish to seek the endorsement of the
electorate, surely not an undemocratic thing to do.’[25] This sounds admirable, but is not in
fact what happens. If a government makes an abrupt change of policy and the
prime minister calls an election, it is because he believes the issue will help
him to win the election. If there were an abrupt change of policy which was not well received by the public, no
prime minister would contemplate holding an immediate election. He would hold
on, hoping that the benefits of the new policy would be apparent by the time an
election was inescapable.
To
look at the UK,
dramatic developments or changes of policy which might be claimed to have
required a mandate include the dismantling of the Indian Empire (1947), the
decision to produce an atom bomb (1948), the involvement in the Korean War
(1950), Suez (1956), the Falklands
(1982), and entry into the European Economic Community
(1971). A mandate was not sought for any of these at the time of the decision.
Moreover, an election is not a very satisfactory method of determining public
opinion on a single issue. Other issues have a tiresome habit of intruding, and
sometimes the issue on which an election is ostensibly called is barely
mentioned during the campaign. An example is the 1987 federal election in Australia
which was called to resolve a deadlock over the proposed introduction of a
national identity card. The identity card played no significant role in the
election campaign. The Labor government was returned, but this was in no sense
an endorsement of the identity card, which remained very unpopular with the
public.
If one really wants to know what the
public thinks on a particular issue, public opinion polls are available. If one
wants a more formal expression, referendums are available. Both public opinion
polls and referendums have limitations, the principal one being the difficulty
of explaining complex issues to some of the voters, but as measures of public
opinion on single issues they are far superior to general elections.
One
other possible ground for arguing against fixed terms must be mentioned, if
only to be dismissed. There have been many occasions when a prime minister or
premier has been replaced, because of death, resignation or a party coup.
Should the voters not have the right to register their approval or otherwise of
the replacement at a general election? The only replacement British prime
minister to call an election was Anthony
Eden, in 1955.[26] He claimed to be seeking a mandate,
but in fact was seeking to exploit the electoral honeymoon which is usually
granted a new prime minister. The same thing has happened twice in Canada,
in elections called in 1968 by Pierre
Trudeau, and in 1984 by Trudeau’s
successor, John Turner.
Trudeau judged the electoral climate correctly, but Turner
was decisively beaten.
Under the present system, the
decision whether or not to call an election has nothing to do with principle,
but is a matter of political judgement. If a new prime minister fears his
electoral honeymoon is not sweet enough to ensure an electoral victory, there
is no way an election would be called. There seems to be no general feeling
that a new prime minister should have
to ask the voters for a personal mandate, and that being so, it is surely wrong
to permit an incoming prime minister to cut short the term of parliament to
exploit a political opportunity.
The final argument against fixed
terms seems to consist of setting up a straw man and then knocking him down.
The straw man is the claim that a fixed term could not work because of the
possibility of the lower house being unable to agree on a government. In fact,
those who advocate fixed terms agree that there must be an election if a
government with the confidence of the lower house cannot be formed. Such
dissolutions would be limited, for a defeated prime minister or premier would
have no right to a dissolution if he
lost the confidence of the lower house, for the head of state would have the
duty to see if another government which possessed the confidence of the house
could be formed. This is the established position in Australia,
both federally and in the states. It seems to be the position in the United
Kingdom, New
Zealand, Canada
and the provinces, though it has not been tested in any of these parliaments
since 1926. It would be helpful if it were clearly spelt out, in each
Constitution or Electoral Act, that a dissolution after a government lost the
confidence of the lower house would be granted only if no other government
could be formed.
There were seven
cases in the twentieth century of upper houses forcing premature elections, all
but one of them in Australia,
the only place where upper houses still have such power.
United Kingdom
The behaviour of
the House of Lords with regard to the 1909 budget, and the consequences of its
actions, have already been described in Chapter 2.
Canada
Although the
Canadian Senate technically has the power to reject a budget, such action has
never been contemplated, anyway in modern times. The lack of prestige of the
Senate and its unelected character mean that it would be almost suicidal for it
even to discuss such an idea seriously. Besides, the Senate could not force an
election. The Canadians have destroyed a vital part of responsible government
by passing the Financial Administration Act, by which the Governor-General may,
on the advice of the government, issue special warrants authorising expenditure
not approved by Parliament. So, if the Senate blocked supply, the government
could simply prorogue Parliament and finance itself by special warrants.
New Zealand
The New Zealand
Legislative Council was abolished in 1951, but it was moribund for some time
before that and there was never any suggestion of it blocking supply in order
to force an election.
Australia
There were two
occasions during the 1970s on which the Australian Senate interfered with the electoral-college
role of the House of Representatives, by refusing to pass supply unless an
immediate election was held. The financial year runs from 1 July to 30 June of
the following year. At that time the budget for that financial year was not
introduced until August (the procedure was to be changed in 1994), and although
the passage of the budget through the Representatives was a formality it was
not normally passed by the Senate until October or November, after hearings by
estimates committees. As the Australian government, unlike the Canadian, cannot
spend any money not approved by Parliament, the government was given an advance
before the Parliament rose for the winter recess. The amount was of a size
sufficient to see the government through for about five months, by which time
the budget should have been passed and the amount advanced absorbed in it.
In April 1974 the Whitlam Labor
Government had been in office for seventeen months. It faced a hostile Senate,
where the balance of power was held by the Democratic Labor Party, a right wing
breakaway group from the Labor Party and a ruthless opponent. The Senate had
twice rejected six government bills, giving ample grounds for a double dissolution.
When the pre-budget supply bills were presented they were threatened with
rejection unless Whitlam agreed to an immediate election. Whitlam accepted the
challenge, obtained a double dissolution and won the election, but only
narrowly. He did not win control of the Senate.
Eighteen months later, with the
Whitlam Government in even worse trouble, the Senate deferred consideration of
the 1975-76 budget unless Whitlam agreed to a general election. Whitlam decided
to tough it out. Supply would last until the end of November, after which
government administration would be in chaos. He did investigate the possibility
of borrowing from the banks to carry on the business of government, but such
borrowings would certainly have been unconstitutional, and nothing came of the
plan.
The Governor-General, Sir
John Kerr,
was in an awful dilemma. He had been advised by the Chief Justice (Sir Garfield
Barwick) that he had the constitutional power to dismiss the prime minister,
but such power had never been exercised by any of his predecessors. Whitlam
made it clear to Kerr that he would never resign or advise an election for the
House of Representatives or a double dissolution (the Senate had already given
the grounds for a double dissolution), and that the only way an election could
be obtained would be by his dismissal, so Kerr did just that. He dismissed
Whitlam and installed Fraser, the leader of the opposition, as caretaker prime
minister, on the understanding that he would obtain supply and recommend a
double dissolution, though whether the Governor-General has the power to impose
pre-appointment conditions on an incoming prime minister that he will tender
certain advice is very doubtful.
Kerr has been much criticised for
his dismissal of Whitlam, though in his defence it must be asked whether a
Governor-General, faced with an apparently insoluble political confrontation
which was going to result in administrative chaos, did very wrong in asking the
voters what they wanted. Very clearly the voters wanted to be rid of the
Whitlam Government. On the other hand, the determination of the opposition
senators was weakening as public opinion moved sharply against them, and it is
most unlikely that they would have held firm as social chaos developed. Whitlam
would have. Besides, Kerr’s plan should not have worked. It depended on Fraser
being able to secure the passage of the budget through the Senate as an
essential preliminary to a dissolution. Whitlam failed to tell his Senate
ministers of his dismissal. On the other hand, the Liberal and National Party
senators were fully aware of the situation. When the Senate met at 2 pm on 11 November 1975 the Labor Senate Leader almost
immediately moved the adoption of the budget as a matter of urgency, and to his
astonishment in four minutes it was passed. Of course by now it was Fraser’s
budget, and Fraser had his key requirement. The
Coalition easily won the election but there was unprecedented bitterness.
The other four supply-blocking
incidents occurred in the states, but there have been none in the past 50
years. It is difficult to think of anything to recommend such actions, or any
motive other than the desire for political power. The problem is how to
dissuade upper houses from forcing premature elections without destroying
themselves as effective legislatures. The New South Wales Constitution has a
unique provision by which the upper house cannot reject or amend any bill
dealing with ‘the ordinary annual services of the government’. There are some
problems with the New South Wales approach, which will be dealt with when upper
houses are discussed in Chapter 8, but there is no doubt that it is totally
effective in preventing the upper house from forcing a premature election.
The Victorian and South Australian
parliaments have taken a different approach by adopting a partially fixed term.
When their constitutions were amended to provide for four year parliamentary
terms, the power of the premier to ask for an election during the first three
years of a parliament were effectively limited to circumstances where the lower
house had passed a vote of no confidence, or where there was a legislative
deadlock between the two houses. Nothing was done directly about the blocking
of supply, but it is now a much less attractive option during the first three
years of a parliament. It must be assumed that any future government would
adopt the Whitlam ‘toughing it out’ tactics, but it could not be assumed that a
governor would act like Sir John Kerr. As the state drifted towards
administrative chaos, the opposition would have to bear the political odium,
which would be compounded if the only way there could be an election was for the government to pass a vote of no
confidence in itself. In the fourth year of a parliament, with an election
pending, an opposition scenting victory would be extremely rash to risk
throwing it away by blocking supply in the Legislative Council. It seems most
unlikely that any future Victorian or South Australian oppositions will block
supply, no matter how unpopular the government.
There has been less progress on the
federal scene. In the bitter aftermath of the 1975 dismissal of the federal
government, rational debate has been difficult. Two proposals to amend the Constitution
have been put forward. From the left there was a push to remove the Senate’s
power over money bills. This would seriously diminish the Senate as a
legislature, which is of course the purpose. From the right came the proposal
that if the Senate blocked supply and forced an election for the House of
Representatives, the Senate too should be dissolved. Neither proposal has the
slightest chance of being adopted. Though the danger remains, for the
foreseeable future the Senate is most unlikely to risk exercising its
disruptive power again. The scars of 1975 are too deep. Of course, if there
were a fixed term for the House of Representatives, it is almost inconceivable
that the Senate would ever block supply.
There have been
some extreme views expressed that the head of state has no discretion, but must
do what the prime minister requires. Australian Prime Minister Gough
Whitlam claimed, while in office, that the
Governor-General unquestionably must act on the advice of his prime minister,
with no tolerance whatever.[27] Imagine
a prime minister who was clearly beaten in an election refusing to resign until
he had faced the House, as he is certainly entitled to do. On being defeated in
an immediate vote of no confidence, he asks the head of state for a dissolution
and another election which, according to the extremist view, the head of state
would have to grant. It is only necessary to state the proposition to reveal
its absurdity. The head of state must have some discretion.
The head of state must also have
considerable discretion in deciding when a government has lost the confidence
of the lower house. Whom should the head of state then invite to try to form an
alternative government? To whom should the head of state grant the dissolution,
if one becomes inevitable after the failure of attempts to form alternative
governments, for holding office during an election campaign may be a
considerable advantage?
These matters will be discussed
later, but it should be noted how substantial is the necessary discretion given
to the head of state, whether the term of parliament is fixed or flexible.
How well have the
lower houses of the various parliaments performed the electoral-college role? Eighteen
of the twenty electoral colleges here considered use single member
constituencies as the method of choosing all their members. Although the single
member constituency system exaggerates swings and usually produces a decisive
result, it does not always result in the government desired by a majority of
voters. The preferential voting system used in Australia
shows this most clearly. Of the 22 governments chosen by the federal House of
Representatives between 1946 and 1998, five would not have been the preferred
choice of a majority of voters. Although the figures are not so easy to
interpret in the countries without preferential voting, it seems that in at
least 10 per cent of the elections which resulted in an absolute majority of
seats for one party, that party would not have been the preferred choice of a
majority of voters.
Nor have the election results always
been decisive. There were minority governments in the UK
and Canada in
the 1970s, and there were occasional minority governments in the Canadian provinces.
In the five Australian states using single member constituencies, the pattern
of clear majorities which applied in the 1970s and 1980s suffered an abrupt
change towards the end of the latter decade, and in the 1990s there were
minority governments in four of these five states, with the balance of power
being held by Independents. There were no attempts to stitch together
post-electoral coalitions, though some policy concessions were made to
particular Independents to gain their support. The election of an Independent
member as Speaker was also a popular option.
What can the Australian House of
Representatives learn from the other nineteen parliaments we are considering in
order to improve its performance as an electoral college? The first issue is
the electoral system. Single-member constituencies seem to be the best option,
though the system is far from perfect and gives a much less decisive result if
a multi party contest develops. It is difficult to see a better option in the
other nineteen parliaments.
The Australian federal system of
drawing electorate boundaries is exemplary, and nothing useful can be learned
from the other nineteen parliaments. The Australian system is fair, prompt and
free from political delays or interference. On the other hand, it must be acknowledged
that too frequent electoral redistributions are likely to undermine the
stability of representation. MPs may expend much effort in establishing close
ties with their voters, only to find their electorate boundaries substantially
changed, or the electorate even abolished. This tends to make the party more
important than the MP, thus vastly increasing the power of the party machines.
The seven Australian parliaments are
the only ones to use preferential voting. The same is true of compulsory
voting. There is no evidence that preferential voting gives a more decisive
electoral result, or one that better reflects the overall wishes of voters, but
it is probably desirable in that it produces MPs who are preferred-or perhaps least
disliked-by a majority of their voters.
The life of the Australian House of
Representatives, a maximum of three years, is
far too short. Only New Zealand
and Queensland have a similar
term. The remaining five Australian state lower houses have four year terms,
and the other twelve lower houses have five years. The Australian term should
be increased to at least four years as soon as possible.
The term of the Australian Parliament
should also be made fixed, as it is in New South Wales.
There is no justification for leaving the Australian prime minister with the
power to cut short the term of the House of Representatives to suit his
political advantage. The term should be cut short only if no government
possessing the confidence of the House of Representatives can be formed. The
term should be capable of being lengthened-as can be done in Canada
and New Zealand-by
a two-thirds or three-quarters majority of the House of Representatives if a
national emergency made an election highly undesirable.
There is nothing to be said in
favour of the Senate usurping the electoral college role of the House of
Representatives. If the House of Representatives had a fixed term, the Senate’s
power to block supply in order to force a premature election on the House of
Representatives would become unusable, for what would be the point of trying to
force an election if there could not
be one? Nor is a double dissolution a sensible way of resolving a deadlock over
legislation between the two houses. These problems are discussed when the roles
of upper houses are considered in Chapter 8.
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