Yes Federal Parliament Should Be Expanded And No It Isn't A Partisan Fix

Federal JSCEM season is upon us and who knows I might manage to write a submission soon.  But for now on this site I want to comment on one issue that has been generating a fair amount of commentary, too little of it accurate.  The fact that JSCEM is again inquiring into the size of parliament has resulted in speculation that Labor is pursuing it for partisan benefit; some have even absurdly alleged the potential expansion is a form of gerrymander.  Nonsense from an already unhinged online right that fails to understand what even happened at the election has been fuelled by a Seven interview with pollster and strategist Kos Samaras that claims that because Labor is doing so well in the cities, an expansion will greatly benefit Labor and put the Coalition to the sword for good.

The fact is that while there is an internal harmony advantage for Labor in expanding the parliament now, it is not likely there will be any advantage for Labor proportionally. Indeed, if anything, there are very good reasons to suspect Labor will be getting a slightly lower House of Reps seat share for a given vote share with an expansion than without.  There are many good reasons for expanding the House of Representatives and I strongly support passing legislation to expand the Parliament in this term.  As with Senate reform in 2016 (an excellent and necessary change that Labor to its shame opposed with embarrassingly bad arguments) we again see nonsense arguments being made by the Opposition against something that is actually a good idea.  James McGrath has claimed that an expansion doesn't pass any sort of test let alone the "pub test".  Well it easily passes mine, and I am not known as an easy marker.  

There are not such strong reasons for expanding the Senate, but nor is there anything in particular wrong with doing so (but see below re Territory Senators), and that will come with any substantial increase in the House via the nexus provision, which I don't think is going away anytime soon.  

For the purposes of this article I am assuming the Coalition survives til the next election as a largely intact Opposition and electoral politics in this country carries on as normal.  I cannot at this time be completely sure this will be so. 

Why More Reps Would Be Good

1. Reducing malapportionment

In the 2022 election JSCEM sessions an inquiry into the size of parliament was explicitly framed in terms of "one vote one value".  In general the House of Representatives is very well apportioned on this criteria but we can do better and an expansion would mean that we would do better.

Firstly, Tasmania as a federation State is entitled to a minimum of five Representatives, but on a population basis it doesn't deserve that many. Increasing the size of the House will add seats in the mainland states but not in Tasmania, making Tasmania less proportionally overrepresented.  

The Northern Territory is also malapportioned.  Its population is such that with one seat it would be severely underrepresented, while with two seats it is severely over.  The Parliament changed the formula for the Northern Territory to enable it to retain two seats in a situation where it otherwise would have lost one, but an expansion elsewhere would also reduce the representation gap between the NT electorates and everywhere else.

There is also a minor benefit in expanding the size of the House in terms of redistributions elsewhere, in terms of slightly reducing the impact of rounding.  For instance if South Australia has enough population for about 10 seats, from time to time that might be 9.5 or 10.5 (a rounding error of about 5%).  If following an expansion SA is entitled from time to time to 11 or 12 seats (or with a more ambitious expansion even more), the rounding errors are slightly smaller.  

2. Better electorate services

Electorates with enrolments of on average around 122,000 just aren't the same for representation as they were in 1984 when average enrolment was about 67,000 (not 75,000 as stated by Seven).  There's a noticeable difference between the Tasmanian electorates which now have about the voter base of the typical 1984 seat and many of the mainland state electorates in terms of the degree of community connection to the MP.  With an expansion of the House of Reps, the number of voters per seat would come down and servicing electorates would become a bit easier.  This applies especially to spatially large electorates, but increasing the chance that a given constituent with a problem can be helped by their MP is a good thing everywhere. It's not nearly as big a gain as would occur if politicians actually just fixed more of the obvious problems voters need help with everywhere but it's something.  I also think that having slightly smaller electorates will give more of the electorates a clearly defined character, which makes it easier for major party MPs to represent their distinctive qualities.  

A simple populist response to any proposal for more politicians is that politicians are bad so why would we pay extra for more of them.  But having more will enable those politicians who try to do a good job for their electorates to do it better.  

3. Better representation

Something that was very obvious in the 2025 election (and also in 2022) was that as the major party vote declines, more electorates are struggling to find an MP who is uncomplicatedly the most wanted person for the seat.  More seats are being determined by complex three cornered distributions where a case can be made that at least two candidates were the most preferred candidate by the electorate.  There were three cases in 2025 (Forrest, Grey and Bullwinkel) where it's possible the candidate excluded in third was actually preferred to the top two by most voters in the electorate (ie they were the "Condorcet winner") and there were also cases in the Brisbane seats in 2022 where this was true of the Labor candidate but they were pipped at the 3-candidate stage by the Greens.  New independents were desperately unlucky in many seats where some could have won had the swings between the major parties been either higher or lower.  The Greens' most intense support area in the city of Melbourne ended up split between part of Wills and part of Melbourne (seat) and they won neither.  And so on. 

Beyond the argument about whether the House of Representatives should be more proportional I think there can be wider agreement that the 2025 election was a missed opportunity in terms of turning another record non-major-party vote into an increase in the diversity of voices that have any presence at all in the Reps.  And while expanding the parliament wouldn't get rid of the three-cornered seat contests that are fun for psephologists but testing strategically for some voters (we could even get more of them) I think that making the electorates a little smaller, a little less geographically and demographically diverse could make it easier for the non-major forces to effectively target more seats they can win.  

Who would expansion favour?

There was a particularly silly op ed by George Brandis arguing that expansion would favour Labor in the Reps and the Greens in the Senate.  Fortunately Ben Raue has completely demolished it and saved me from having to do so.  The current six seats per state is actually optimal for the Greens because even off, say, 10% of the vote they have great prospects of winning a sixth of the state Senate seats.  Or at least it would be if they could reliably preselect Senators who didn't defect.  Increasing the number of half-Senate seats per election to seven or eight doesn't assist the Greens at all, except during double dissolutions which are a rare species nowadays.  Proportionally, an expansion reduces their Senate power but gives them better prospects in the Reps.

Samaras' argument as further advanced on Twitter was that the Coalition represents seats that are shrinking as Labor wins growing outer city seats that lag in redistributions.  Therefore, a redistribution of every mainland seat at once favours Labor.  But the problem with this is that NSW, Victoria and WA are not currently lagging in redistributions because they all had forced redistributions in the last cycle, in the case of Victoria and WA as a result of their seat entitlement changing and not because one was due.  This leaves Queensland where most of the over-quota peripheral seats in need of reduction are LNP-held (Longman, Wright, Fisher, Fadden - an exception is Blair) while many of the under-quota inner to middle urban seats are not (eg Ryan, Moreton, Bonner, Rankin).  Partly as a result of Queensland, average enrolment in the mainland state seats nationwide is currently higher (124,699 at end of September) in Coalition-held seats than non-Coalition (122,043).  Even after removing Queensland it is still higher (123,855 to 121,907), as several NSW rural/regional seats, far from being depopulated, are around 5% over quota.  So the idea that redistributing everywhere at once is bad news for the Coalition is just not true at all.  They stand to benefit.  (Note that Queensland will be redistributed this term anyway.)

There is another way in which expansion can help the Coalition.  This is that unless the expansion is a big one, the ACT won't be getting more seats, and Tasmania and the NT won't in any case.  This means the area where expansions can occur is the mainland states where the Coalition currently holds 30.7% of all seats compared to 28.7% overall.  (The Coalition currently holds nothing in the non-expanding states and territories, and only one is even now marginal on a 2PP basis).  

Thirdly, expansion will help the Coalition by creating more vacant seats.   Labor made large seat gains at the 2025 election including winning 13 Coalition-held seats, 10 of which were occupied.  As it stands, Labor will have personal vote advantages in those seats (especially the ones that were occupied) that will make it more difficult to recover those seats with a modest 2PP swing.  It will be easier for the Coalition to pick up newly created notionally Labor seats that don't actually have an occupant.  

This dynamic was visible in the 1984 expansion.  The Coalition won 44.6% of the seats at that expansion (66/148).  Had there been no expansion from the 1983 election, the same 2PP swing would have resulted in them winning only 54/125 seats (43.2%) but because of personal vote effects it could well have been one or two less than that.  The Coalition won eight seats that were notionally Labor, but six of them were unoccupied new seats or vacancies, and one of the others was to the former Chief Minister of the Northern Territory.  The 1984 expansion in fact slightly helped the Coalition in proportional terms, though there was a reason it might not have as a mild form of potential malapportionment that could favour it (protection for rural seats against on average falling below quota) was abolished.  

Given that an expansion is more likely to slightly help the Coalition than Labor, and might also assist non-majors, the question is why would Labor do it?  One answer is that when a government has a large majority, a swing back can cause it to lose many seats.  But if the parliament is expanded, the likelihood is that, as in 1984, losses will be mainly in new or vacant seats and the government will retain more of its sitting MPs.  

Senate expansion and Territory Senators

Expansion of the House of Representatives will trigger an expansion of the Senate per the nexus provision.  In the 1984 expansion this was done by having the next half-Senate election for seven seats per State with the last elected Senator assigned to a short term, so we could in theory see eight-seat half-Senate elections as part of an expansion of the Senate to 14 Senators per state and the Reps to about 174 MPs.  There are other approaches and which solution is best is outside the scope of this article.  I will note that giving Tasmania more Senators is never going to be popular elsewhere and that it is absurd that every State gets the same number irrespective of population, but there's no chance of a referendum to change that ever passing in every affected state as required by the Constitution.  At least an expansion of the Reps reduces the extent to which Tasmania is overrepresented there.  

Expansion of the Reps does not automatically create new Territory Senators, which is a matter for separate legislation.  During the previous Parliament there was support for expanding the ACT and NT to four Senators each (elected all in all out).  I've been cast as opposing this expansion, which I don't mind but which isn't strictly accurate, since what I do oppose is increasing the number of Territory Senators for bad reasons.  One vote one value is a bad reason since the Territories are already overrepresented in the Senate and would become more so.  "But Tasmania has ..." is also a bad reason since Tasmania is already a bad case of malapportionment and one doesn't fix malapportionment by adding more of it.  Good possible reasons include improving the electoral experience of voters in the Territories and increasing the chance that both major parties will at any time have some representation from each Territory in parliament.  (I say "increasing the chance" not "ensuring" because the ACT Liberals' Senate result was so atrocious this year that if the election had been for four Senators not two the Liberals would have only defeated the second Labor candidate for the fourth seat by 1587 votes (0.54%).)

If there is to be a Territory Senate expansion in the form suggested I would like to see it made on the grounds that the Parliament recognises that this increases malapportionment of the Senate and would ideally be avoided, but that it has the benefits noted above in improving the Senate representation and electoral experience of Territory voters, and also providing the Territories with some measure of the overprotection afforded (in my view excessively) to the small states.  The High Court only barely allowed Territory Senators in the first place and I think there should be care that any rationale advanced for having more of them is sound and can't convincingly be challenged as an attempt to stack the Senate to the left's benefit.  (Whether a challenge on such a basis could ever succeed is another question.) JSCEM's handling of the Territory Senators matter in the last term was an unsatisfactory display in which submitters were invited to comment in the specific context of one vote one value then in effect criticised for doing so.  I hope the debate in this cycle will be better.