Comment on [Discussion] What level of proportional representation is desirable?
CurlyWurlies4All@slrpnk.net 6 days ago
I would love to see proportional representation in the lower house. The answer on how to solve issues with democracy usually are solved by adding more democracy.
Last election, the Nationals received only 3.6% of the popular vote. Despite this low vote, it won ten seats, and that’s because Nationals voters are highly concentrated in a few low population rural seats, where there are fewer people controlling larger portions of land.
The Greens, by contrast, won 12% of the popular vote but only won 4 lower house seats. That’s because Greens voters, although most heavily concentrated in inner-urban seats, and are much more uniformly spread across the country.
To put it another way, Nationals won 52,000 votes per seat as compared to 448,000 votes per seat for the Greens.
Is that reflective of strong democratic values? I don’t think it is.
MisterFrog@aussie.zone 4 days ago
Would you also remove the upper house. Otherwise what is the purpose of the upper house if it’s elected identically?
CurlyWurlies4All@slrpnk.net 4 days ago
Yes. The upper house is supposed to be proportional and yet it suffers from the same unbalanced outcomes. Each state currently has the same number of senators despite population differences. This results in smaller states being overrepresented while larger states are underrepresented. Both Tassie and Victoria have 12 senators, yet a Tasmanian senator represents ~34,000 voters, while a Vic senator represents ~380,000, once again making a lightly populated state’s vote ten times more valuable than a heavily populated one.
MisterFrog@aussie.zone 4 days ago
Can agree with you on that point. Seems like a hangover from federation that the smaller states receive more representation.
Doesn’t really make sense in our modern, highly interconnected world to have some states have better representation per capita than others.
I think a unicameral system would not be popular in Australia though, because you’d largely remove local members (unless you switch to something like what NZ has, but with preferential voting for the local candidates). Hence why I advocate for local multi-member electorates in the lower house to improve representation of more parties, and retaining the senate.
Thanks for sharing your thoughts friend!