

Tom Roberts's painting of the opening of the first Commonwealth Parliament in the Royal Exhibition Building

in Melbourne hangs in the Parliament building in Canberra, on permanent loan from Her Majesty the Queen.

Opening of the First Commonwealth Parliament:

Members in both Houses of the first Commonwealth Parliament (1901-03), which is shown above at its opening on the 19th May 1901 by His Royal Highness, the Duke of Cornwall and York (later King George V), had been elected by the systems for the Lower Houses of the Parliament in their State (see Sections 9, 10 & 31 of the Australian Constitution). Quick and Garran's "Annotated Constitution of the Australian Commonwealth" gives background on the Constitution.

Thus Tasmania's first 5 members of the House of Representatives and 6 senators were elected by the Hare-Clark system from the same single state-wide electoral district, so each of its 5 MHRs was referred to as an 'Honourable Member for Tasmania' as each represented the same State-wide electorate, although each had been elected by a different quota of the five quotas of ballots cast. That was the only Australian House of Representatives election ever in which over 83% of the single transferable vote was effective, with less than 17% electing nobody and thus being wasted. Since the introduction of preferential voting in single-member divisions in 1918, the effective vote in the House of Representatives has been limited to 50% of the vote, plus one vote, with the remaining 50%, less one vote, electing nobody and thus being wasted. The 5 MHRs elected for Tasmania were 3 Free Trade candidates, 1 Protectionist candidate, and 1 independent candidate, King O'Malley, who later joined the Labour Party. Those 5 MHRs were the only Australian MHRs to have ever been elected in a multi-member electoral district by PR-STV counting, which has never been prohibited by the Constitution.



Queensland used its contingent voting, which was a limited form of preferential voting, in single-member electoral districts. All other States used plurality (relative majority) voting; MHRs from single-member electoral districts, with boundaries fixed by the State Governments, except South Australia, which used a single State-wide electoral district to elect its 7 MHRs as a group. Each of its 7 MHRs was referred to as an 'Honourable Member for South Australia'.



Each mainland State elected its 6 original senators as a group with the whole State as one electorate, using a multiple first-past-the-post voting system where plumping was prohibited. A complete list of all the people ever elected to the Commonwealth Parliament, and all Federal Ministers that have held office, appears in the latest Parliamentary Handbook.



First attempt at proportional representation for the Senate:

The House of Representatives passed the Barton Government's Commonwealth Electoral Bill 1902 , which specified preferential voting in single-member electoral districts for the House of Representatives, and PR-STV for Senate elections with each State as one electorate, with fully optional preference marking applying for both houses, but the Senate unfortunately replaced its proposals for preferential voting with plurality voting (first-past-the-post) for both houses. Citizens of internal territories did not vote in Senate elections until 1975, after the Commonwealth Electoral Act 1918 was amended to allow that.



That intended form of PR-STV was the only form that would satisfy the requirement of Section 7 of the Constitution that senators "be directly chosen by the people", but the Senate, which had, except for the senators for Tasmania, been elected by a first past the post (plurality) multiple vote, amended the Bill (see the Hansard debate on that 1902 Bill) to substitute that system, with plumping being made unavailable, as can be seen in the resulting Commonwealth Electoral Act 1902. See the Australian Electoral Commission's summary of the history of the federal electoral system. See a summary of all federal elections up until 2010.

Tasmania's first federal by-election, in 1902 - to replace an MHR that had died - had the whole State voting as a single electorate, despite that method of filling a casual vacancy being inconsistent with the Hare-Clark principle used in the 1901 General Election, as the Federal Parliament had not yet used Section 31 of the Constitution to pass an Electoral Act.

1. Full Marking of All Preferences, Partial Optional Preference Marking, or Fully Optional Preference Marking:

The 1901 election of the six senators for NSW gave a dramatic early warning about the need to make ballot-papers and their use comfortably manageable by a wide range of voters, as 38,674 voters (up to 17.5% of the ballots cast) cast informal (invalid) first-past-the-post ballots because, with 50 candidates, and with only 6 senators to be elected, many voters failed to strike out exactly 44 names of the candidates they did not want, as was the law for NSW colonial polls in small single-member electorates, which law (see Sections 85 and 86 of the NSW Parliamentary Elections and Electorates Act 1893), as a consequence of Section 10 of the Commonwealth Constitution, applied for the first NSW Senate poll. That law did not apply to later polls, where voters had the same, often ineffective, ballots but the much easier, and far less error-prone, task of indicating, by marking a cross (X) against their names, the candidates - equal in number to the number of places to be filled - that they were voting for. That unavailability of plumping, which continued under Section 150 of the Commonwealth Electoral Act 1902, required that a voter still had to indicate a vote for the same number of candidates as there were vacancies, in order for the completed ballot-paper to be accepted as valid.

The use of plumping, in which voters in multi-member electorates could, under earlier first past the post multiple votes systems, which are still the common law voting system, vote for fewer candidates than there were vacancies, and hence concentrate their vote on fewer candidates, even just one, had allowed some rudimentary proportionality. Examples were certain earlier colonial elections, a more recent reversion to that on the Isle of Man, and the 1925-94 Japanese Lower House system of multi-member districts with a single non-transferable Vote. The method of indicating an Australian Senate vote from 1902-17 was - unlike some of the various colonial systems used at the 1901 polls - the placing of a cross (X) against the name of each candidate voted for. The 1917 periodic Senate election, in which W. M. Hughes's Nationalist Party won all Senate seats in all States, was the last time the first past the post multiple vote was used for Senate elections.

NSW Senator Hon. Albert Gardiner was an advocate of proportional representation for Senate elections. As the prevailing winner-take-all plurality electoral system had resulted in the Nationalist Party gaining in 1917 all the 18 Senate seats to be filled and, in 1919 under its replacement - the new winner-take-all multiple majority-preferential system - 17 of the 18 seats (Albert Gardiner was the only Labor candidate elected), to be filled for the whole of Australia, he was the only Labor senator in the 36-member Senate from 01 July 1920 until 30 June 1923. He held the position of Leader of the Opposition in the Senate, even though he had no party colleagues to lead, or even to second a motion. His solitary position, despite Labor's having gained 43.7% of the national Senate vote in 1917, and 42.8% in 1919, was a stark testament for the need for proportional representation.



Senator Hon. Albert Gardiner made a 12 hour speech in the Senate on 13 November 1918 (2 days after Armistice Day) in protest at W.M.Hughes's Nationalist Government's seeking to suspend standing orders then - after the Governor-General, Sir Ronald Munro-Ferguson, had issued his writ for the impending Corangamite by-election - so the Commonwealth Electoral Act 1918 , which replaced the plurality counting in House of Representatives elections with preferential counting, could apply before that poll. The preceding Swan by-election in October 1918, which the Opposition candidate won, with only 34% of the vote, was the last election to the House of Representatives that used the flawed plurality counting system. Senator Gardiner's speech remains the longest speech ever made in Australia's Senate, as time limits for speeches were imposed in 1919. The Corangamite by-election was won by a Victorian Farmers Union candidate instead of by the ALP's James Scullin, who had won only 42.5% of the vote, and who had been the incumbent for 1910-13, when he had won with 54.7% of the vote.



From the first House of Representatives election that used transferable voting in all divisions, in 1919, until 1951, both the Labor and the Coalition parties chose - over those 32 years - 30 divisions in which they each had, at some stage, multiple candidates standing, from two to as many as five. They could do that safely, in 59 different contests, because transferable ballots freed them from a major weakness of the previous plurality system, which was the splitting of the vote. In Werriwa, in NSW, in 1940, there were five United Australia Party candidates. In Franklin, in Tasmania, in 1919, the only two candidates were each from the Nationalist Party, which at least gave voters a choice of candidates, rather than an unopposed election. Labor had multiple candidates on five occasions. A revival of that practice of giving voters more choice would enable all parties to deal with a widespread 21st Century concern about the relative dearth of women as MHRs, compared with men, if serious parties were to stand a candidate of each sex in each present single-member division. That would provide the flexibility of letting the voters decide how that concern will be resolved at each particular election - relative to other competing priorities - rather than resorting to a rigid form of stage management by imposing a pre-determined dogmatic sex ratio regardless of the qualities of the candidates, or the opinions of the voters on the particular candidates.



A much fairer solution would be to have multi-member divisions with PR-STV, so each major party would seek diversity in its candidates in order to maximize its vote. Tasmania's House of Assembly and the Australian Capital Territory's Legislative Assembly, which each use the Hare-Clark electoral system, are Australia's first legislative chambers where voters have freely chosen a majority of women members. Concentration on equalizing the numbers of members of each sex in an elected chamber seriously misses the very much more important point of ensuring that the EXPRESSED WISHES of as many as practicable of the voters for those members are given effect to. That point is not implemented by any system that uses single-member electoral districts, which are inherently winner-take-all systems, nor is it implemented by proportional representation systems - such as party list systems or Australia's above-the-line contrivances - that lack, or are designed to thwart, the direct election of members. As Tasmania's 2018 Assembly election showed, Tasmania's system of Robson Rotation, and its filling of casual vacancies by countback, which prompts parties to nominate more candidates than they expect to be elected, is needed to ensure that the members elected correspond to the voters' EXPRESSED WISHES, rather than to some imposed sex ratio.



That important Commonwealth Electoral Act 1918 , which, in its current amended and consolidated form, is still the Principal Act for federal elections, changed the electoral system for MHRs from a first past the post system to its present majority-preferential system, but the Senate system was not changed until the Commonwealth Electoral Act 1919 replaced the previous multiple first past the post system (see 1917 NSW example) with a multiple majority-preferential system (see 1919 NSW example). Its Sections 7 and 8 changed the Principal Act to provide that, to cast a valid vote, voters had to indicate preferences for a number of candidates equal to one more than twice the number of vacancies to be filled.

The Lyons United Australia Party Government introduced the Commonwealth Electoral Act 1934, whose Sections 8-10 and 13 began what many now see to be an oppressive and ridiculously unnecessary requirement that, to cast a valid vote, a voter in an election in a multi-member electorate must, instead of the 1919 provision above, indicate a preference for each of the candidates, regardless of how many there might be.



In response to the Labor Party's unexpected "four A's" ploy in 1937 to exploit the possibilities of stage management of preferential voting afforded by the absence of Robson Rotation, R.G.Menzies's UAP Government introduced the Commonwealth Electoral Act 1940, in which the electoral law explicitly let party organizations exercise an almost overwhelming influence on which of a party's Senate candidates would be likely to be elected, and which would not be. The Act replaced the single column with the present below-the-line layout of separate vertical group columns set by lot side-by-side left to right, but with the order of names down each column set by a joint written statement of the candidates in the group that they would have their names appear in the order specified in the statement (the amended Act did not refer to parties, but candidates within each group were inevitably of the same political party). When the Chifley ALP Government introduced the Commonwealth Electoral Act 1948 to change the Senate electoral system from a multiple majority-preferential system to a single transferable vote (quota-preferential) PR system, it insisted on continuing the 1934 provision for full preferential voting despite it being imposed on a PR-STV system, which is a very different system from the multiple majority-preferential system to which the provision was originally applied, and despite the long-term proven success of Hare-Clark PR-STV 's partial optional preferential voting Tasmania-wide since 1909.

The Menzies Coalition Opposition unsuccessfully moved to amend the 1948 Bill to provide instead for partial optional marking of preferences, but the Chifley ALP Government insisted that a voter must mark all preferences on a ballot-paper for it to be valid. The Whitlam ALP Government proposed partial optional marking of preferences in its Electoral Laws Amendment Bill 1974, which the Senate twice rejected, and later in its Electoral Bill (No. 2) 1975, but its lack of a Senate majority prevented it legislating for that, as the Coalition had, since 1948, changed its view on the matter. It is ironic that the PR system in the Commonwealth Electoral Bill 1902 introduced by the Barton Government, and rejected by the 1902 Senate, had provided for fully optional marking of preferences. The statutory requirement to mark all preferences for a valid vote, which has never applied in Tasmanian State elections, has given rise, in mainland Australia, to the widespread use by political parties of how-to-vote cards.



At the 2013 Senate election, there were a record 110 candidates in New South Wales. For the first time ever, each of Australia's six States had a full quota of votes (16.7%) where voters marked their preferences for candidates of the parties already represented in the Parliament below their preferences for other candidates that were not members of such parties. That novelty led to widely-based, and long overdue, calls for changing the virtually full preferential voting system used for Senate elections since 1934 to a system of optional preferential voting, as cogently discussed in a paper by Michael Maley. That change was fortunately made in 2016. Michael Maley's paper showed that, for the 110 candidates in New South Wales in 2013, the number of possible preference orders of those 110 candidates was the factorial of 110 [110!] - which equals 1.5882 x 10 178 - and that unimaginably large number obviously made consideration of all possible preference orders an impossible task for anybody.



2. Senate's 2 former Winner-take-all Electoral Systems (1903-17 & 1919-46) & Proportional Representation (1949- ):

From 1903-17 the multiple, or bloc, first past the post (also known as plurality or relative majority) vote, was the Senate system, as the Senate in 1902 had, as stated at the end of the previous section, rejected the Barton Government's proposal for PR-STV for the Senate, and had provided instead for that for the Senate, and had provided instead for that multiple plurality (first-past-the post) system with plumping prohibited.





gave way to a preferential voting for the House of Representatives, to avoid splitting of the conservative vote by the newly-formed Country Party, which supported the Nationalists in a Coalition government. Since then, the Coalition , in its various forms, has been the only governing group, other than the Australian Labor Party, in the Federal Parliament, and it has been the Government for most of that time. In 1919, the Senate's multiple first-past-the-post systemto a multiple, or bloc , majority-preferential system after William Hughes's Nationalist Government had introduced, in 1918,to avoidby the newly-formed Country Party, which supported the Nationalists in a Coalition government. Since then, the, in its various forms, has been the only governing group, other than the Australian Labor Party, in the Federal Parliament, and it has been the Government for most of that time. The , whose members were appointed on the advice of S.M.Bruce's Nationalist Government, recommended an experimental inclusion of PR in the Constitution , but that was not implemented. 1929 Royal Commission on the Constitution [ 5 ] , whose members were appointed on the advice of S.M.Bruce's Nationalist Government, recommended an experimental inclusion of, but that was not implemented.





By 1948, the decades of operation of those two systems showed that they filled Senate seats so grossly disproportionately to votes that Parliament in that year replaced the Senate's multiple majority-preferential system with the present system. The Opposition supported the change. PR-STV system. The Opposition supported the change.

The Proportional Representation Society of Victoria held a Melbourne Town Hall meeting in October 1943 (see Uhr, J Page 4). It resolved to urge the wartime Prime Minister, Rt. Hon. John Curtin MHR, to introduce PR-STV for the Senate. The Society sent a letter to the Prime Minister, and received his reply.

A volume of the 1948 Hansard [6] records on 16, and 29 April 1948 the Attorney-General, Rt. Hon.

H V Evatt KC, introducing his Bill that was passed as the Commonwealth Electoral Act 1948, which amended the Commonwealth Electoral Act 1918 to provide for PR-STV for the Senate, and acknowledging the help of 'the Proportional Representation Society of England'. The second reading of the Bill in the Senate was on 30 April 1948. A 1948 letter from the Proportional Representation Society of Victoria congratulated the Prime Minister, Rt. Hon. J B Chifley, on the Bill that introduced PR-STV . The Bill was not opposed by the Opposition, led by the Rt. Hon. R G Menzies KC, except that they did, unsuccessfully, move that the Bill's continuation of the existing requirement for full marking of all preferences other than the last preference in order for a ballot-paper to be valid be altered to provide for partial optional preferential voting.

Since then, the PRSA has monitored the Senate system - the world's largest scale PR-STV election. PR-STV is the longest operating electoral system used for Senate elections. The PRSA has monitored other Australian elections also. Regrettably there is no constitutional or other entrenchment requiring approval at a referendum, or even an absolute majority vote in both houses of Parliament, before the Senate's PR-STV system can be weakened or abolished.

3. Casual Vacancies Setback:

Senator Peter Rae, and some other Tasmanian senators that had a good understanding of the Hare-Clark system and its countback procedure for filling casual vacancies in a PR system, agreed with the PRSA that the Constitution Alteration (Senate Casual Vacancies) Bill 1977, in ostensibly seeking to improve the original form of Section 15 of the Constitution, which provided for the filling of Senate casual vacancies, should have, to make it consistent with the PR-STV system used since 1949, used countback, rather than the system of appointment on the nomination of the party organization that replaced that original 1901 provision. They urged that replacement senators should be elected by the people via countback and not, as proposed in the Bill, by the Constitution requiring State Parliaments to endorse the nominees of political parties.











The Minister's second reading speech on the Constitution Alteration (Senate Casual Vacancies) Bill 1977, was not read in the Senate, but just taken as read. It can be read here. In the Bill's rushed, hushed, very cursory passage, the Senate voted to suspend its Standing Orders to dispense with the requirement for a Call of the Senate to be made before the third reading of the Bill on 25 February 1977. Eight senators, seven of whom were Government senators; Sir Magnus Cormack, Ian Wood, Kathryn Martin, Peter Sim, including four Tasmanian senators - Brian Harradine, Michael Townley, Peter Rae and Reginald Wright - voted against the Bill. Senator Wright, as he then was, stressed, in the 90 seconds he was allowed to speak, the need for a recount system of the original votes rather than party appointment.



Use of countback would have ensured direct election of all replacement senators, but those senators' advocacy failed to change the Bill, so senators filling casual vacancies now have been, regrettably, indirectly elected since approval of the Bill at a 1977 referendum by over 53% of voters in each State produced an alteration resulting in the present form of Section 15 of the Constitution. From the adoption of the original 1901 Constitution until that change in 1977, Section 15 had prescribed that casual vacancies had to be filled - until the next periodic or general federal election - by a person appointed as the relevant State Parliament, or until it sat, the State Governor, saw fit. That temporary appointment provision was abused in 1975 for partisan gain. Its replacement was well justified, but not by an indirect system of party appointment, when a provision for countback would have given direct election by the voters, and also party continuity in all significant cases.



With the 1948 adoption of PR-STV for Senate elections, the occasional extra place to be filled reduced the quota and could have the disadvantage of causing the number of places to be an even number rather than the odd number that was provided for before the number of senators per State was increased to12, which leaves an even number to be elected at each periodic election of senators.



Since then, the operation of the loose, poorly thought-out, present form of Section 15 of the Constitution, which the Fraser Coalition Government rushed through the Senate, as described above, but without sufficient time for exposure of its defects, has exposed subsequently-recognized weaknesses, such as:



senators directly elected by the people, such as Senator Michael Tate (ALP, Tas) and Senator John Herron (Liberal, Qld), resigning after serving only a month or so of their 6-year term, and their places being filled for nearly 6 years by persons unelected by the people. That behaviour was easily surpassed on 23 October 2013, when Senator Bob Carr (ALP, NSW) resigned. He was never elected by NSW voters to the Senate position he held then, but he had been appointed to fill a casual vacancy till 30 June 2014. At the periodic Senate election on 7 September 2013, he had been elected by NSW voters as a senator from 1 July 2014 to 30 June 2020, but he revealed when he resigned his appointed position that he also intended to resign his not-yet-occupied elected position, which would let it be filled by an unelected person. This practice could reduce many Senate seats - in a house supposedly elected democratically - to a recurrent series of party appointees;

the unprecedented failure of the then Liberal-dominated Tasmanian Parliament to replace Senator Donald Grimes (ALP, Tas) in 1987 by the nominee of the ALP , John Devereux, which was possible because Section 15 places no restriction on a State failing to appoint a replacement senator, thus distorting the Senate's balance;



available manipulative loopholes that were publicly revealed in a statement by Senator Brian Harradine (Independent, Tas) in 1996, when he honorably chose not to exploit them, that could have let him cut short his 6-year term by resigning in the middle of it just before nominations closed for the periodic election then, nominating a member of his group to be appointed to fill his Senate seat for 3 years, and then standing at the periodic election, when his support was likely to see him join that appointee in a bonus extra seat for a 6-year term;



Nearly always, the so-called 'choosing' of a replacement senator by a State Parliament involves the acceptance of a single nomination, as that 1996 South Australian example showed, but there was an exception in Tasmania in 1994 when the Groom Liberal Government required the Parliament, in acrimonious circumstances, to actually choose between two Liberal Party members as candidates to replace Senator Brian Archer.





The 2013 periodic election of State senators was accompanied by a failure of the Rudd Government to win enough lower house seats to remain in power. Speculation that quickly began about the possible intention of the outgoing Foreign Minister, NSW Senator Hon. Bob Carr - who had never been elected to the Senate by electors before that election, but who had been elected at it - to resign highlighted certain possible extra problems from the looseness of Section 15 of the Constitution that were well explained by the psephologist, Antony Green. A feasible and beneficial interim measure, pending the necessary alteration of Section 15, was advanced by Michael Maley.





In 1997 the Senate consisted of senators over 20% of whom had not been elected by the people of Australia!

The 1977 change to the Constitution was motivated by the breach in 1975, by the NSW and Queensland Coalition Governments, of the convention that a person appointed to replace a senator would always be member of the party of that vacating senator. That breach was encouraged by the climate established by the very contentious Gair Affair in 1974, when the Whitlam Government induced a non-ALP senator to resign, in the expectation that the ALP would gain an extra senator as an outcome of having an even number of places to be filled at the imminent poll to fill that vacancy, as was then still necessary. That opportunistic manoeuvre was foiled by the rapid, effectual response of the Queensland Premier.



The practical importance of that long-standing convention had increased greatly since proportional representation had been introduced in 1948. The convention originally applied for the first three Senate casual vacancies, but it was disrupted after a 1907 High Court decision that voided the purported appointment, under Section 15 of the Constitution as it was then, by the South Australian Parliament in 1907 of the Hon. James O'Loghlin, a Labour Party member, as a senator to replace Mr Joseph Vardon, an endorsed Anti-Socialist Party member. Mr Vardon's election at the 1906 periodic election of senators was, in 1907 after a recount, declared void by the High Court acting as the Court of Disputed Returns.



That High Court decision led to the 1908 Special Election in South Australia, at which Messrs O'Loghlin and Vardon were the only candidates. A separate 1907 High Court action, the King versus the Governor of South Australia, also touches on this matter. Mr Vardon was elected in 1908 to fill the vacancy that the High Court had declared had not been filled at the 1906 periodic election, and was not a casual vacancy subject to being filled under Section 15 of the Constitution, as had been attempted by the South Australian Parliament. The casual vacancies convention continued to operate, by and large, but the 1975 breach, in the finely-balanced context of a Senate elected by proportional representation, showed the need for a better system of filling casual vacancies, which countback, rather than the party appointment instituted in 1977, would have provided.



An excellent suggestion by Michael Maley that would shed more light on the operation of Section 15 of the Constitution is that the Commonwealth Electoral Act 1918 should be amended to include a requirement for the Australian Electoral Commission to conduct a countback when a Senate casual vacancy occurs, and to notify the relevant State Parliament of the result, so its members would be aware of the person that would have been elected had countback applied, and could consider that in its deliberations. He points out that Act's Section 282 as a good precedent for such an informative provision.



4. Gregory Fractional Transfer variant replaces Random Selection Transfer:

The Joint Select Committee on Electoral Reform of the Federal Parliament in 1983 was rightly concerned about potential difficulties with the procedure for transfer of surplus votes by random selection that had applied at Senate scrutinies since the changes made by Section 3 of the Commonwealth Electoral Act 1948. The narrow margin of 560 votes (0.089% of the total formal vote) between Jack Evans (Australian Democrats) and the final senator elected, Noel Crichton-Browne (Liberal), in the 22nd and final count in the October 1980 Senate poll for Western Australia and the potential problems that Mr Evans's appeal to the Court of Disputed Returns might have raised if it had been successful and the Court had had to consider ordering a recount of the poll. With a random element in the scrutiny, there is no guarantee that a recount would resolve the doubt in a close finish. The Committee's recommendation (see Page 65 Section 3.34) led to the Commonwealth Electoral Act 1918 being amended in 1983 so that an Unweighted Inclusive Gregory Fractional Transfer is now prescribed in Section 273(9-12), necessarily, but inadequately, replacing the poor original Senate procedure of random selection of the number of surplus ballots for transfer at full value.

The original Gregory fractional transfer, which Hare-Clark has used since 1907, is the transfer of all ballot-papers showing a particular first preference, but at a fractional value appropriate to the level of the surplus. When it is applied to transfers of surpluses other than those arising from first preferences, it applies only to the last parcel of votes received, whereas the later Unweighted Inclusive variant applies to all parcels, but relates to ballot papers rather than vote values, so it can greatly over-emphasize surplus votes transferred at a very small transfer value. Victorian Liberal Senator Alan Missen had Hansard in 1983 [7] incorporate a PRSA letter stating concern about the defective nature of the Unweighted Inclusive Gregory Fractional Transfer introduced then, which still applies. The PRSA notes that in 1983 computer processing of such transfers was seen as being impracticable, but by 2015 it is certainly practicable and would, for Senate scrutinies, beneficially allow the Weighted Inclusive Gregory Fractional Transfer, whose original proposal by the PRSA is noted in the 1986 JSCER inquiry's Recommendation 89, and in a 2003 paper by Professor David Farrell , to replace the defective Unweighted Transfer in Section 273(9-12). Western Australia adopted the Weighted Transfer in 2006 for its Legislative Council polls. The PRSA's Victoria-Tasmania Branch submitted further details to the Joint Standing Committee on Electoral Matters in 2014.

A Weighted Inclusive Gregory fractional transfer is prescribed by Schedule 1 of Western Australia's Electoral Act 1907. See in particular Clause 5 of that Act's Schedule 1. The Submission No. 94 to the Inquiry into the 2007 federal election by the federal Joint Standing Committee on Electoral Matters by the South Australian Branch of the PRSA proposed that Senate counts should use a Weighted Inclusive Gregory Fractional Transfer instead of the present unweighted transfer.

5. Group Voting Tickets:

This particular stage management of the Senate electoral system operated from 1983 until it was fortunately abolished in 2016 following widely criticized election results in 2013 that highlighted its defects.



Click on hyperlinks below to see aspects of that former system. It is now fortunately a museum piece federally, but it still applies for elections to that third of Australia's six other legislative chambers that use PR-STV , but have not yet ceased any provision for Group Voting Tickets, namely the Legislative Councils of Western Australia and Victoria.



The system described in Para. 5A, below, which still includes stage management, but less severely, replaced it.



5.1 Implementation of the Group Voting Ticket device in 1983, by the ALP and the Australian Democrats



5.2 Parliamentary debate in 1983 on Group Voting Tickets' introduction



5.3 Senate electoral system was made less voter-empowering in contrast to Hare-Clark's progressiveness



5.4 Regimentation of the vote actually disadvantages the major parties



5.5 Below-the-line voting became exceptionally hard given the large number of candidates in the 2013 elections



5.6 The 2004 election gave an early warning of the problems in the 2013 election



5.7 The need for the direct election of senators and, at least, partial optional preferential voting



5.8 The first High Court challenge to Group Voting Tickets under Section 7 of the Constitution



5.9 Untested constitutional validity of a party's being able to lodge up to 3 different Group Voting Tickets



5.10 Greens' 2008 bill to replace Group Voting Tickets with separate party squares above-the-line



5.11 Defects of the Green's 2008 bill



5.12 Greens' further efforts to promote their 2008 bill

5.13 Senator Nick Xenophon's unsatisfactory 2013 bill



5.14 Weakness in the Greens' and Senator Xenophon's bills compared to NSW and Victorian Upper House systems



5.15 Final abolition of Group Voting Tickets by the Turnbull Government's Commonwealth Electoral Amendment Bill 2016



5A.

Partial optional preferential voting in Senate above-the-line and below-the-line options from March 2016



The extreme stage management by the Group Voting Ticket system that persisted from 1983 to March 2016 was fortunately replaced by the Turnbull Liberal Government in 2016. The replacement system provided, for the first time since 1934 - a gap of 82 years - for voters to indicate preferences for individual candidates without deeming their ballot to be informal because they had not marked their preferences for almost all candidates. The last NSW Senate poll with virtual full compulsory marking of all preferences, in 2013, had 111 candidates that voters were required, in order to cast a valid vote, to indicate their order of preference for. Being able to indicate preferences for individual candidates is a prized right protected by Section 7 of the Constitution, but that important Section neither requires nor forbids compulsory full marking of preferences. That long overdue discontinuation of that full marking requirement was achieved by re-introducing partial optional preferential voting.



A less extreme form of stage management, similar to, but more party-focussed than that introduced in 1940, still remains, as an above-the-line option has been retained in which each group's voting square implements a ballot that has all the names of the candidates for that group, but only that group, ranked in preference order in exactly the same way that they appear in that party's column below-the-line. That unnecessary contrivance is unavailable to ungrouped candidates, which is unfair and unjustifiably discriminates between candidates. It makes ballot papers more cluttered and confusing to voters.



During the debate, in committee, Senator Ricky Muir, of Victoria, who had issued his Dissenting Report on the bill, in which he had put a good case for using the Hare-Clark system, moved an amendment to require the use of Robson Rotation in the printing of Senate ballot papers, but that was not supported by the Coalition or the Australian Labor Party, and failed. Senator Jacinta Collins, of Victoria, accepted that Robson Rotation had worth, but made the reasonable point that the ALP could not accept it without careful study and report by the Joint Standing Committee on Electoral Matters. Senator Muir is the first federal parliamentarian to have ever moved to adopt this important democratic reform. He helpfully mentioned, during his speech to that amendment motion, that Robson Rotation was supported by the Proportional Representation Society of Australia.



The new form of above-the-line voting that replaced Group Voting Tickets in 2016 has been criticized, and claimed to be 'dishonest', because the ballot paper instructions state that at least six boxes must be marked despite the formality requirements being that only a single above-the-line box need be marked for a formal ballot. That criticism and claim overlooks the reasonable need in a transferable vote system to encourage the expression of at least a modest number of preferences so as to reduce the incidence of exhausted ballots, but at the same time ensure that voters that have, for whatever reason, only marked fewer than the required number of boxes do not have their ballot unnecessarily wasted as informal.



6.

Exclusionary 'Threshold' - Fraction of all first preferences a candidate, or his or her party, would need to reach for his or her election:

The election in 2013 of several Senate candidates with very low numbers of first preference votes has seen some renewed calls for imposing an arbitrary exclusionary threshold, as often used in party list PR systems, but which are inappropriate in PR-STV systems, to prevent such election. The 2013 German election showed how small changes in the arbitrary threshold percentage could drastically alter outcomes. In 1998-9, a NSW Liberal, Senator Helen Coonan, campaigned for a change to the Senate's electoral system that would have required the exclusion from the count of any candidate that failed to gain a prescribed fractional part of the total first preference vote, which she termed a 'threshold', unless the total number of first preference votes for that party's candidates reached that threshold.



The aim of Senator Coonan's proposal to impose an exclusionary threshold was to prevent candidates of parties with a low level of first preference vote support from accruing enough votes transferred from surpluses, or from other less successful candidates, to be elected with a quota of votes. The effect of the proposal would be to reduce the proportionality of the counting system. The weakness in her failed plan, which is the subject of a 1999 letter to The Age, is its arbitrary redirection of voters' ballot preferences away from one or more of their higher preferences to one of their lower preferences, which is manifestly against the plainly expressed wishes of such voters. See Michael Maley's excellent 2014 JSCEM submission.



A threshold flouts the direct election provision of Section 7 of the Australian Constitution, and a High Court challenge could invalidate it. Malcolm Mackerras AO raised that on Page 4 of Appendix A of his 2013 JSCEM submission where he stated, " ... Two types of reform have been proposed. One is to place a threshold below a party's vote and cut out any party with less than, say, three per cent. The trouble with that proposal is that it would be unconstitutional. My basis for that assertion is Section 7 of the Constitution: 'The Senate shall be composed of senators for each State, directly chosen by the people of the State, voting (until the Parliament otherwise provides) as one electorate. ...' The words 'directly chosen' command a candidate-based election. Few people seem to understand this point but the fact is that the present system is candidate-based. Once you put in a threshold you change it to a party-list system and senators would then no longer be directly chosen by the people. ..."

7. Why the number of senators to be elected should be an odd Number:

From 1984 six senators were to be elected from every State at a periodic election of senators, instead of the previous five. Until 1948 there were three to be elected, and then that number was increased to five, both of those numbers being an odd number. The disadvantage and inadvisability, with a proportional representation electoral system, of setting the number of places to be filled as an even number were not unknown, as the 1951, 1974 and 1975 "double dissolution" elections, at which it is unavoidable that an even number of senators is to be elected in each State, were held after the adoption of PR-STV for Senate elections.

The advantage of setting an odd number is that an absolute majority of votes for a given party, however slight, produces an absolute majority of seats for that party whereas, with an even number of places, an absolute majority of votes for a party does not, unless it is high enough, produce an absolute majority of seats for that party. If the absolute majority is not large enough to produce an absolute majority of an even number of seats, the party gaining such an absolute majority of votes will only gain half the number of available seats, and the party, or parties, that jointly gain only a minority of the seats, will gain the other half of the seats, which is unsatisfactory. The Whitlam Government instigated the Gair Affair in 1974, which sought to exploit the nature of a PR-STV election where the number of positions to be filled is an even number.

The remedy for this problem is to arrange matters so that the number of places to be filled is an odd number, but the requirement of the nexus provision in the first sentence of Section 24 of the Constitution has made that onerous and expensive as the size of the Parliament has increased. The greatly increased difficulty, with there no longer being an odd number of places to be filled in each State at periodic elections of senators, for either major party to obtain a majority of seats in any State has led to increased demands for a relaxation of the careful safeguards of Section 57 of the Constitution, which provides for procedures that can ensue following a disagreement between the two Houses of the Parliament.

There is also the fact that, with an even number of places to be filled in each State, a party that gains half of the quotas of Senate votes in all States at two successive periodic elections (42.9% of the vote), or a single election after a dissolution of the Senate (46.2% of the vote), can thereby, with much less than 50% of the overall vote, gain half the seats in the Senate, and thus deprive an opposing party that might have gained Government by the vagaries of the single-member electorate system used for elections to the Lower House of a majority of Senate seats, thus enabling it to reject any Government Bill it chooses. A change to the law to set the numbers for periodic Senate elections to be odd numbers would be desirable, but a further change to provide for PR for the House of Representatives would be better still.

8. A sounder basis for dividing State senators into two classes after a dissolution of the Senate:

Section 13 of the Australian Constitution requires the Senate, at its first meeting after any dissolution of it, to divide the newly-elected State senators into two classes of equal numbers, with one class to be long-term senators, with a six-year term, and the other class to be short-term senators, with a three-year term. From the first election onwards that division to establish the rotation of senators has been effected by a resolution of the Senate that had the first class consist of the half of the State senators first declared elected in each Senate electorate made long-term senators, with the rest of the State senators being made short-term senators.

That long-standing practice was examined by the Joint Select Committee on Electoral Reform, whose First Report, dated September 1983, stated in its Paragraphs 3.36 - 3.39 that the practice had been appropriate under the Senate's previous two winner-take-all electoral systems, but was inequitable under the current system of proportional representation. That First Report's Recommendation 16 therefore was that the Commonwealth Electoral Act 1918 should be amended to include a new section to require the Australian Electoral Commission to conduct, after each election necessitated by a dissolution of the Senate, a recount of the votes confined to the elected candidates, and to determining, in each State - for the sole purpose of informing the Senate - which of the candidates for that State that had been elected would have been elected if only half the number of vacancies were to be filled, and to report that to the Parliament. That new section, Section 282, was added to the Act. Recommendation 17 of that First Report was that Section 13 of the Constitution should be amended to require the division to be made according to the result of such a recount, but no further action was taken on achieving such an amendment.

At the first opportunity to implement the new system, the Hawke Labor Government, which had supported it at the Joint Select Committee, and had supported the introduction of the necessary Section 282 of the Act, failed to support it in the Senate. A member of that Committee, ALP Victorian Senator Robert Ray, spoke in favour of the new section, as Page 3220 of the Senate Hansard of 02 December 1983 shows. The Coalition Opposition supported the new approach that the Hawke Government had developed but, at the first opportunity to implement it, when the Senate met on 15th September 1987 and proceeded to its task of dividing the newly-elected State senators into two classes, the Australian Democrats senators joined with the Hawke Labor Government senators to defeat an Opposition motion to implement the new procedure that the Hawke Government had developed, which reversal in attitude appears to have resulted from an assessment that avoiding implementing the reform would result in fewer long-term senators for the Coalition Opposition than would occur if the reformed procedure was adopted.



Liberal Senator Jim Short's 1987 speech in support of his amendment motion to the Hawke Labor Government's motion to use the traditional procedure, in which he advocated the use instead of the reformed procedure that that Government had favoured in 1983, appears on Page 96 of the Senate Hansard of 15 September 1987 and continues on Page 155 of the Senate Hansard of 16 September 1987. The speech by the Australian Democrats spokesman, Senator Michael Macklin, shown on Page 156 of that Hansard, reveals quite starkly that the Australian Democrats' vote against implementing the new system was based on a consideration of which system would yield more long-term senators for them for the coming term. Page 194 of the Senate Hansard of 17 September 1987 shows the end of the debate, and the results of divisions on the amendment motion, and the substantive motion. Until the Senate's carte blanche to decide which senators after a dissolution of the Senate will gain the benefit of the longer term has been superseded by an alteration of Section 13 of the Constitution, along the lines of the reform that the Hawke Government had first advocated, it would seem that party political advantage will continue to override considerations of electoral propriety.



The next time the sounder system for the rotation of senators could be applied followed the 2016 double dissolution election, but expediency again resulted in Senate power blocs maximizing their senators' terms.



9. Single Transferable Vote proportional representation ( PR-STV ) for the House of Representatives:

The Australian Constitution does not require that electoral divisions for House of Representatives elections be single-member divisions, nor does it specify how the votes shall be counted. Section 29 allowed, "... until the (Commonwealth) Parliament otherwise provides ...", each State to determine the number of members in each of its electoral divisions, and it did not restrain the Commonwealth Parliament from making a similar determination, which it made in its first electoral legislation, which was the Commonwealth Electoral Act 1902 .



The final sentence of Section 29 of the Constitution is, "In the absence of other provision, each State shall be one electorate.", which provision applied in the case of the first election of MHRs for South Australia and Tasmania, although South Australia used, for that first federal election, a multiple plurality (multiple first-past-the-post) system, whereas Tasmania used Hare-Clark PR.



Tasmania's 1901 use of Hare-Clark (PR-STV or quota-preferential proportional representation) for electing its five MHRs was an example of the Constitution's not preventing Hare-Clark PR-STV being used, although it would be preferable - if Hare-Clark PR-STV were to be instituted - if Section 33 of the Constitution was altered so that casual vacancies were filled by countback. The election for each House of Representatives single-member division was counted using a plurality system until 1918, but ever since then preferential voting (the alternative vote) has been used, as prescribed in Section 274 of the Commonwealth Electoral Act 1918.



A misconception that some commentators have about preferential voting in a single-member electoral district is that it amounts to electors voting more than once, or insinuations of "a second bite of the cherry". This misconception was authoritatively refuted in the 1999 High Court case of Ditchburn vs Divisional Returning Office for Herbert, where the High Court made it clear that a preferential vote was a single vote, transferable according to clear rules. In the 2011 UK plebiscite to adopt a preferential voting system to replace the present House of Commons plurality system, the then British Conservative Party Prime Minister, David Cameron, misleadingly used that 'cherry' insinuation to argue against preferential voting.



A 1981 Background Paper, 'Proposals for Change to our Electoral System', issued by NSW Senator Arthur Gietzelt, the then Australian Labor Party Spokesperson on Administrative Services and Home Affairs, proposed introducing PR-STV for elections of members of the House of Representatives. The paper proposed partial optional preferential voting, as had been included for Senate voting in the Whitlam ALP Government's Electoral Bill (No. 2) 1975, which was not passed by the Senate. The then Federal Opposition Leader, Hon. Bill Hayden MHR, spoke favourably of the proposed adoption of PR-STV on television, but he was replaced as Opposition Leader in 1983 by Robert Hawke, who soon became Prime Minister, with a result that, rather than those proposals for PR-STV being introduced, the ensuing electoral change did not even include partial optional preferential Senate voting, with the main change being the retrograde 1983 adoption of Senate Group Voting Tickets, which persisted until it was replaced in 2016, with a different above-the-line option, and partial optional voting replaced full preferential voting below-the-line.



The Australian Democrats Senators Michael Macklin and Jack Evans spoke in 1983 of the need for PR-STV for the House of Representatives when speaking on electoral legislation then. The PRSA suggested improvements to Australian Democrats Senator David Vigor's Commonwealth Electoral (Representation of the People) Amendment Bill 1985, which sought to amend the Commonwealth Electoral Act 1918 to provide for PR-STV for House of Representatives elections. Sections 24, 27, 29 and 122 of the Constitution, which govern the composition of the House of Representatives, must be complied with in determining the numbers of MHRs in each State and Territory. As Section 24 of the Constitution requires that at general elections MHRs be "directly chosen by the people of the Commonwealth", PR-STV is fortunately the only form of proportional representation that can be used for electing MHRs at a general election.



Senator David Vigor spoke on, and moved amendments to, the Commonwealth Electoral Amendment Bill 1987 during which he again sought PR-STV for the House of Representatives, and drew attention to the faulty Unweighted Inclusive Transfer Value introduced by a 1983 amendment, and the fact that the PRSA's highlighting that fault had been referred to in that Senate debate. Hansard [9] records Australian Democrats Senator John Coulter drawing the Senate's attention to the PRSA's 1993 Federal Election Analysis. The PRSA has produced PR Analyses of House of Representatives polls for 1996-2004.



Mr Michael Organ MHR, a Greens Party member elected at a by-election in the division of Cunningham, introduced in the House of Representatives, on 1st December 2003, his Royal Commission (House of Representatives Elections) Bill 2003, which provided for the appointment of a Royal Commission to investigate the implementation of a system of proportional representation for the House of Representatives but, without support by any other political party in that House, it did not proceed beyond its first reading (Hansard Page 23318), and lapsed.



10. Forestalling a 1988 Constitution Alteration blunder:

An eagle-eyed PRSA(NSW) member, Edwin Haber, warned the PRSA of a major drafting blunder in a 1998 Constitution Alteration Bill. Insistent PRSA representations to the Australian Democrats, and discerning support by their Senators John Coulter and Michael Macklin, led the Senate [8] - even though the House of Representatives had to be recalled just to pass the amended bill - to omit from Clause 5 of the Hawke ALP Government's Constitution Alteration (Fair Elections) 1988, a potentially disastrous sub-section that was one of four proposed new sub-sections.



It was a proposed new Section 29(2) of the Constitution, "Electoral divisions: The number of members shall be the same for each division of a particular State", that - if the ensuing referendum had unfortunately succeeded without that necessary omission having been made - would have, for no good or discernable reason, removed PR-STV as a practicable constitutional option for House of Representatives elections, unless each whole State where the total number of MHRs was a prime number - or was otherwise not divisible to attain the proposed constitutional requirement - became a single electoral district. Such a single electoral district would be most ill-advised for a populous State such as NSW, with a number of MHRs that once reached 50, and could again become larger.



As shown on Page 28 of the pamphlet - posted to each voter under the requirements of the Referendum (Machinery Provisions) Act 1984 - the bill in the form presented to the electors contained a quite different Section 29(2), which had been reduced to being one of only three sub-sections instead of the four proposed in the Government's original form of the bill. The referendum was one of four alterations proposed . Each failed to achieve a majority in any State.



11. PRSA member successfully suggested improvement to Commonwealth Electoral Act:

Section 213(1) of the Commonwealth Electoral Act 1918 owes, since 1983, its present wording to a recommendation to Parliament by the Joint Select Committee on Electoral Reform (See Page 67, Sections 3.40-3.42 and Page 205, Recommendation 19) made after a PRSA member and statistician, Mrs Alison Harcourt, proposed in evidence to that Committee that the initially-proposed legislative provision for replacing - for House of Representatives ballot papers, - the originally-prescribed alphabetical order of candidates' surnames with a single fixed order, randomly decided by lot, of candidates' surnames down and - for Senate ballot papers - of randomly deciding by lot the order of party columns from left to right, was insufficiently rigorous, and should be replaced by the double randomization method she proposed, which is now provided for in Section 213(1). Those single orders set by lot should not be confused with the far superior Robson Rotation. It has ballot-papers printed in batches, and each batch has a different order of names, so overall none of the candidates is unequally advantaged or disadvantaged by the position of his or her name.



12. PR for the 1997 Constitutional Convention Election:

PRSA advice to the Government on its use of a PR-STV system for electing half the members of a Constitutional Convention at a 1997 national postal ballot was acknowledged in Hansard of 24th June 1997 [10]. Two PRSA(NSW) officers were among the 20 people elected to represent NSW. This was only the second time in Australia's history that members of a federal Constitutional Convention were popularly elected, the first such election soon before Federation being for all members of the Convention, but conducted using a multiple plurality (first-past-the-post ) counting system, and without women being allowed to vote.



13 . Representation and Institutional Change Conference:

PRSA representatives attended this August 1999 Conference, to commemorate 50 years of PR for the Senate, in Parliament House, Canberra, run by the Department of the Senate and the Australian National University.



14 . Formation of the Proportional Representation Society of Australia :

State bodies promoting PR-STV systems have varied their names occasionally, and once operated informally as PRSA branches. The PRSA Constitution took effect on 1st January 1982 after PR-STV societies in NSW, and Victoria (later joined by Tasmania), South Australia, Western Australia, and Queensland formally adopted the Constitution, and became PRSA Branches.



The PRSA held a National Conference in Melbourne on 23 and 24 April 1983 to settle various matters including its future operations. The Australian Capital Territory Branch was admitted by a PRSA referendum in 1989. The Queensland and Western Australian Branches were later dissolved.



The PRSA's quarterly newsletter, Quota Notes, which began in December 1975 as the NSW Branch newsletter, became the national society's newsletter in September 1983 with its Issue No. 31. The PRSA's first National President, Mr J.F.H. Wright, wrote the informative book, Mirror of the Nation's Mind - Australia's Electoral Experiments (available from the PRSA), and had earlier been recognized for his international contributions by being elected a Vice-President of the Electoral Reform Society of Great Britain and Ireland.

