The Australian election and Alternative Vote

Liberal Democrat Voice:

Fans of the alternative vote system would do well to look at the result of the Australian election. Australia and Fiji are the only two countries in the world to use AV. The two main parties got about 80% of the vote. A record* 2 million+ people voted for minor parties, that’s around 17% – a 50% increase of the number of people not voting for the big two.

And the result? Well the two main parties got 145 seats and the minor parties 5.

Now at this point defenders of AV will be saying “yes we know AV isn’t that good (ie it is utterly appalling) but straightforward First Past The Post would have been even worse”. Well it is possible that AV helped the Greens win a seat in Melbourne, but that is debatable. The Greens were only 2320 votes behind Labour at the first preference stage, and then won because of transfers from the 15,000+ Nat/Lib voters voting tactically. Well never know for sure but it is likely that in a FPTP election enough voters would have voted tactically to ensure the Greens won anyway (it would only have taken less than one Nat voter in seven to do this). Even under the very strict interpretation that AV did help the Greens here, according to this analysis this is highly unusual.

Indeed AV would have produced exactly the same election last time. And the time before that. And the time before that. And the time before that. Indeed in the last 26 elections in Australia, going right back to 1948, the AV system has only given minor parties 4 more seats than straightforward FPTP would have – or one extra MP every 15 years.

You could make the argument that minor parties could have done better under FPTP. Seats like Batman, Sydney, Grayndler and Denison were in 2007 for the Australian Green Party about where Brighton Pavillion was for the UK Green party in 2005. Yet the Aussie Greens didn’t make a breakthrough in any of these seats – because whilst in Brighton Pavilion Caroline Lucas needed 29% of the vote in her seat to win (and got 31%) in Australia the Greens in these seats needed 50% of the vote in their seats to win.

This is why AV is so unfair on minor parties. Straightforward First Past the Post is unfair because it requires a minor party to win 30% in a certain area before it can have any seats at all. AV is unfair because it applies the same test but with a threshold of 50% – yes it introduces preferential voting, but at what cost?

The Australian Green Party is by some distance the third largest party in Australia with 11.4% of the national vote. Yet they only have 1 seat in Parliament, the same result as the UK Greens – Britain’s 7th largest party – have achieved on 1% of the national vote. This is the reality for third parties and other minor parties under AV.

The First Past the Post system in both its preferential or its non preferential form is deeply iniquitous. We are only going to have proper democracy when if minor parties get 20% of the votes they get 20% of the seats.

* in 1998 a slightly higher proportion – 20% of people also voted for minor parties, but a larger population and higher turnout means this was a record in terms of the sheer number of voters. In 1998 those 20% of votes resulted in …. 0 seats.