WA Liberals Threaten To Bring Back Malapportionment

I'm aiming to have a federal polling roundup out tomorrow or so to deal with that Resolve 55-45, that YouGov MRP and other recent stories, but firstly I should comment about and condemn a disappointing development in the WA election campaign.  

Yesterday the WA Liberal leader Libby Mettam promised that the party would seek to reintroduce WA's regional Legislative Council system if elected.  This system was severely malapportioned, was an affront to one-vote one-value, and was an affront to democracy itself and to almost every Western Australian voter.  It has been the work of decades to evict the last cases of stone age malapportionment from the Australian state houses.  Any party that wants to go back there in 2025 is not merely unfit for Government.  It is also unfit for Opposition ... which suits the Liberals quite well at the moment, since they're not one.

WA has had a series of malapportioned Legislative Council systems where, in the supposed name of rural representation, rural areas were overweighted such that votes in them carried a few to several times the weight of those cast in Perth.  This was the case in the system of half-in half-out single-seat elections between 1965 and 1986, again for the first regional multi-seat system (1987-2005, 4x5+2x7 member seats) and somehow even worse in the second (2008-2021, 6x6 member seats).   

The effect of rural malapportionment in the Council through the multi-seat era has been to skew it in favour of the conservatives.  As an average of the nine elections held under such systems, Labor has won 41.1% of the vote and 41.4% of the seats.  The combined Liberal and National parties (sometimes running entirely independently, sometimes as joint tickets) have won 39.8% of the vote but 46.8% of the seats.  One expects that in a system with six members per electorate the major parties will each be over-represented by a few percent.  Instead, one side has been over-represented by 7%, the other barely at all.

The effect of the malapportionment is most clear when the National Party runs alone.  It has on average won 9.9% of the seats off 4.2% of the vote.   In the 6x6 system this has risen to 11.8% of the seats off 4.4% of the vote.   In all cases but one it has won at least three seats (and sometimes as many as five) though its vote was always less than two quotas worth if WA had a single statewide electorate.  In cases (eg South-West 2021) the other outrage that was Group Ticket Voting (now scrapped) played a role in these undeserved outcomes, but on the whole the cause was the pro-rural malapportionment.  (I should note that it is far from only the conservatives who have been to blame for the conservative skew.  Even the WA Greens helped make the system worse at one point.)

It is one thing to say rural areas should have their own upper house regions to ensure that there is some rural representation in an upper chamber.  That is debatable enough given that the evidence from NSW shows that rural areas are in fact over-represented in the statewide-elected upper house there, at the expense of the outer suburbs and the coastal regions. Furthermore Ben Raue has shown that it looks like regional candidates will do just fine in this year's WA ballot.

But it is quite another to say that ensuring rural areas have their own representatives justifies rorting the electoral system so that some voters are more equal than others.  This is simply repulsive behaviour from the WA Liberals.  If they do not immediately announce that any solution will respect one vote one value, no WA voter whatever their normal politics should vote for or preference the Liberals.  Unless they respect one vote, one value they deserve to lose more heavily than 2021 in the hope that the vacant space will be filled by some new conservative force that knows what democracy is and cares about it.

The language used by Mettam in defending the proposal was also dreadful:

"We believe under the new boundaries these regions have been disenfranchised by the Cook Labor government and the Liberal Party will restore regional representation."

To disenfranchise someone is to remove their right to vote.  The reforms passed in the current term did not disenfranchise anyone.  Voters in the regions have the same say as everybody else.  The reforms in fact ended a situation in which the majority of Western Australians had their votes undervalued by the system.  Abuse of the term "disenfranchise" is sadly common in such debates (also seen in, for instance, federal Labor's 2016 oppposition to necessary Senate reform.)

"Twenty per cent of the State’s population have lost representation because of Labor’s grab for power."

This is garbage.  The regions still have plenty of representation in the Assembly (in fact, there is malapportionment in their favour there too!) The major purpose of single-seat lower house electorates is to have areas represented by their local members. It may be nice to replicate that upstairs but it's not even remotely necessary.  But to imply that regional voters are now not represented in the upper house is nonsense - they are represented by having a vote in a statewide electorate just like everybody else.  If enough of the rural voters want to be represented by a specific party, there are enough such voters to ensure that party will win seats.  If they choose to vote for non-rurally-specific parties even if that doesn't guarantee there will be rurally-based MLCs, why should the system insist on making them vote local, even to the extent of skewing the value of votes to do so?  

Moreover, what Labor have grabbed for here isn't power, it is fairness.  If WA Labor were as bereft for concern about democracy as their opponents here, they could have easily used their majority in both houses to ram through a system that would be skewed in their own favour.  But they didn't; they set out to design an upper house system that was purely based on one vote one value, and have done so. They have been very principled about it, even avoiding a 4x9 regional system that I and others proposed because they wanted to have a system that flowed as simply as possibly from the core principle they offered.  It's a refreshing contrast to the Victorian Labor party, which continues to drag its heels on getting rid of Group Ticket Voting.  

"We will fix that and not add to the country-city divide at a time when regional Western Australia needs support,"

Er, you are proposing to bring back a country-city divide in which country voters not only have their own regions but have more power per vote than city voters at exactly the time when such divides have just been rightly removed.  

But isn't this just like the Senate?

A common evasion used by defenders of rural malapportionment in state houses is to talk about the Senate.  The Senate is severely malapportioned because each founding State gets the same number of Senators irrespective of population, resulting in Tasmanian voters getting twelve times the bang for buck that NSW voters get.  

I'm at no risk at all of inconsistency on this front, because I oppose Senate malapportionment too and have frequently called for it to end, or failing that I'd like to see the bigger states given some kind of upweighting to take some of the edge off the problem.  But firstly, it's not happening, since all the affected States would have to approve a dilution of their voting power by referendum, which they're obviously not going to do.  Secondly and more importantly, the different States tend to vote pretty similarly at elections, and so the malapportionment in the Senate has relatively little actual effect on how representative it is or isn't (and it's actually more representative than the Reps, even now).  In contrast, a system that upweights specifically rural areas, which tend to be conservative, has a severe distorting effect.  Thirdly, Senate malapportionment was a price of Federation that Federation wouldn't have happened without; there is no such historic basis for malapportionment in rural state houses.  

In any case, even if the malapportionment in the Senate and in the WA Legislative Council had the same skewing effect, it would still be the case that malapportionment is bad.  The fact that we can't get rid of it out of the Senate is no reason to bring it back anywhere else.