She and Girl 2 look unhappy but the boys look happy. Girls 2 and 3 are holding each other, and Girl 2 has her face covered by a pillow. The boys look as if they are enjoying the movie. Narrator: Wait a second! Narrator: Two people will love scary things but the rest of the group might hate it. And do you really want 4 out of 6 people having nightmares?
A wide shot of all the teenagers sitting on the sofa. Above their heads are the DVD covers of their first and second choice of movie. The Henry Porter covers are circled. So 4 out of 6 people are going to be fairly happy. A montage of people voting in federal elections, including a woman being handed her ballot papers.
Narrator: Instead of people just choosing the one candidate they like best, they give each one a number; 1 for their favourite, 2 for their second favourite, 3 for their third and so on. In a lounge room, 6 teenagers 4 girls and 2 boys are sitting on a black corner sofa. Four of the teenagers disappear, leaving 2 girls left on the sofa.
Four teenagers dressed in suit jackets stand behind lecterns. A blank sign hangs in front of each lectern. Narrator: To win your seat, you need half of all the votes plus one. So, if there are say a voters, you need to win.
This is one of the simplest forms of voting as it requires the voter to indicate a vote for only one candidate and the candidate with the greatest number of votes that is, a relative majority is elected. The preferential voting system used is an absolute majority system where for election a candidate must obtain more than 50 per cent of the votes in the count. The first step in obtaining the result of the election is to count the first preferences marked for each candidate.
If a candidate has an absolute majority that is, fifty per cent plus one on the first preferences or at any later stage of the count, that candidate is elected. An even more drastic way of tackling this question would be to amend the Constitution to strip back all Senate power to a position where the upper house had little more than a delaying power, much like the House of Lords since the Parliament Acts of and In Britain this matter is currently being reconsidered by the Royal Commission set up to investigate proposals to alter the place of the House of Lords after the removal of the hereditary peers.
The British have realised that there is a basic dilemma involving the relationship between upper and lower houses in any legislature. If there is too much pruning of upper house power it can leave that body as largely redundant.
This is the old dilemma posed about two hundred years ago by the French politician, the Abbe Sieyes, when he asserted that 'if a second chamber dissents from the first, it is mischievous; if it agrees with it, it is superfluous'. The Senate-perceived problems. It has been argued that the Senate is unrepresentative in at least two ways. The first is part and parcel of the original federal compact, namely the equal number of Senate seats given each original state, described in a recent paper by Liberal Senator Helen Coonan as making 'a nonsense of the notion of one vote, one value '.
It is a measure of the frustration of the major parties that a Liberal Senator should express a view that would once have only been heard from a Labor politician. The other aspect of this matter of Senate representativeness relates to the fact that the balance of power is so often held, and is exploited, by minority party or independent Senators. To win a Senate seat at a half-Senate election, a 'quota' of Coonan has asked whether it is in the best interests of the broader community and good government, if 'for practical purposes effective power [in the Senate] is concentrated in the hands of the few, especially disproportionate to their electoral support'.
What changes might be made? The simple answer is for the major parties to increase their popularity with voters. For both Labor and the Coalition a vote of This is a target that should be well within their capabilities, yet in the most recent Commonwealth election in both sides were well below the 40 per cent mark nationally, and only managed to share the six seats in Victoria.
This latter result has become quite rare, due to the marked decline in major party Senate votes in each decade from the s to the present. There have been some suggestions that the reduction of the size of the Senate to ten Senators per State would, by increasing the size of the quota to An illustration of the effect of increasing a quota can be seen in the reduction in the size of the Tasmanian House of Assembly.
The quota for the five seats was increased from The chances of a prominent minor party, such as the Democrats, winning the final seat in each State would thus still be high.
Coonan's criticism about the equality of Senate numbers for the Original States is unlikely to be supported. There would be little chance of any alteration of such a fundamental part of the Constitution, even were the major parties to support it in the national Parliament. There would be very strong opposition-that would probably be bipartisan-in the smaller States.
In any case, it is likely that many federal Liberals and Nationals would also oppose such a change. Overall, then, there would be sufficient opposition to make the double majority of s.
Another way of changing the Senate would be to revisit the effort to amend the Constitution to alter Parliamentary terms. If all Senate members were elected at the one time as occurs in Western Australian Legislative Council elections, this would increase the chance of one party gaining control of the body after an election.
There would be no Senators who had been elected years before a general election, as is the case now. A restoration of major electoral strength would make this scenario quite possible, particularly if each State had an uneven number of Senators e. Attacking the proportional representation 'problem'.
A key target for critics is the proportional representation PR voting method itself, which is blamed for the continued failure of the major parties to gain control of the upper house.
Replacement by preferential voting? In , press reports stated that Prime Minister Keating was looking into changing Senate voting arrangements so that there would be separate, single-member electorates, with preferential voting the method employed. Robb proposed a system similar to the Victorian Legislative Council arrangements, whereby each State would be divided into six regions, each represented by two Senators, one of whom would retire every three years.
The larger the size of the electorate, the more reliant would party candidates be on their party organisation, a factor that would be of particular benefit to Coalition and Labor Party candidates-New South Wales seats would contain nearly voters, for example, compared with the average of 81 for the State's 50 House of Representatives seats in According to Coonan, the Coalition would have gained a Senate majority of between four and six seats in had this system been in place.
Alteration of electorates? Senator Coonan has suggested another option, namely the establishment of three State electorates, each being represented by four Senators, two of whom would retire every three years. Such a two-seat contest would mirror the arrangements currently in place for the Territory Senate elections. The problem, though, is that if an even number of Senators is to be elected in this way at each election, it is highly unlikely that either major side could secure a Senate majority.
Electoral thresholds? A third method for tackling proportional representation involves the imposition of an electoral threshold, a device commonly used by major parties in other political systems to protect their position from attack from minor parties:.
Most architects of PR want representation to be proportional for serious, pro-regime parties. They want to keep trivial splinter groups and tiny anti-regime parties out of parliament for fear that parliamentary representation might help them destabilise the political system. Typically, the electoral arrangements that include an electoral threshold will specify a minimum percentage of the vote that a party or individual must achieve to be able to participate in the allocation of seats.
Coonan's paper canvasses four threshold levels: five per cent the German figure , 7. Three would have been defeated under a 7. With the remaining dozen seats likely to be pretty evenly shared due to the evenness of party strengths, even the use of the highest threshold on the Coonan list would be quite likely to see the balance of power in the Senate held by minority Senators. The simple answer might be that a higher threshold than Even the ten per cent threshold would have removed the Queensland Nationals from the count in In all cases the preferences of these parties would have flowed on to the Coalition partner, but as Coonan herself notes about thresholds:.
Obviously expert advice would be necessary to conduct a thorough analysis of the impact of a threshold system but conceptually it offers the possibility of a solution to the rule of minorities that has so characterised the Senate in recent years.
House of Representatives-perceived problems. Preferential voting has long seemed a settled part of the Australian electoral system.
Since the election, however, there have been three public criticisms made of this voting method. Only 14 such victories have been achieved in House of Representatives seats since Such a figure does not leave many votes for non-major party candidates.
The major parties' reply to criticism of the height of the hurdle is simply to reply that all candidates have an equal chance to achieve it-the problem, in other words, is not with the voting method but with the minor parties. Despite this, the Australian Democrat leader, Senator Meg Lees has recently criticised this aspect of Australia's electoral system.
According to her it denies representation to one in five voters based on figures , because it effectively 'minimises voters' effective choices to just two similar parties'. This is regardless of whether or not the number of votes for the successful candidate represents a majority of the total amount of votes.
First-past-the-post voting systems are used in many countries including the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada and India. Some preferential voting systems make it compulsory for voters to mark a preference for every single candidate on the ballot paper, some require a certain number of preferences to be indicated and others are optional preferential.
During the counting process, votes are transferred between candidates according to the preferences marked by voters. Information sheet: Preferential voting in the House of Representatives. The preferential voting system used for the Senate provides for multiple counts of ballot papers to occur to determine which candidates have achieved the required quota of formal votes to be elected.
Information sheet: Preferential voting in the Senate. The AEC acknowledges the Traditional Owners of country throughout Australia and recognises their continuing connection to land, waters, culture and community. We pay our respects to Elders past, present and emerging. Search the AEC website Search.
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