The Federal Voting system

Our Federal Government is made up of two 'Houses' - the House of Representatives comprised of 150 popularly-elected Members representing a specific location (or 'Seat') in Australia, and the Senate consisting of representatives elected by a quota system based on all votes within each State and Territory. Government is traditionally formed by the Party that has control of the Lower House (Reps) either outright or through coalition with another Party. The Senate acts as a 'House of Review' for legislation passed through the Lower House.

The House of Representatives

Each Australian lives in an Electoral Division (Seat). Wherever possible the 150 seats are roughly the same in terms of numbers of voters, though the physical size may be vastly different, and therefore the voting patterns are also different.

The type of voting used in the House of Representatives election is known as "compulsory preferential". This means that for a vote to be counted, all squares on the ballot paper must be marked with numbers starting from 1 to however many names appear on the paper. When the votes are tallied, they will go through a number of counts, and at each count the candidate receiving the lowest number of primary votes (1 in their square) is eliminated. That candidate's ballots are redistributed at full value to the remaining candidates according to the next ranking on each ballot.

Eventually there will remain two candidates - those with the most primary and re-distributed votes - and they will be the contestants of what is called the "two-Party preferred vote". 

The thing to be fully aware of here is that for the House of Representatives the voter is the person who determines the order of selection on the voting paper. Individual candidates or Parties cannot 'give' the preferences to any other candidate - it purely depends on what the voter puts on the ballot paper. It is also important to remember that the voter must number every square for the vote to count.

So what are 'preference deals'? Preference deals are where a Party or candidate promise another candidate a position high on their 'How-to-Vote' material handed out at the polling booth on election day. In a system where all squares must be numbered (like our Federal system), the How-to-Vote recommendations are very powerful, because many voters will stick to the order their favoured Party advises them to use.

The Conservative candidates and Parties often attack the Greens as being "just another vote for Labor". This comes from the fact that where we have to make recommendations of our How-to-Vote cards at a Federal level, we always put Labor above the Liberals - because the ALP are less objectionable in their social policies than the Libs. Most often, however, they are both at the tail-end of the list, though they routinely have the advantage because our voting habits are very 'dichotomous'.

Believe me - if we could get away without showing a preference position for either, we generally would! 

The Senate is elected on a 'proportional' system, with Senators elected for a term of 6 years. Terms overlap, with half of the Senate up for election at each Federal Election.

The Senate must comprise an equal number of Senators from each of the original States, and have at least 6 Senators from each State. This is the first inequity - for example Tasmania with half-a-million voters has the same number of Senators as NSW with 7 million voters!

The type of voting used for the Senate can give Parties very real power over where the votes end up. Senators are elected when a Party/Group reaches a specific 'quota' of votes (14.3% of the vote for States, or 33.3% of the vote for Territories). Anything left over is distributed according to the preferences shown. Now, you may ask, which votes are distributed - surely all the votes with preferences a certain way could be included in the primary count, and all the remaining could have preferences another way? Well, the answer is that to stop this happening all votes are distributed - the preferences for every vote are counted at whatever percentage of the vote is left over (i.e. they don't count as full votes). 

Complex, eh?

The above-the-line voting system for the Senate also means that if a voter places a number above a specific 'group', the Party/Group decides where the votes flow. This means that someone with very little primary choice votes (like Stephen Fielding) can end up with a very undeserved spot - hence Keating's marvellous quote about "unrepresentative swill".

Individuals can overcome this problem by numbering 'below-the-line', however when the list of candidates is a tablecloth as it has been in the past, most people simply don't take the time.

Preference deals become critical in this system, and the Greens have suffered from some pretty underhanded deals involving the major Parties and fringe candidates. We also have to walk a fine line between trying to get electoral benefit and our principles.

The Senate is a dodgy system in desperate need of reform.