Last weekend, the people of Australia went to the polls to elect a new government. All 150 of the country’s MPs, and 40 of their 76 senators were up for election. While Australia’s Senate is elected by a system of PR, its House of Representatives is chosen with “Preferential Voting”, known in the UK as the “Alternative Vote”, or AV.
How does Australia’s electoral system work?
Like in the UK, Australia is divided into constituencies, each represented by an individual MP. However, how the votes are counted in Australia is very different.
In the UK, the candidate with the highest number of votes wins the election, even if this is a small minority of the votes. Imagine an election where:
Candidate A receives 150 votes
Candidate B receives 175 votes
Candidate C receives 200 votes
Candidates D receives 225 votes
Candidate E receives 250 votes
Candidate E will win this election, even though three times as many people want a different MP. This is our antiquated First Past the Post system.
Australian voters are asked not just who their favourite candidate is, but who their second favourite candidate is, their third favourite, and so on, with the option to give a preference order for all of the candidates.
Officials will then check if any candidate has more than half the number of total votes.
If they do, then great! There is no way that any candidate can be more popular than them, because they already have half the vote.
If not, then the least popular candidate will be eliminated from the election. Officials will check who the voters for this candidate picked as their second preference, and will redistribute their votes to their second preferences.
This process will keep being repeated until a candidate has a majority of votes. This may mean that it is a voter’s third or fourth preference which is used to elect an MP. But, if they had voted in First Past the Post, then their vote for a long shot candidate would not have made a difference to the final outcome.
The UK famously voted against introducing AV for Westminster elections in a 2011 referendum. While AV removes the need for tactical voting, it does not meet the standards set by Make Votes Matter’s Good Systems Agreement, which sets the bar for an acceptable system of PR.
The Australian election shows the limits of AV, and confirms that it cannot be considered a form of Proportional Representation.
Proportionality
One of the main problems with AV is that it does not deliver proportional elections. While the Australian Labor Party (ALP) won 32.8% of first preference votes, they received a disproportionately high 51% of seats, and with it majority rule. Not only did they receive a smaller percentage of first preference votes than they did in 2019, but they in fact received fewer first preference votes than the Coalition at this election.
It has been smaller parties, both to the right and left, who have lost out. While the Green Party, and the right-wing One Nation Party, won 12% and 5% of the vote respectively, the Greens only received 4 seats, and One Nation none.
So we can see that AV is still a majoritarian system, and encourages two-party politics.
This lack of proportionality is a problem. Academic research, such as Salomon Orellana’s Electoral Systems and Governance lists proportionality as one of the key aspects of good voting systems. More proportional elections have been linked to better representation of women and minorities in parliament, and better policy-making in areas like climate change and income inequality.
Safe seats
This election has seen considerable changes in the makeup of Australia’s House of Representatives, including the election of new independent MPs in formerly Liberal seats. However, only 21 seats (14% of the total) actually changed hands.
Indeed, since 2010, only 36% of seats in Australia have changed hands, leaving a solid majority of safe seats.
Safe seats are bad for our democracy, as we have seen in the UK. All of the MPs earning the most from second jobs outside of Parliament had majorities of 17,000 votes or more, and MPs in safe seats are disproportionately influential, as studies have shown that they are more likely to become ministers.
Pork-barrel politics
What’s more, Australia’s electoral system has encouraged parties to spend taxpayer money politically to reward areas in return for their support.
This has happened from both major parties. During the 2019 - 2022 Parliament, ALP safe seats only received 2.9% of government funding, despite making up 17% of all seats. The Morrison government was repeatedly accused of political spending, including in the ‘Sports Rorts’ affair, where sports funding was targeted to seats which the Coalition government had won in the last election.
The ALP have also been accused of politicising their local programmes. During this election campaign, 80% of ALP funding pledges for local projects went to seats deemed as marginal.
We have seen the impact of these incentives in the UK too, with research into the Towns Fund showing that 39 of the 45 recipients of grants were in seats held by the governing Conservative party,
While any good voting system should certainly contain local links to constituencies, it should make sure that all voters can express their voices equally. In this way, the incentive is to allocate spending depending on where there is most need, rather than where politicians most need support. Indeed, countries like Germany, which use a system of Proportional Representation, have been much more successful in addressing regional inequality.
Verdict on AV: not good enough
The Australian elections have shown that AV is not enough, and that full Proportional Representation is needed to deliver a representative parliament. Problems with safe seats and politicised spending have still persisted. Only by making sure that seats match votes, can we truly modernise our elections.