Australia needs electoral reform

The Australian.com:

The Greens secured more than 11 per cent of the popular vote, but won only one seat in the lower house out of 150.

Could it be time for Australia to introduce proportional representation?

The direct effect of PR would be to lead to parliamentary outcomes that more closely reflected the popular vote.

But it would also transform our political landscape.

To begin with, it would eliminate the focus on marginal seats. That focus is a perennial of Australian politics, but has become more pronounced as manipulating elections has evolved from an art to a science.

It is a focus that is as distorting as it is corrupting.

In particular, it leads major parties to emphasise visible give-aways to voters in the seats most likely to swing. Inevitably, these give-aways cannot be programs that would be implemented in any event. Rather, what makes them give-aways is precisely that they would otherwise never have been chosen, and hence the greater the extent to which they deviate from sensible policy settings, the better.

Little wonder that the areas chosen for initial implementation of the national broadband network were all marginal seats.

Moreover, because these benefits need to be highly targeted, they invariably involve spending increases rather than tax cuts, which cannot be laser-beamed to particular electorates. And all too often, those spending increases involve building infrastructure in areas where costs are high and benefits low, as that is the form of spending that is most visible and localised.

The overall result is that we build infrastructure where it is not needed and not where it is needed; we invest too little in maintaining what infrastructure we have, as filling potholes and repairing bridges is less politically salient than ribbon-cutting; and we skew the focus of political competition away from needed tax reform to spending initiatives that make the nation worse off.

Clearly, introducing PR into the lower house would not completely remove these distortions. After all, if the propensity of voters to swing differs geographically, then even under PR, campaign promises will be targeted to the areas where voting patterns are most volatile. Moreover, the nature of the Senate, with its over-weighting of the less populous states, ensures that geographical income redistribution will always be an important element in Australian politics.

But PR would make it more costly for parties if they ignored voters in their heartland areas, as a vote lost in those areas would make a difference.

This would force some, however limited, rebalancing from a politics of targeted promises to an emphasis on policies of more general importance. PR could, in other words, help shift the pendulum from pork-barrelling to competition between political programs, just as the introduction of mass suffrage in the 19th century transformed electoral politics from an exclusive focus on vote-buying and patronage towards provision of public goods.

But it is not only the quality of political competition that would be affected. Rather, PR could also change voter behaviour.

For example, as anyone who has spoken to a Greens voter knows, most have no idea what the Greens' economic policies are. Nor do they need to, for at least as regards the lower house, where policies are made, their vote is essentially a feel-good gesture.

It is consequently unsurprising that one finds affluent, well-educated voters supporting a party whose program involves raising marginal tax rates, withdrawing from trade agreements and increasing tariffs.

If voting for the Greens had greater consequences in terms of shaping policies, their program would be likely to receive much closer scrutiny. A cautious optimist might expect this to lead the Greens to adopt more sensible policies.

None of this, however, is to minimise the difficulties PR would involve.

It would, to begin with, create substantial challenges for the major parties and perhaps especially for Labor.

Although Tasmania and the ACT point somewhat in the other direction, the experience in continental Europe is that in electoral systems with PR, the rise of the Greens has placed the social democratic parties on a path to seemingly inexorable decline, with an ageing support base, deep internal divisions and a political positioning that swings haplessly between the moderate and extreme Left.

In turn, the decline in the social democrats has induced the conservative parties to move closer to the centre and allowed them to consolidate their power base. With Labor no longer benefiting from Green preferences, the same could happen here, especially in the larger states.

Additionally, PR does reshape the political fabric towards a more consensual model, which can create veto points to policy change. Policy stability is not necessarily a bad thing, and there is a large scholarly literature that concludes that economic performance is at least no worse in countries with PR than in those with voting systems based on variants of first past the post.

That said, PR can degenerate into collusion between political actors and policy immobility. Moreover, if the thresholds for representation are set low, the resulting fragmentation increases the costs of reaching political bargains that reflect broad, community, interests.

Politics then degenerates into an unstable form of horse-trading in which benefits are shifted to insiders while costs are transferred on to those outside the (transient) governing coalition.

Last but not least, no country that has gone from first past the post to PR has ever made the trip back, with everything pointing to substantial lock-in effects. PR creates interests that, once mobilised, are not readily suppressed. As a result, this is not a change that should be made lightly.

Historically, however, Australia has been a laboratory for experiments in the design of electoral systems.

Moreover, our systems have evolved as circumstances have changed, with the single transferable vote being introduced to accommodate the emergence of the Country Party. And our willingness to experiment with electoral systems may be one reason international surveys find Australians have a relatively high degree of satisfaction with how our democracy works.

With the major parties looking to negotiate with the Greens and independents, a proposal to a comprehensive, public, review of electoral reform might well be a carrot worth dangling.