Representative Government


Introduction

Political commentators often use two “R” words to describe Australia’s system of government: representative and responsible. In this section, we explore representative government and in the next, we explore responsible government.

The notion of democracy is the starting point for understanding representative government. The word democracy means “government by the people”, from the Greek words demos (people) and kratos (rule). The city-states of ancient Greece decided issues through public meetings in the market place that all citizens could attend. However, in large nations like Australia, such a direct form of democracy is not efficient.

In its place, Australia (like all modern nation-states) has a system of indirect democracy, where the people elect representatives to act on their behalf in governing the nation. In its 1997 Lange decision, the High Court of Australia described representative government as “a system where the people in free elections elect their representatives to the political chamber which occupies the most powerful position in the political system”.

Elections are the central mechanism for delivering representative government. Accurate representation requires these elections to be full (everybody is represented), fair (equal representation for all), free (from intimidation, corruption and artefacts of the electoral system) and regular (in order to respond to changing opinions).

Representative government emerged in Australia in the 1840s. Since then, there has been a series of innovations to make that representation fuller, fairer and freer, and (less consistently) more regular than the United Kingdom, though not as regular as the United States. We begin our study of representative government in Australia by surveying the milestones in Australia’s electoral history. We will also consider models of representation and problems with representation.

Australian electoral milestones

In November 1842, the newly established Sydney City Council held Australia’s first popular election. To be eligible, voters had to be male and occupy property with an annual value of £25 for at least one year. The election for the newly established Melbourne Town Council followed in December 1842.

In the same year, the United Kingdom more than doubled the size of the New South Wales Legislative Council to 36 members, two thirds of whom colonial voters would elect. At that time, New South Wales included the land in what are now Queensland and Victoria. The first election for the partially elected New South Wales Legislative Council occurred in 1843. However, few were eligible to vote as the franchise was limited to men owning freehold property of a value exceeding £200 or leasing property with an annual value exceeding £20. In 1851, this reduced to £100 and £10.

With the advent of responsible government in the Australian colonies in the mid 1850s, Australia was at the forefront of implementing electoral reforms. It was well ahead of the United Kingdom in delivering representative government. In part, this tendency had its roots in working class disappointment with the scope of the British Reform Act of 1832 and the subsequent Chartist movement.

The British Reform Act of 1832 is famous for two reasons. First, its passage followed a bitter struggle between the British Prime Minister and the King. In the process, the principle of Cabinet-solidarity was established and a measure of executive power transferred from the King to the Parliament. Second, the Reform Act became an important step towards a more representative Parliament in Westminster. It extended voting rights down to social ladder to some of the middle class by regularising the eligibility to vote, previously based on complicated system of property, burgage, potwalloper, freeman, and corporation rights. It extended representation in Parliament to new towns like Leeds, Manchester, and Birmingham, which were growing rapidly yet they had no representation. In addition, it removed representation from old decaying villages (the “rotten” boroughs) such as Old Sarum in Wiltshire, which comprised three houses and 12 voters in 1831, and it was still sending two members to Parliament.

However, substantial inequities remained in the British electoral system after 1832. Whereas 35 constituencies had less than 300 electors, Liverpool had a constituency of over 11,000. Property requirements continued to exclude the working class from voting, for example, voting in the boroughs was restricted to men who occupied homes with an annual rental value of £10. The working classes of Britain were disappointed with the limited achievement of the 1832 Reform Act. Westminster enacted the Reform Act in large part because of huge public demonstrations, primarily comprising working class people. Many working class people felt betrayed by the lack of reform and rallied behind a new program of reform called the Peoples’ Charter. Drafted in 1838 by William Lovett, the Charter had six points:

  • manhood suffrage (votes for all men);
  • secret ballot (voting to take place in secret);
  • equal electoral districts (the same number of voters in each electorate);
  • payment of members of parliament (so poor men could be elected);
  • no property qualification for members (anyone to stand for parliament); and
  • annual parliaments (an election every year - elections were every seven years at the time in Great Britain).

While Chartism did not persist as a movement in Britain beyond 1848, some 100 Chartists were transported to Australia for their political activity, mostly following riots in 1839 and 1842. Many more working people who came to Australia in the 1830s, 40s and 50s were supporters of the movement and had been educated in democracy as a result, even though support for democracy and the Chartist’s agenda raised revolutionary fears in Britain and was branded as un-British and disloyal to the mother country in Australia.

In Australia, Chartism informed public debate, especially in Victoria, as the colonies developed their constitutions for and then introduced representative and responsible government. From the beginning, Victoria fully or partially incorporated four of the six Chartist points into its system of government (manhood suffrage, secret ballot, no property qualifications for members and short parliaments). Victoria was the first legislature in the world to introduce the secret ballot in 1856, known internationally as the Australian ballot. The success of the secret ballot in Australia was instrumental to its adoption in Westminster.

Generally, the Australian colonies were well in advance of the United Kingdom in giving effect to innovations in representative government. These included the secret ballot, full adult male suffrage, payment of members of parliament, a prohibition on plural voting (being able to vote where you live and where you own property), and an end to hustings (often boisterous public meetings with open nominations, speeches and straw polls).

Female suffrage

South Australia was one of the first places in the world to give women the vote in 1894. Ironically, one legislator sought to prevent the passage of Bill by adding an amendment that enabled women to become members of parliament as well. While he thought the supporters of women’s suffrage would not come at that, they did, and South Australia was the first place in the world to enable women to enter parliament. However, South Australian’s did not elect women to their parliament until 1959. Victoria, in 1909, was the last state to enfranchise women, and the Victorian Legislative Council was the last to have a women member in 1979.

Following the South Australian precedent and the enfranchisement of women for the Commonwealth Parliament in 1902, a number of Australians were instrumental in campaigning for the enfranchisement of women in the United Kingdom. Just as the Australian colonies were able to convince Westminster of the advantages of the secret ballot, the Australian Parliament passed a number of resolutions in 1909 and 1910 designed to persuade Westminster to extend the vote to British women.

One vote, one value

Equal electoral districts (having the same number of voters in each electorate) provide for voter equality. However, the Australian Constitution explicitly prevents equal electorate districts in the Senate, where each original state elects an equal number of Senators. The Constitutional also militates against voter equality by providing that all original states can elect at least five representatives to the House of Representatives. As a result, in the Australian Parliament, voters in the least populous state (Tasmania) have 16 times the per capita representation as voters in the most populous state (New South Wales).

Nonetheless, the Australian House of Representatives has for some time had a system of roughly similar sized electorates, with some tolerance for variation, originally set at plus or minus 20 per cent, and for the last twenty years set at plus or minus 10 per cent. However, most state parliaments have allowed substantially more variation in their state lower houses. At some time, all states (except Tasmania) have had systems of zoned unequal electoral districts for their lower houses. The most notable example unequal electoral districts is the “Queensland gerrymander”, which existed between 1949 and 1990.

Typically, a gerrymander is the name given to the drawing of (often unusually shaped) electorate boundaries to maximise the electoral outcome for one political party over another. The term dates from 1811 in Massachusetts, USA, when Governor Elbridge Gerry drew a beneficial electoral boundary that apparently looked like a salamander. Although it had the goal of maximising the chances of a particular electoral outcome, the “Queensland gerrymander” was not really a gerrymander but an example of malapportionment. Under a zoning system, some electorates had many more voters than others, resulting in the votes in some electorates being worth much more than votes in others.

Twice, the High Court of Australia has considered whether voter equality is implied right under state and federal constitutions. First in respect of the Commonwealth in the McKinlay (1975) case, and then in respect of Western Australia in the McGinty (1996) case. The High Court found that our constitutional arrangements do not guarantee one vote, one value. Rather they leave the regulation of most electoral matters including apportionment to the Parliament. In 1974, and again in 1988, Australians rejected referendum proposals that would have written a requirement for equal electorates into the text of the Australian Constitution.

Not withstanding the High Court’s decision and the two failed referendums, most Australian parliaments, including the Commonwealth, have now enacted legislation that ensures lower-house electoral districts are as close as practicable to equal in size, allowing for individual variations of plus or minus 10 per cent. While Queensland abandoned its zoning systems for a 10 per cent tolerance system like the Commonwealth, they still allow large sparsely populated electorates to have fewer voters. In 2001, the Western Australian Parliament made similar electoral provisions to that of Queensland; however, the validity of the legislation is being challenged in the courts.

Summary

From Sawer (2001) and Hirst (2002) the following table summarises advances in representative government in Australia compared with the United Kingdom.

  NSW Vic SA Tas Qld WA C’wealth UK
Secret Ballot 1858 1856 1856 1858 1859 1877 1901 1872
Adult malesuffrage for the lower house 1858 1857 1856 1901 1872 1893 1902 1918
No property qualification for members of the lower house 1858 1857 1856 1901 1872 1893 1901 1858
Payment of members 1889 1870 1887 1890 1886 1900 1901 1911
Abolition of plural voting 1893 1899 Never existed 1901 1905 1907 Never existed 1948
Female suffrage 1902 1909 1894 1903 1905 1899 1902 1928
Adult suffrage for upper house 1978 1950 1973 1968 Abolished in 1922 1964 1902 -
Compulsory registration of voters 1921 1923 - 1930 1914 1919 1911 -
First election with compulsory voting 1930 1927 1944 1931 1915 1939 1925 -
Votes for Aborigines Officially Aboriginal people had the same rights as others, but from 1902, because they were denied the right to vote in Commonwealth elections, they were often illegally denied the right to vote in state elections 1965 1962 1962 N/A

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