Presentation given at workshop 2: How the people are left out - the challenge to renew Australian democracy and the Constitution at the Now We The People conference, at the University of Technology, Sydney, 23.8.03


Arthur Chesterfield Evans MLA

Basically I congratulate Now We The People for putting this on. There is no doubt I think that democracy is failing, or control of government is failing. I don't know if it's ever been worse but it's certainly very bad now. When you say it's getting worse you may just mean I'm finding out more about it, so it was better in some day when it was hazy and I didn't know too much and it was OK, and now it's awful because I understand it. So whether it's worse or whether I think it's getting worse I'm not going to try to pretend.

I was very interested in the talks by Rod Donald from New Zealand, because I have very strong ties to New Zealand. My grandfather's a New Zealander, my wife's a New Zealander, I've spent a lot of time in New Zealand. In fact I was involved in New Zealand by travelling around as an activist trying to get the Smoke Free Environment Act up some years ago.

Some of the activists who traveled around with me would get very involved in the campaign for the referendum. They went on from being activists against tobacco to being activists on that, and they were very effective activists too, I must say - they got the Smoke Free Environment Act up and the Referendum Act up. They were real grassroots: travel around the country, talk to a lot of people, have a meeting, and beat the big guys.

I'm very impressed by that and the effect in New Zealand. They have a far more democratic government than we have. I think that it is much better and I think we have to move in that direction.

I think we have a failure of democracy at a world level. In the US as you know they have a pretty flawed system, lots of different electoral systems, none of which are looked at very closely as they now find out how terrific they work. They have that funny States' electoral college system, they have a huge emphasis on money, and as everybody knows, Nixon got in with a minority of the vote. And so did George Bush, who then had the Court, that his party had appointed, appoint him. And you get Bush taking the world into war without even asking anybody, which I think must lead to a fair degree of disillusionment among people who care about democracy.

If that weren't enough, of course Britain has a first past the post voting system which has been pretty awful for a long time, and Blair - again people are pretty grassed off with him in Britain.

In Australia, we have a very bad voting system. I want to talk about why that's no good. But of course, the US and the UK have trashed the UN, which of course is the world's attempt to get democracy. So from unrepresentative governments in both the US and the UK, the people are saying "hey, what's going on? They've been holding inquiries with people like Andrew Wilkie to tell them how they were conned.

Whereas here, I don't think there's that same sort of reaction. People have said that the Australian people are very apathetic. I must admit it's been beaten out of them, because I think Australians have recognised for longer than the US or Britain that their democracy isn't working, and they are sick of it and switching off. And when they then smash Medicare, destroy the welfare system, and wreck the PBS, whatever else they're doing, one thing after another, we are battered, we the activists are battered into submission.

I think because in Australia the elite never established itself. The convict ethos of anyone who's trying to be on top is probably a coward, a bully or no good - that cynicism has been so vindicated so often that we now don't expect John Howard to tell the truth, we don't expect him to consult with Parliament before getting us into a war. We are really quite systemically disillusioned and I think we are less indignant that the British or the Americans about the fact that their government lied to them, because we have lower expectations.

In a sense, that's a very bad sign I think, because it means we are so brassed off that we have so low expectations, that we won't even fight them now, we just say "do what you like." And the average kid says, 'Why don't we have Bill Clinton as our president?' because they don't know who we've got. So we have a fundamental failure of Australian democracy.

Now, being a scientist, as well as having been to New Zealand, I try to put these in quantitative sense. Now we had some electoral legislation in NSW recently which of course favoured the big parties over the small party, and it's reformed the upper house again. And of course the big parties got a greater percentage of the seats in parliament than they got votes. They've always done that, but this time they got more seats, the distortion between the number of votes they got and the number of seats they got was worse than usual. So their reform was favouring the major parties over the minor parties.

Now I wanted to be scientific about this, so I went into the proportional representation society and said is there an index of the difference between the number of votes cast for the parties and the number of seats they got? It seems to me that the first principle of democracy is that the percentage of votes should equal the percentage of seats. And the mechanism of democracy is to get that number right, and the present system is a distortion.

And of course, I did a bit of statistics once, and I'm a doctor by profession, and it seems that there's a thing called the correlation coefficient, which varies from nought to one on how close sets of scores rate are related. Nought means the things have no connection at all with each other, just random numbers. And one is when they are identical, and in between there is a range. And I was not able to get the information from the proportional representation society.

I am trying to find out why there is a difference between the share of votes for a party and its share of seats. When you look at the reasons for the difference, there's a number of reasons. Firstly, the single-member electorates really mean that in order to win a majority of seats, you need a majority of the two-party preferred vote, in the majority of the seats. So technically, if you got 51% in just over 50% of the electorates (which is a quarter of all votes) you can have a majority with only 25% of the vote.

Now, of course, Joh Bjelke-Petersen was famous for having a majority in Queensland at 28%. John Howard and other governments have recently got in with 39%, which gives them a majority of the lower house. Now, I'm in the NSW Upper House, which is generally regarded as a farce, and I could make a very strong case for that, for why it's a farce.

But it's not as big a farce as the Lower House. In the Lower House, John Howard wins 39% of the primary votes, 56% of the seats and wins 100% of the votes in the House. So he's gone from 39% of the primary vote to 100% of the power. Now if that's democracy! And do you think backbenchers have any influence on that at all? Precious little.

So, fundamentally, single member electorates are a huge problem.
Optional voting is a huge problem, we don't have that in Australia yet. Once you've got optional voting - say 50% of the population don't vote as they do in the USA - you've only got to persuade half of the voters to do anything. Then when you segment them, and know which ones are going to vote for what, you end up with all the money going into the handful special interests. You have much more money for each voter conned.

So optional voting is a con, and of course it leaves you with more distortion than ever.

Now, optional preferential is another way, because first past the post voting of course means that the winner takes all far more than in a preferential voting system. At the Federal level, we've got compulsory preferential and compulsory voting, which is very good. At the State level we have optional preferential in the Lower House, and now we've introduced optional preferential in the Upper House, which is why, as I said before, it is delivering more power to Labor than they deserve, and they've got far more seats than the got votes in the Upper House, as well as in the Lower House. And that is why Premier Carr is so arrogant.

So, the Senate we have some sort of proportional representation. The only problem we have is that because Australia is cobbled together between all the little colonies didn't really want to come together. Our Constitution wasn't some great visionary statement, it is full of compromise, and anyone who tells you something different doesn't know much history.

The point is that the Senate is unrepresentative because some States have more Senators per voter than others - in Tasmania you can be a Senator if you get your relatives to vote for you.

What I'm saying is that these are big faults in Australian democracy. And if that wasn't enough, we've got this tradition of lack of control. I mean, basically, if John Howard says we're going to war, we're going to war. Nobody asked Parliament, I don't believe anyone even asked the Liberal Party. Certainly in NSW, if Bob Carr and indeed the minders within the Premier's department say we're going to do this, the Cabinet does this.

The caucus doesn't challenge it because they're all ambitious little vegemites coming along so they won't rock the boat. And then when the caucus says it, then the Labor Party says it, and of course because 43% of the primary votes means 100% of the power in the Lower House, the Lower House says it, takes it up to the Upper House, where again he has many more seats than he deserves for the votes, and he then bullies a handful of people, appealing to the right wing to put more people in jail or something else, to isolate the Democrats and the Greens. And he gets it through.

So effectively he's got control of it all, and far more power than he actually deserves.

And the idea that question time actually puts Ministers on the spot is a fanciful notion. It's mostly a tirade of personal abuse which doesn't take you very far.

Added to that we've got Federal, State and Local, and of course the answer for some people is to say "abolish the states", and I must confess that's (a) Democrat policy, and (b) I think it's correct, but I think that to simply abolish the states without really democratising Australia is a bad mistake. Some of the stupidest legislation we passed - I know it well because I read it clause by clause - comes from a Federal compromise between John Howard and Brian Harradine. And so we have insanity on the internet, crazy things on human cloning, and genetically modified food, which are simply the prejudices of what I regard as a silly religious nut, stuck in the 1950s. When the Federal parliament passes a law, the States tend to follow along, and increasingly we are having template legislation.

In NSW we have 92 people in the Lower House, it is effectively a 92-person rubber stamp, with full staff.

So what we need is a huge reform of government in Australia, the object of which is to inform the people, so they know what they're doing. And that is de rigeur under the open government legislation I have drafted, which is modeled on the New Zealand Official Information Act. That Act says that any information held by the government belongs to the people unless the government applies to the Ombudsman to have it classified for the public good.

This radical legislation came in - and it was going to be the end of the world in 1985 - and it's now been doing quite well. And the same Ombudsman's been in the job, and he assured us that when the legislation started he had in trays full of requests for exemptions and he didn't know what to do. So he just said, "I'll knock it all back and see how I go."

So a couple of appeals ended up in the Supreme Court, which was the appeal mechanism for open government. He won the appeal, and now says he has a few requests which are generally quite reasonable. And now New Zealanders can actually look at government information and seek the truth.

And all the Inquiries I waste my time fighting for in the Upper House - which is mostly about why some real estate fiddle has gone wrong, or some crooked contract that takes months or years to expose - wouldn't be necessary.

But this is the first step.

Then I believe we need to get some sort of proportional representation. There's 50 Lower House seats in the House of Representatives in NSW. My suggestion is to turn those 50 seats into 10 electorates of 5 seats each, and have a Hare-Clarke, so you have 50 people in NSW elected by a proportional system, and you replace the State Parliament with one House of 50.

I would replace the two houses with one proportionate house. I said to the Treasurer, who's a great one for abolishing Upper Houses, "I'll abolish that House if you give me proportional representation in the Lower House." I said I'd vote for the end of my own job, because I'm a doctor, I can make a living mate, I'll scratch by. I'll make less money than I've made before, I'll scratch by. But you give me proportional representation in the Lower House, I'll abolish the NSW Upper House, mate, how about it?
"No way, mate. I want a rubber stamp in the Lower House, and no Upper House." That's what he wants. Let's be real clear about that.

So I said OK, let's combine the two Houses with proportional representation, 50 seats based on NSW, and let's replace our Senators with that 50 people. And let's have those 50 people in the ten electorates, forming a meaningful local government connection from the bottom to the top. Now I don't know much about local government to say how they would connect them up with the Lower House, but I do believe that that would effectively make for smaller regions, there will be less politicians. And I don't think that simply having less politicians will bring about good government and cheap government.

We will save a lot of money if we sack all those politicians, and that's fine, and I think of politicians are wasted. NSW's budget is about $40 billion, and the number of politicians who are or aren't managing it won't make much difference. The question is how accountable and how effective they are. We can't just look at the money that government costs, look at where it works.

So that was my modest suggestion about how to fix NSW and be a model for the rest of the country. So I'd like to set up a group called Reform Australia's Government - or RAG. And basically, there's a lot of opposition to reform, and I think the major parties are the major problem, because they are effectively a monopoly. They're both targeting a very conservative vote, they basically the captives of vested interests.

So they don't want this idea of representative government. So it's what the small groups have to deal with. Now, as has been shown in business, is you want to make a decision you get everyone in a room to thrash the thing out and you try and get a consensus position that encompasses everybody.

In the law and in government, don't just say "we've got 51% of the vote, the rest of you can go to hell, the rest of you can just cop it." And then you bully that 51%. And that, I think, is the problem with our government. So we've got the two parties who want monopolies, and basically they see it as "we control the government, we just have to swap every now and again between ourselves." So I think the two major parties do see themselves as having a monopoly position, and I think that everyone's totally disillusioned with them.

And if one of them implodes as they usually do before the end of their term - as the Keating government did - all the talent leaves. So who is the opposition? In NSW it is the other way around - who is the Opposition state-wise? Nobody. So you vote for the government. There ain't no choice, which really suggest the extraordinary paucity of process that led to this. Who the hell do you vote for? God help me - Bob Carr. It's a worry.

So the major parties are monopolies that don't want any meaningful change in the Australian government system. In terms of national, the small States are a problem, because they're frightened they'll get taken over by big ones, so they're happy to have more seats than they deserve with less votes, and they assume that this gives them a better deal, but I don't think it does, because Senators don't actually act for their States, but are totally bound by their parties. It is largely a myth that people are representing their electorates in Australian politics.

In blue ribbon seats, the opposition doesn't care about getting in, and the government won't give you anything. In marginal seats, the opposition, they're not going to give you anything, you won't be rewarded.

So the only people who actually get anything out of the trough in general in marginal seats are those in government marginal seats, of which there are a handful. So if you've got a system where basically only a handful of funded seats, at random, in a state, that's no sort of democracy.
And in general of course the resources are allocated hopefully in a reasonable government according to the number of people there and their necessities.

So basically the other people who don't want reform are the businesses, who want to deal with one person, and that's the Minister - they make a deal with the Minister, he'll get it through caucus, caucus will get it through the party in power, the party in power will get the Parliament to rubber stamp it. It won't even bother consulting them, thank you very much, and away it all goes.

So the fact that the New Zealanders got this through, I must confess, it's got me gobsmacked. When I think of setting up Reform Australia's Governments, and I think of what a job it is, and I think of what the New Zealanders did, I am gobsmacked at the size of the task. Because the opposition to it is so massive. We're worse off having States, unlike New Zealand, as it's just going to be another level of opposition.

But the greatest journey begins with the smallest step, and we really have to say that Australia's government, folks - this is the biggest issue, because this touches every other issue - it's all about control of the country. And it's about the people not controlling the country, it's about vested interests controlling the country. And it's interesting the story that it's all a bit of a blunder in New Zealand, if it's true, it's highly significant, and I hope we have such blunders here.

But in NSW, of course we have reform of local government, but there have been no criteria for that reform. A whole lot of prejudice against local government has been expressed: they're all hopeless, they're all wasting money, too small, non-viable - all sloganistic. There's been no consultation with the people, and in fact one of the things we got in the Local Government Act, I thought, was that we got a referendum before we got amalgamations. We did actually get that referendum, but the only thing we left out and that's why Fred Nile made the amendment, which means yes, we have a referendum, but the government doesn't have to take any notice of it.

So to my innocent little mind, the government could hold a referendum and ignore the result of it, and in fact with the referendum in Canada Bay, that's exactly what they did. They had referendums in the two councils that were to amalgamate, both referendums knocked it back, and they went ahead with it anyway. And that is the Carr Government's idea.
I'm not particularly pro-Liberal, don't get me wrong, I don't believe in the paradigm that Liberal and Labor are the only two possibilities. I don't have much time for either of them. But we now have a form of local government. They are not trying to make it work, they're not trying to involve the people, they basically want to make it easier for politicians of their particular persuasion. That will help big parties against citizens and little parties.

At one time I tried to put up an amendment, into the Local Government Act - talking about the voting system - in which if someone was a member of a political they had to put that on the ballot paper. The Nationals actually said this was a monstrous infringement of the personal liberties of the candidate. I was howled down by everyone in the Upper House, the whole lot.

So this is the level we're at. We really need a lot of change and I think our objective has to be to get a proportional representation system where the proportion of votes translates into a proportion of seats.

The second thing we need is for more information to be made public so that people can make better decisions. And I think they're the two key reforms that I think Australian democracy needs.

It's a mile from that now, and I really have to get bipartisan people rising up to say "this is what we want, and we aren't going to sit on our hands" and it will be a very big struggle. I have to read that book about how the New Zealanders did it.

It looks like a pretty big challenge to me.


Arthur Chesterfield-Evans is a Democrats Member of the NSW Legislative Assembly

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