Comment on Australia 2025 – Wrap-up of the night
Zagorath@aussie.zone 4 weeks ago3 is such an awkward number though. It would basically lock in 1 Labor 1 LNP all over the country, with the third being the only variable one. I’m not a huge fan of STV with 3. 5 is really where I’d like to see it start. Merging 3s to return 5 would work, and because of how STV works, you could still adapt for regions where that’s not viable, like the NT and rural WA.
MisterFrog@aussie.zone 4 weeks ago
Unless Australians are comfortable with sending a much larger number of lower house members, that would make the electorates get much bigger than they currently are, and I would guess removing local representatives would not be a popular move.
I’m not entirely convinced that 1 liberal and 1 Labor would be locked in everywhere. I think the change in electoral system would produce governments much more representative of how people vote. It would change us to a system where forming a coalition is practically expected.
5 does seem like a reasonable working number of members to send as a combined “delegation” from an electorate, but that’d be the maximum desirable, in my view.
With 225 members and sending 5 from each electorate, that would reduce the number to only 45 electorates in the whole country.
Something, I’m totally fine with, I think federal electorates ought to be much larger than state or local electorates, but it would probably be a hard sell to many people.
Really appreciate you sharing your thoughts on this :)
Zagorath@aussie.zone 4 weeks ago
Your idea would result in a 225 seat house. Mine would be 250. Not a significant difference IMO.
I actually most of all would like to see a move to MMP, the system used (with some minor differences) in NZ and Germany. Where you elect 1 per division locally, and also vote for a party, with the party vote being roughly 50% of the total seats in Parliament, and used to make the total Parliament proportional to the will of the people. The biggest differences I would like compared to the Kiwi & German system is to let you give a second preference for the party vote, used only if your first choice doesn’t reach the 5% minimum threshold to get any seats, and to choose MPs in the proportional system based on nearest loser, rather than by a party-provided list, so if a party deserves 1 extra seat based on its party vote, the candidate from that party that gets the seat is the one that got 49% of the seat vote, rather than being the person who was pre-selected by the party to get the highest priority.