There’s been a lot of discussion in the last few days about the merit of Australia’s electoral system. In response to some conservative attacks on our preferential system, sometimes implicitly or explicitly suggesting a first-past-the-post system would be somehow more legitimate.
In response to that, Kevin Bonham has a good piece in the Guardian dismantling the pro-first-past-the-post arguments. In Crikey, they set up a debate between two pieces, one by William Bowe defending the electoral system, and one from Robert Lechte arguing that the electoral system does in fact “suck”.
While I am very much not a supporter of first-past-the-post. I think there is a danger in defending our system that we ignore the problems. While Lechte did make a case for proportional representation, I disagree with a lot of the arguments, let alone his irrelevant side-swipes on a variety of issues.
So I wanted to make my case here on one specific but very important element of the electoral system: the use of single-member electorates to elect the House of Representatives, as opposed to some system of multi-member electorates using proportional representation.
This is not my only issue with the electoral system, but I should say that generally the way that Australian elections are administered is excellent. The Australian Electoral Commission does an excellent job, is generally well funded and is able to be well trusted and independent. We also make it easy for voters to get to the polls and cast a vote, and our system of redrawing electoral boundaries is generally very good.
Activists have been campaigning for proportional representation in Australia for well over one hundred years, dating back to Catherine Spence who campaigned for “effective voting” in the 1890s, and eventually was Australia’s first woman candidate when she contested South Australia’s election for delegates to the 1897-98 constitutional convention.
A lot of arguments have been regular and constant throughout that century, but I’m not going to spend a lot of time on those.
Yes, a majoritarian electoral system leads to governments winning majorities when they don’t win a majority of the vote, and that is increasingly true now, with the current Labor government polling less than 35% of the primary vote. I think this remains true even when voters have the option of marking a further preference. It is still the case that barely one third of the country most preferred Labor in government. While they won the two-party-preferred vote with at least 54%, all that tells us is that voters preferred Labor to the Coalition (another reason why the pro-FPTP advocates are full of it), not that they preferred a Labor majority government to any other government shape.
And the majoritarian system means that the electoral contest becomes focused on a minority of electorates while most remain safe, thus creating incentives to focus attention on some areas while ignoring others. Even though once-safe seats have now become marginal, on average seats are just as safe as they once were.
The median electorate has a two-candidate-preferred margin of 9% , which is the highest we’ve seen since 2004. There are more seats where a seat is marginal on the three-candidate-preferred margin, but not that many.
But as the primary vote for independents and minor parties has continued to climb, I would argue that a lot of the problems with the majoritarian system have become worse, and things that were once key selling points of the majoritarian system no longer apply.
For a start, disproportionality in parliament is off the charts. The Gallagher least squares index measures the gap between the vote share and the seat share of parties. Michael Gallagher has calculated this statistic from 1946 to 2022. He treats the Coalition parties separately, something I think you could justify until the Liberal National Party merger in 2010 but harder to do now. So I have calculated my own statistic treating the Coalition as one party, back to 1984. The two numbers move closely together, but not identically.
Both statistics reached a record high in 2022, but I estimate the number is much much higher in 2022, reaching a score of 22. In contrast, the 2024 Tasmanian election, conducted using the proportional Hare-Clark system, produced a score of 3.5.
While preferences are a helpful tool in broadening the popular mandate of MPs, the fact remains that the first preference is a clear indicator of who a voter supports. And it is becoming more and more removed from the results. Another way to show this is to measure what proportion of voters gave a first preference to a winning candidate.
This number dropped below 50% for the first time in 1990, but dropped precipitously in 2022, and has dropped slightly further again in 2025. Just 41.3% of voters gave a first preference to the winner.
This is not an argument for first-past-the-post, which would slightly improve this statistic, but instead for using a system where more than one person can be elected, so a number of main voting blocs can have a local representative. Again to contrast with Tasmania, over 60% of voters gave their first preference to an individual candidate who won, and 88% voted for a party that won a seat in their electorate.
The preferential voting system is particularly bad at handling three-cornered contests. Once there is some doubt about who will be in the top two, it creates strategic voting incentives for voters, and creates the potential for non-monotonic outcomes.
In Macnamara in 2022, a voter who voted 1 Liberal but is most concerned about defeating the Greens almost helped the Greens win the seat by pushing Labor below the Liberal. In Fannie Bay in 2024, Labor won the two-party-preferred vote but the Greens lost the two-candidate-preferred vote to the Country Liberal Party. If some Greens voters had switched to Labor, they would have ensured the CLP did not win.
It seems likely that some independent seats in 2025 will be in this category. We won’t get a Liberal vs Independent 2CP count in Grey or Monash, but once we have final 3CP figures we’ll be able to make estimates, and I suspect those independents may have won such a count.
I think we can mostly agree that our electoral system, or something like it, is the best way to elect a single person to parliament. But when you elect a lot of people, the same narrow and arbitrary results in numerous seats can produce disproportional outcomes. Right now Labor is benefiting, but it won’t always be like that. In 2022, we saw two localised results where a minor political forces won multiple seats in the same area with a relatively small share of the vote. The Greens won three seats in inner Brisbane on about a third of the vote, while the teals won three out of four seats on the north shore of Sydney on about a quarter of the vote.
Some people criticised me for describing the result where the Greens won Ryan and lost Griffith precisely because Ryan is a more conservative seat as “perverse”, but I had also suggested the Greens sweep of inner Brisbane in 2022 was strange in a 2023 paper.
This also makes counting and analysing the results more complex, but that’s not really the point here. It certainly makes things more interesting. But it’s not great for the voters, and the ultimate outcome is often quite volatile and arbitrary.
All of this means that the relationship between how people vote and who gets elected has become weaker, and less logical. I don’t think this problem is going to go away, and we should acknowledge it.
My solution? A system of proportional representation, likely with multi-member districts. I would prefer 5-member districts but even three-member districts would significantly improve proportionality and reduce the arbitrary impact of those three-cornered contests.
It is very easy in punditry to be very focused on the race in front of you, on calculating who will win and marvelling about the unsual and interesting calculations needed to know who would win. But I think it’s important to also zoom out and judge our electoral system normatively, not just treat it as a fact that cannot be changed. The way our system is working now is weird, and isn’t producing great outcomes.
Here is every electoral system that I know of ranked worst to best.
Electoral College<FPTP<OPV<Second Round Voting<STV<FPV<Hare-Clark<MMP/PR
Yeah nah, a headline like that ain’t it.
I get the point here. There is an argument to be made about single member electorates. They can create some perverse outcomes, as you say.
That said, PR systems aren’t perfect either. There are tradeoffs to be made with any electoral system. Perhaps those tradeoffs might be worth making. They are certainly worth discussing.
Either way, a headline like this one is unhelpful right now. When the world is full of terrible electoral systems producting equally terrible outcomes, then I think we can’t go far enough in praising our electoral system against the cookers who would try to tear it down.
You said it best yourself. “I think we can mostly agree that our electoral system, or something like it, is the best way to elect a single person to parliament.”
Great article.
I think the most important philosophical point that seems to be missed by people who appose proportional representation is that people who vote 1 for a minor party *aren’t* voting for a majority government for somebody else. It doesn’t matter if all of those minor party voters gave a 2nd preference to a particular major party (giving them a big 2PP win) they still didn’t vote for a majority. How do we know? Well, because they didn’t vote 1 for that major party. I don’t see why the voting system for a so called “house of representatives” should deliver a decisive majority to a party that is plainly not representative of the majority.
Another thing that irks me is the bizarre dynamics of electoral boundaries. If 10% of Australians want thing A and 10% want thing B you’d think they should have roughly the same representation in the House of Representatives, but if one of those cohorts of voters is distributed and the other concentrated in a few hotspots then we already know that the former is going to get less representatives than the latter. Some people seem to be fans of this dynamic, but I just don’t understand it, why does the concentration of a viewpoint mean it deserves representation ahead of other viewpoints that have just as much support?
The elephant in the room is the senate. Is the quasi-proportional outcomes in the senate saving grace for the disproportionate house of representatives? I would argue no, not entirely. The HoR and the executive formed from it dominates the political culture of the country. The tendency is for the party in lower house majority (from a minority of the vote) to brandish amendments or delay from the more proportional senate as illegitimate. The diverse campaigns for the senate also tend to fall by the wayside in election season, with the parties and candidates in with a serious chance in the lower house getting the majority of attention accentuating the “two horse race.”
As the major party vote shrinks the probability of hung parliament increases. But when hung parliaments eventuate in our current system it’s the aforementioned “concentrated viewpoints” who randomly have a huge amount of power. The largest lower house party can no longer rabble rouse against all other voices, because some of them can now vote no confidence in the government.
I think the suggestion of 5-member districts (3-member districts would be a huge improvement, but I have some reasons I think that’s not quite as good) in the lower house would be great.
So is the way we vote the issue or the fact that we have so many people voting (compulsory and uninformed) on a party rather than candidate basis and local interest basis?
We are supposed to vote for people who represent our interests. Some years ago on my local council 4 of the ALP councillors (there were 6 plus a former ALP councillor turned independent) were advisors to State Ministers. As such, there was little discussion or dissent on State Planning Policy and our council was 25% over the nominal urban consolidation targets for a decade!
As for electoral funding and lobbyists we kid ourselves that we actually have any influence over the two flavoured uni-party system.
Relatively speaking, in my opinion our electoral system is one of the best used ones across the world, and in that regard, I’d much agree with Kevin Bonham’s take that we can be proud of it. Yes, quite a bit of it came about because of political self-interest (e.g. 1918 Swan by-election leading to preferential voting being introduced to stop conservative vote splitting), but the end result made the system better, even if currently it favours Labor a lot more than it does the Coalition (excluding three cornered contests). Going even further, I’d say our bicameral parliament and a powerful upper house (also called the Washminster system taking aspects from both the Westminster system and the US systems) has been a boon overall.
In theory I would agree with Ben in favour of multi member electorates in the lower house (as well as expanding parliament – our population has increased a lot since the last expansion) – election results won’t be nearly as lopsided (e.g. 3 members would likely produce 1 ALP, 1 Coalition and then the last member being up for grabs be they a 2nd major, Green, independent). But even if we don’t, I’m pretty okay with it staying as it is, with maybe some minor adjustments (e.g. would Robson rotation work at the federal level to minimise the effect of the donkey vote).
All I know as fact is Labor is lying about the Greens. If not for Greens preferences …
I prefer having a majoritarian system, and ours is the best in the world.
J Knight, the Tasmanian/ACT system of Hare Clark is superior to the single member system for the House of Reps/other State Legislative Assemblies. It is even better compared to the system used for the Senate/State Legislative Councils because you number individual candidates rather than just voting for a party. There have been numerous occasions (almost one every election) where a sitting MP is defeated by another candidate from their own party.
@Chris, that is a ridiculous position to take.
We can’t critique our electoral system because there could be something worse?
Yes I said it was the best way to elect a “single person” to parliament. But we aren’t electing one person, we’re electing a whole bunch of them.
@J Knight, there is no country in the world where representative democracy works without political parties. They aren’t perfect but I don’t think there’s any way around that. And I think Australian voters are pretty well-informed, but there are limits to what is reasonable. And there are particular problems with accountability in local government.
Love to see a discussion on how likely it would be to have a NZ style multi member party system installed in Oz – it seems more democratic than ours?
Agreed about the need for greater proportionality. It’s a shame that Australia has a worse electoral outcome in terms of proportionality than Russia & Singapore!
Hare-Clarke seems like the best way forward for better proportionality. It’s constitutional, and has already been used in Federal elections before (1901; Division of Tasmania elected 5 parliamentarians under Hare-Clarke).
3-member Hare-Clarke electorates would have issues – Tasmania has 5 federal electorates under the constitution being an Original State. But definitely something that could be worked over by the Joint Electoral Committee, not a deal-breaker for reform (like a constitutional change!).
It is a problem that so many voters do not see there 1 translate into an MP. This can be overstated – I vote for my local Socialist in House, for pleasure at seeing a serious 10% vote for a left candidate (without the if and buts about Labor and Green as left) knowing my 2 preference to Labor will be the relevant one. More than happy with majority Labor outcome.
I can see the logic of multi member electorates but it needs some reality check when applied nationally.
Multimember has worked well in ACT and mostly in Tasmania. Both are fairly small geographic places. Since by Constitution Tasmania needs 5 MPs a 5 member electorate would be needed – 30 of them, since number of MPs is limited by Senate (or we increase Senate further). 30 big electorates means 2 in SA, 3 in WA etc. Difference to Senate would be modest for those three. For Victoria 5 member electorates would be similar to but larger than the State’s upper house districts. How much local identity is needed up for debate – but it is a factor.
To be clear, under the Australian constitution you couldn’t have every district elect the same number if you went to multi-member districts, but you could have a target number. So maybe 3 is the ideal but Tasmania could elect 5 in one district. Likewise if the target is 5 seats but a state has 9 you could have a 5-member and a 4-member district. That’s basically how it works in Ireland.
Grey I have seen scrutineering estimates suggesting that Kuss wins the 2CP vs Liberals (which we’ll never see because she didn’t make it), and not that close either, c. 52.5-47.5. I’d argue that the system largely worked in electing the correct representative in 2022 (exempting Macnamara as a special strategic case) but the strategic voting argument did not get going in the same way in 2025 in places where it mattered, in part because the overall result was unexpected and hence it was not clear how vulnerable the Coalition was to indies in scattered seats that didn’t have strong indie runs in 2022.
Is there something to be said about majoritan systems producing moderated and stable governments? Europe (although I’m mainly thinking Germany) seems to be struggling with multi-party government at the moment.
I suppose one could argue that the returned Grand Coalition of Germany is the most centre they can be – but they really struggled with a three party coalition prior to that and AFD is now the biggest opposition party.
There are a couple of problems with this take:
1. While it is appropriate to acknowledge the problems with disproportionality in the house, we also need to acknowledge that our current house has been the present size for 40+ years. Also, the dispropotionality in the house is not just a function of first preference vote, but also in populations per seat between the mainland and Tasmania. For these reasons, the most urgent and realistic reform is to expand parliament. Let’s make our parliament as proportional as we can within its current constitutional limitations and go from there? Ben might make an argument that we could do both at once, which is possible, but attaching the relatively difficult reform of proportionality to the relatively easy reform of expansion would be a massive risk that both of these reforms might fail, since both are controversial. It would be easy for the “no” side to prosecute a stupid argument like “the fewer politicians we have, the better”. The Voice referendum shows that the default option to any change is no change, so that’s why all reformists – including proportionality supporters – could consider it more feasible to expand parliament first.
2. The focus on primary votes dismisses the importance of preferences in choosing MPs. If preferences were included in an assessment of house performance, then in most seats it’s fine, since the preference contest between the top two candidates is fairly clear. Only the minority (but increasing) number of three-way contests are relatively more problematic. However, that tactical problem that we’re seeing may be exacerbated by the electoral instability created by the collapse of the Coalition and the weakness of the Labor vote, and the realignment that is occurring as voters shift their votes and preferences. As this article is completely focused on primary votes, it draws the conclusion that we have a very significant problem. It’s the same when FPTP supporters focus entirely on primary votes as their main contest of who they think should win, as they draw the similar but opposite conclusion that there is a significant propblem. Whereas anyone who accepts that preferences are a relevant and important part of our system won’t be nearly so concerned either way, and will conclude that the problems described in this article are over exaggerated.
3. The argument about safe seats doesn’t acknowledge that there are increasingly fewer safe seats now. More elections are generally becoming more competitive, which is a good thing. Also, changing the House to proportional doesn’t necessarily reduce the number of safe seats, because any seat that will most likely reach a quota for any particular party would be able to be pencilled in for them. This already occurs in the senate. Since we already have problems of laziness in various safe senate seats – and in party backroom factional powerplays in who gets preselected for those safe seats – then making the house proportional would extend this lazy and shady behaviour to house seats too. This would increase the rewards for party loyalty and decrease the the ability for poor performers to be dislodged.
4. Our system was designed with two different houses, and we do need to consider why and how this generally works incredibly well when it comes to forming government and reviewing legislation. How would having two proportional houses work? And what’s the point of the senate any more? Why has no thought been given to how the senate could be improved, such as by making every election a full senate election to increase the magnitude in each state?
5. What are the risks and drawbacks of a proportional house? Does it give One Nation a realistic chance at forming government, like has occurred in New Zealand?
So I think Australia’s electoral system is very good, and we should indeed be very proud of it. The most urgent reform we need is expansion. Reforms for proportionality are best directed to expansion and the senate, within the scope of the constitution and the practical realities of referenda. The house is better kept as a representative chamber.
5 seats is much more representative than 3 in a PR system. 50% gives 2 of 3 in a three seat model but only 3 of 5 or 4 of 7 so more seats becomes more representative. If there was Robson rotation there would not be hacks topping the ticket and every candidate has to fight for a vote. It also allows voters to ideologically identify with party candidates. Lists are probably the worst as they reward for little effort. It irks me in the NZ system that a sitting MP loses their single seat but still goes off to the Beehive as they are on the list. One advantage of the single seat system is that senior MPs can lose – as we have just seen. In any PR or list system that can’t happen.
Ben on the seat numbers, could you use the current system to draw electorates, but just make every electorate elect a higher number? Like if, for the sake of the argument, you were to just pentuple the size of the parliament, could you just make every current seat elect 5? Is the constitutional provision for state entitlements in terms of electorates or members? Not familiar with the technicals of the constitution sorry. Also, the constitution would presumably need to be amended anyway to move to a proportional system, so it could just be changed to be consistent with that if one wanted.
@Clarinet, I don’t think anyone would suggest expanding the parliament by that much. You would need to expand the Senate likewise and even then each state wouldn’t continue to be entitled to a multiple of five seats. I don’t think there’s a way to avoid having a variety of magnitudes, you just want to get it as consistent as possible.
Peter, lots to respond to:
1 – I don’t see what the size of the parliament has to do with disproportionality in the way you describe. It comes up in terms of offsetting the impact of electorates becoming larger but in itself it wouldn’t do much to reduce disproportionality. This issue with disproportionality isn’t caused by Tasmania’s electorates being smaller in size. I’m also an advocate for a bigger parliament but I don’t expect them to be a package deal.
2 – Bear in mind we have a compulsory preferential voting system so every formal vote will ultimately go to a major party on the 2PP, and to one of the top two on the 2CP locally. There is no way to use that preference to reject both options. So it’s a logical impossibility to avoid someone getting a majority!
Indeed in the only OPV jurisdiction, the only elections that produced a majority of the 2PP for a major party was 1988 and 2011, when the Coalition won in big landslides. Otherwise no party ever wins a majority after preferences.
Preferences are an important part of our system but you need to be aware of their informational limitations.
3 – this isn’t true. There aren’t more marginal seats than there used to be. There’s a chart in this post which shows this. I thought we would have more marginal contests but when writing this piece I looked into this question and it’s not true.
It is true that parties would have safe seats under a PR system. Depending on the system they could be safe for a particular MP or just the party. Under Hare-Clark the major parties can be assured of at least one seat, usually two, but the individual MPs are usually only safe if they are very personally popular. I have no issue with this.
But there wouldn’t be districts that are completely safe and thus you wouldn’t have the divide between marginal seats and other seats which get less attention.
4 – If the House isn’t working, I don’t think we should avoid fixing it just because it would be too close to the Senate. Having said that, I think the trick is to have the Senate elected with a greater magnitude so it has a broader range of parties represented. Say M5 in the House and M7-9 in the Senate. Getting rid of the overlapping terms and electing the whole Senate at once would also resolve this, but would require a constitutional amendment.
5 – yes you’d have a broader range of parties taking roles in government. Likely in a junior role, and accountable to the voters if they perform badly. I don’t think you should assume the existing system is a guarantee of the far right being excluded. We only need to look at the UK and US to see how a major party can be taken over by further right forces, or even overtaken. If the major parties lose support to the point where someone else overtakes them, then they can benefit from the massive winners bonuses.
Great discussion, thankyou. I support proportional representation, being someone who has never had my fav candidates win, even in the Senate, but avoiding huge parliament means expanding the size of the electorates.
Already we have trouble with vast electorates. For example, Lingiari in the NT covers all of the NT (except the tiny urban areas of Darwin/ Palmerston) and includes Christmas Island and the Cocos (Keeling) Islands off WA, as well as the half dozen NT islands. It is extremely difficult to reach all these diverse communities to represent them fairly. Perhaps this contributes to the very poor voter turnout.
To expand electorates to say group 3 electorates together with at least 3 MPs could forseeably result in much less representation for remote voters. It might mean that for the first time in my life i get a politician elected that i voted first preference for, but they would be pressured to work extremely hard to represent an absurdly huge electorate and so it would be hard to find good candidates prepared to work that hard.
I have a counterpart graph to Ben’s TCP averages graph, which colours voters by which candidate they preferred. Like Ben’s graph it shows that just under 60% of Australians have voted on a 2CP basis for the winning House candidate over the last two decades.
Or to flip it a different way, a fairly consistent 40% of Australians are “represented” in the House by someone whom they did not vote for.
I’ll echo Ben Messenger’s point re how we privilege geographically concentrated views. The same logic holds not just for parties getting 1/10th of the vote, but all the way down to 1/150th.
For a federal government in the information age, geography is ever-less relevant. Yet it’s still good to ensure everyone has someone reasonably local to them as a point of contact.
STV has a very clear trade off of locality and proportionality – to be more proportional your districts must be bigger. Our House of Representatives is of course just the magnitude-1 case of STV – maximal locality, minimal efforts made towards proportionality.
That’s why I think MMP is best overall (and yes, we can use preferential voting with MMP). For a given number of MPs, under MMP we can have locality as good as magnitude-2 STV and proportionality as good as magnitude-half-the-parliament STV, at the same time.
Regrettably, the “direct election” provision in the Constitution likely prevents this federally. (IMHO it was probably there against indirect elections in which the state parliament “elects” federal parliamentarians, as seen in the US pre 17A and in the Bundesrat today). I guess there’s still hope for Queensland at a state level – we have enough Kiwis living here already who are familiar with the benefits of MMP…
Thanks Alex, that reminds me of another point.
Labor is currently just under 35% of the primary vote, and 55% of the 2CP. That means 20% of the country preferenced someone else #1 and put Labor ahead of the Coalition. I think that’s incredibly different to a situation where most of that 55% is Labor’s primary vote.
Thanks for this Ben, an important discussion to have.
I come from a planning background, so my take on all this is more systems, issues and sociological, rather than mathematical. But hey I am on a psephology web site, so I have to accept this mathematical analysis. But to put in my two cents worth, I would make a few points.
Firstly, I believe that all systems need to undergo regular monitoring and review processes to see if they are still working as intended and are fit for purpose going forward. While I am proud of our voting system, I think there is always room for re-evaluation and improvement. I have noticed a small growth of almost jingoistic talk about the AEC and our voting system creeping into commentary, which can almost unintentionally hamper some clear eye critical analysis of any such system (i.e. if it ain’t broke don’t fix it).
Secondly, while I accept data and analytics are important, I always try to go back to first principles – what are we trying to achieve with this particular “system”; what are the main issues associated with stopping this from working as intended; and what can possibly be done to make this work better. In this case and for me, the critical issue is democracy and how can this be best achieved through political representation and governance. It seems to me that our current system is based on two outdated principles that now are falsehoods, rather than a truisms. How long since we have seen someone in the HoR vote against party lines because the proposal is bad for their electorate? Likewise in the Senate, when was the last time the “State” representatives voted as a block because the proposal was against their State’s interest? It just doesn’t happen often enough to justify the belief that the system is set up to represent these supposed structural foundations. We might as well just drop the pretence and say we now have a system wholly designed for machine party politics.
Which leads me to my big radical reform, that has a snowball in hell’s chance of ever happening. I believe we should do away with the two Federal Government houses and just have one single house based on regions whose representatives are voted in on some form of MMP. Obviously there are a lot of things to work through here in terms of finer details. But years ago I was involved in a regional planning project for SEQ and while it was mainly land use based, it did draw in many different subject fields and levels of political representatives to try and address regional issues from a more holistic perspective. It was for me an exposé about the whole disconnect that occurs when thinking about and addressing issues (i.e. breaking up issues into subject areas and areas of responsibility), which I think was demonstrated quite starkly in the last Federal elections when much of the discussion was on State or even local issues (pedestrian crossings for God sake!). During that time, I always thought that we could get better outcomes if we had some form of regional political and governance representation (if not regional government). The Federal Representatives would sit in the Federal House and also sit on the governing Board of the regional planning and delivery agency. A direct line of responsibility and accountability, as well as a fair measure on how well they are truly “representing” their (regional) electorates for their voting public.
MMP/PR on the NZ model would probably require a constitutional amendment, as s24 requires House seats to be allocated to States in proportion to their populations, with the implication that the votes of the people in a State will determine who is elected; a nationwide top-up list would be inconsistent with that.
I think it’s also worth noting that what may be the “best” electoral system is much influenced by the context of a country. For example, STV/PR would be impracticable in a country with high levels of illiteracy.
The last time a major party took on the PR issue seriously was in about 1980, when Arthur Gietzelt, then ALP spokesman on electoral matters, put out a discussion report proposing it, which attracted a lot of blow back from within the party, especially from Robert Ray. I was critical of Gietzelt’s proposals at the time, not least because in those days, the single-member districts system had the virtue of making it possible for a government to be kicked out by the voters. In a PR system with multiple parties, the numbers in the House may not change so much , and governments are more likely to be cobbled together by parties post-election in a non-transparent way, a bit like ALP ministries.
But things have changed quite a bit since 1980, in ways which have made me a bit more sympathetic to PR. I think the strongest argument is one seldom mentioned: that a PR system is likely to produce less distortion of public policy by governments seeking to buttress their position in marginal seats, or to take marginals from the other side. If you have seven-member districts, the quota will be 12.5%, and a major party will typically be within half a quota, 6.25%, of either losing a seat, or gaining one from the other side. So the incentive for sports rorts will be reduced.
But under that model, there would still be safe seats, unless Robson rotation were used. The Liberals, for example, could expect to win 1 or 2 seats in any seven-member district, which would give them a lot more safe seats than they have now. And safe seats of that type are not necessarily a bad thing: there are arguably benefits in the overall quality of governance if parties can attract and keep good people with the guarantee of a safe seat.
Finally, it’s worth bearing in mind that when you vote, in practice you are simultaneously choosing a local representative, a Parliament, an executive government, and a Prime Minister. The best system for meeting one of these objectives will not necessarily be the best for meeting the others, and advocates for different systems often focus on just one objective, rather than looking at things more holistically. (Robson rotation, for example, is arguably good if your main focus is on the role of the local representative, but it may not be anywhere as good if a party is, for example, trying to increase its number of female representatives by guaranteeing them winnable seats on a party’s slate.)
Thanks for this Ben. Do you have any resources or thoughts about how multi-member electorates would work practically in Australia? Would change the numbers in the House, or would we look to merge say 3 seats, to give us 50 seats and 3 members per seat?
Hey Ben, I realise my comment yesterday was unnecessarily antagonistic. I want to apologise for that. Please allow me to restate my argument a bit more politely.
I do believe the most important point in this discussion is that, as far as single member electoral systems go, Australia’s is significantly better than the rest of the world. We owe that to both the electoral system itself and to the AEC that administers it. In a time when democracy itself is under threat globally, the main message the Australian public need to hear is one of reassurance, not of critique.
That said, there does need to be room for critique. I should have acknowledged that a forum like this one, where those reading this article are likely to be well informed already, is a good place to make such critique. This article does a good job to highlight the rising disproportionality of our current system, and some of the perverse outcomes it creates. But this brings me to my second point, and what I think is the main reason you and I disagree on this issue.
There seems to be an underlying assumption in this article that proportionality should be the overriding goal of an electoral system, and that rising disproportionality is a knockout argument against single member electorates. I agree that proportionality should be one of the primary goals, but I don’t think it should necessarily override other priorities. I think there are several advantages of single member electorates that should at least be acknowledged as part of the discussion.
The most obvious of these is the smaller electorate size. Already it is being discussed that our parliamentarians and their electorate offices are overstretched to represent a population quota of 180,000 people. Putting aside the debate on the size of parliament (which changes the numbers but not the substance of this question), will people be more or less able to get help from their representatives if there are 5 offices sharing an electorate of 900,000 people? What is lost when electors are no longer able to decide their vote based on the character and integrity of two or three people they meet at a candidates forum? These are important considerations in this discussion.
Also, with the rise of independents in our current system, I think it’s worth noting that multi-member electorates would change the landscapes for independents significantly. The quota for election is significantly smaller as a percentage, but larger as an absolute number of voters. No longer does it work to run a hyper local campaign. This is why we rarely see independents elected to the senate, and even then it’s usually in the smaller states. How would PR change the landscape for independents, and would this be a good or a bad thing? These are questions without clear answers.
Personally, I think the most important advantage of our current system is stability and centrism of executive government. On stability, there are numerous examples, particularly in Europe, of governments breaking down because of PR coalitions fracturing. Our current system avoids this, and I’m prepared to cop a bit of disproportionality to keep it that way. On centrism, I think the way our current system concentrates executive power in the two centrist major parties (noting the way that our compulsory voting system usually rewards whichever of these parties is closer to the centre) is a good thing overall. Any change in the system that makes the Greens more able to bargain for ministerial positions is likely to do the same for One Nation. Given the choice of both or neither, I’ll chose neither.
None of these are decisive arguments against change, but all of them are worth considering. Proportionality is desirable, but it is not the only worthy consideration. If it was, we would move toward direct democracy! Once again, sorry for being antagonistic yesterday, I hope this explanation makes my stance clearer. And thanks for your article, I’ve really enjoyed following your website since I found it earlier this year.
The distinction between choosing a parliament and choosing an executive government is a key one.
In the Westminster system the Parliament (well, the House, now) is an electoral college for the Cabinet. This minimises deadlocks between the Parliament and Cabinet, but when the House isn’t dominated by one party it can take a while to establish a coalition government.
The obvious alternative is to separately elect the executive (to use an example close to my heart, the UQ student union does this in combination with a PR Council). Another option discussed on one of Ben’s podcasts was to have a subset of MPs elect the executive (a “confidence committee”).
If we wanted to, we could have rules which keep the Executive responsible to the whole Parliament but without risk of undue delay. This would be to have the new House constructively choose (confirm?) the PM as its second order of business, following the election of Speaker. The election rules would be similar to those for Speaker: any number of candidates can be proposed+seconded, with successive runoffs in the absence of a majority. Votes on record, abstentions allowed. A (successful) motion of no confidence would be immediately followed with a choose-a-PM vote too.
My 2c worth
– 3/5 member electorates would reflect the general primary vote of the electorate better
– 3/5 member electorates would leave party hacks that don’t represent the community in parliament for longer than now
– I like that there is only a half-senate election each lower house election as it leads to a more gradual change i.e. parliament reflects an average of the country’s mood over the past 3 – 6 years so any major change in legislation would need a large number or long time to be passed
What system you prefer, depends on what you want a parliamentary election to achieve.’
The greatest merit of single member electorates is that they maximise the possibility of a particular party obtaining a majority in the House of Representatives. This means that the people have a real opportunity either to re-elect a government (as they have just done), or to toss it out and elect a different one (as they did last time). In most proportional systems, the people don’t really get to do this – governments are formed by horse-trading between parties, after the people have spoken.
The Australia Institute’s own polling from before the election, despite themselves, firmly says Australians don’t want hung parliaments (Greens voters, no doubt imagining a hung parliament with themselves in the balance of power, were the strongest yes vote by far with that self-interest factor involved).
See page 6:
https://australiainstitute.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/Polling-brief-Power-sharing-parliaments.pdf
The declining major party vote over the past decade has largely gone to community independents, not minor parties.
I can’t imagine a worse system for community independents than a system where each seat is sitting say 5 MPs over an area the size of 5 current seats combined. It’s bad enough in the city, even worse in regional areas. Community independents championing local areas would be obliterated.
As for suggesting multimember representation in seats of roughly the current areas, I don’t think Australia is going to look kindly on literally multiplying the total number of MPs in that kind of fashion.
This is a country where people pretty much accept the idea that the winner gets the prize and the team that got 95% of the score of the winner gets to sit on the ground watching the winning team make their speeches and putting hats on kiddies. It has created great stability. You get countries with proportional representation like Belgium where it can take months and months to form government after the election and the winner is still extremely unstable and the result of massive amounts of horse-trading, with no consistent agenda possible. Australia doesn’t want that and shouldn’t want that.
@Alan:
“In most proportional systems, the people don’t really get to do this – governments are formed by horse-trading between parties, after the people have spoken.”
Exactly.
It fails in practice for exactly that reason.
Arky at 1:27 pm
Having governments formed by horse trading after an election isn’t necessarily a bad thing: again, it depends on the context. In a divided society, a system where parties can’t afford to make permanent enemies, because they might need the support of other parties in the future, might well be better than a system which encourages polarisation. Timor-Leste, which had its share of division in 1999 and again in 2006-7, has arguably benefited greatly from having a proportional system. They have closed list PR, which helps to sustain a party structure (in contrast to, say, PNG), and, by making it literally impossible to vote for an individual candidate, largely eliminates vote buying (again, in contrast to PNG). And as the whole country votes as a single electorate, there is no incentive for governments to direct public expenditure away from areas of need into seats which are seen as marginal: a vote for a party has exactly the same value, regardless of where it was cast.
The extent to which government formation under PR is non-transparent can be exaggerated. Yes it is sometimes more complex than one party winning a majority, but it is not like voters have no idea about the preferences or likely partners that various parties have. There are countries (often called two-bloc systems) where most parties are polarised into two clear blocs and it is very clear who will be the PM candidate for most parties. But the relative strength of those parties shapes the policy agenda and personnel of the government. Even when that is not the case, there is enormous variety between countries in terms of how many parties form part of government.
One of the reasons why I advocate for low-magnitude PR is that it keeps the number of parties relatively low and thus the number of parties in government. I suggest people look up “the electoral sweet spot” paper and the podcast I did with one of the authors. They point out that lower magnitude PR usually limits the number of parties in government to ~2 and thus ensures accountability is relatively higher than under a system of very pure PR where you can have big and unwieldy governments with numerous parties.
Steve, check out the post I wrote following the 2022 election simulating the likely results of the 2019 and 2022 elections with M3, M5 or M7 electorates. I probably won’t repeat the exercise this time but it was interesting.
If there is a plebiscite or referendum to move to proportional representation, it will almost certainly fail since there is a strong sense by the Australian electorate to prefer stability and winners take all thus there is a resentment to minority governments.
You just need to look at other jurisdictions where there is even a less fair FPTP, their electoral reforms was voted down like the Canadian provinces of Ontario in 2007 and British Columbia (done three times in 2005,2009 and 2018) to introduce proportional representation or UK in 2011 to introduce a optional preferential voting similar to NSW (aka Alternative Vote). Even is New Zealand in 2011 with a two question referendum , 42% wanted to remove the MMP and within the second question with four choices, a large plurality (nearly half) preferred to change back to FPTP if most had voted to remove in the first question.
And I’d also point out that the alternative, where there are two potential governments with a policy agenda that in theory is locked in before the election and can’t be changed, gives voters a lot less options to influence it than under a PR system. The choice may be clear but a lot of people clearly don’t like that choice.
Ben, agree about low magnitudes maintaining a strong 2 party structure. This is seen for NSW council elections that use PR and magnitude 3 or 4 wards. Most councils with this system form very strong 2 party structures (either traditional Labor-Liberal or one of the majors against a single minor party/independent group, with one or two third-party groups that hold the balance of power).
Ben,
The most obvious first step is increasing the size of Parliament.
There should be somewhere between 270-300 Members of Parliament (Senate & House combined) – up from the current 226.
I wouldn’t be averse to differential Senate delegation sizes per State, but not sure how Constitutional that is.
A potential Senate breakdown could include 4 Senators for ACT & NT, 8 Senators for TAS, 12 Senators for South Australia, 14 Senators for QLD & WA and 16 Senators for NSW & Victoria – a total of 88 Senators – which would be a House of Reps of 176 I believe – a total of 264 in Parliament.
That might be the low end I suppose. If you can’t reduce Tasmania to 8, they can stay at 12 and you have 92 Senators, 184 in the Reps, and a total of 276 in Parliament.
Or thereabouts.
We basically shouldn’t have any electorates with well over 100,000 electors – it’s too many people.
Julian, I am a supporter of expanding the size of Parliament, but I don’t know what that would do to fix any of the issues I have identified in this post.
Just a note on Griffith in 2022. Terri Butler won preselection when Kevin Rudd retired and picked up the seat in the 2014 by-election. She then proceeded to bleed out votes from what was a safe seat (much like Sophie Mirabella did in Indi) until finishing third on primaries in 2022 to hand it over to The Greens Max Chandler-Mather. In 2025 Labor gained votes for the first time in 11 years to take pole position with LNP preferences putting Renee Coffey over The Greens.
What it does show is the virtue of hard work and not taking a seat for granted, particularly when it’s a genuine three-cornered seat. Running around talking up your role as a future minister is not an electoral plus.
We might be electing a “whole bunch” of people to parliament, but we are also electing local members.
The fact that some of them are called on to form a government is more an issue with the Westminster system fusing the executive and legislature.
You can point out that there are flaws with single member electorates, whereby dispersed communities of interest within a larger area are underrepresented, but it works both ways. If we go to massive multi-member electorates, communities within a smaller geographical area might be ill served in choosing a voice to represent them. For instance outer suburban or rural. Or areas within socioeconomically stratified large urban areas.
Indeed, you state that our system ranks highly as a way to vote for single member electorates. What if that is the end we’re actually seeking?
Good job shiftaling, you’ve correctly identified that I am arguing that we should not be electing our parliament one MP per district. It is the single-member system that is bad.
It is not just the Westminster system, many democracies around the world use parliamentary systems where the government is dependent on the legislature for confidence. And many of them do it without severely distorting how votes are cast.
That’s fair, there is a distortion and there does seem something funky that I can’t quite grasp about that last elimination round in a three corner race.
But just going to a form of PR doesn’t address the issue of local representation that the single-member system is clearly intended to meet.
If anything, I wonder whether smaller single member electorates might be better for community representation in parliament. Even with our quite large single-member electorates we elected a number of independents and if the main parties hadn’t had such an unusually uneven 2PP result, there would have been a few Greens this time around as there were last time.
If the Division of Melbourne had been two smaller electorates this time, I’m sure one of them would have returned a Green. I’m sure that smaller electorates with fair support for campaign finance might lead to a larger number of local communities expressing their particular political stripe, but certainly more in keeping with representing their local interests.
Also, second and third preferences are valid votes too.
Anyway I’m no expert – not sold on PR, although I can see there are benefits as you propose.
Shiftaling, even smaller sized districts will still run into the same problem in terms of how preferences flow and the fact that the major parties are still over-represented. The Greens vote was static in Queensland, yet they lost South Brisbane purely because the LNP recommended preferences for Labor instead.
@Julian “I wouldn’t be averse to differential Senate delegation sizes per State, but not sure how Constitutional that is.”
Short answer, it’s not. See this paragraph from section 7 of the constitution titled “The Senate” (emphasis added).
Until the Parliament otherwise provides there shall be six senators for each Original State. The Parliament may make laws increasing or diminishing the number of senators for each State, **but so that equal representation of the several Original States shall be maintained** and that no Original State shall have less than six senators.
I’ve been largely staying out of this but I’ve been rolling it around in my head for a while so I may as well share my opinion.
Once you clear a minimal level of democracy (for what it’s worth, I think this level is somewhere above FPTP and that the status quo in Australia easily clears it), the question ceases to be about what is the singular best electoral system (because there is no such thing, see Arrow, Condorcet, etc.) and becomes about prioritising the different tradeoffs and features available. It’s my view that this priority should be guided by the way voters wish to and expect to interact with the electoral system.
So from here, I agree with the bare title of this article: Westminster’s single-member geographic constituencies do not reflect the way most Australian voters attempt to use their votes. The evidence of this is clear in the way election campaigns are run; the prominence of the Prime Minister and Opposition leader in campaign material and media coverage well outside their respective electorates is clear enough evidence of this. People want to, and do, vote for the party they prefer for the most part over which individual they want to represent them in Canberra. So I’ve argued for a while that it’s bad practice to persist in a system designed at odds with how most people attempt to use it.
But I also don’t think proportional representation is all that much better on this metric, because as Arky noted there’s evidence that voters don’t want hung parliaments. The lived experience of Hare-Clarke in Tasmania reflects this, with a tradition of poll leaders attracting votes at the end of the campaign in the hopes of providing a majority (although, as the current state of the House of Assembly shows, this doesn’t always happen nor does it always prevent hung parliaments). I once read a paper describing a hybrid system where a parliament is elected fully proportionally but that government is determined by a nation-wide preferential vote and confidence secured by a subset of the elected parliament. While I intensely dislike this proposal on a personal basis, it might ultimately be what the national mood wants on balance. A perhaps more typical resolution would be a semi-presidential system where an executive is elected in a single-vacancy election that is separate from Parliament and the government is tied to this executive.
Dryhad, are you suggesting moving to a system similar to that used for local councils in NSW? Under this system, you have a popularly elected Mayor (elected at large using OPV) and then councillors elected either from wards or at large using STV (proportional representation).
This might work but could also be a challenge when the popularly elected leader does not have a parliamentary majority (just like Mayors whose party does not have majority of councillors).
@Yoh An I suppose councils make for a good example that is close to home, yes. You’re absolutely right that a lack of a parliamentary majority would pose difficulties, but at the same time those difficulties would nonetheless exist in any system where the governing party lacks a parliamentary majority. At least a semi-presidential system provides a means for the voters to indicate who they wish to lead the government and secures some degree of force behind this choice – there may nonetheless be a coalition-building process but it would be one lead by the voters’ preferred President which may be some comfort to those concerned that such a process could stray from the voters’ choice.
I would also note that local councils, being imagined by theories of proper governance and by the regulations place upon their conduct to be driven by consensus and conciliation, are themselves also an example of voters using the electoral system in a way not imagined by the framers thereof (in this case, a partisan one).
As Marh said I doubt the system will change anytime soon. I like our current system because it allows different communities to be represented, I feel like proportional voting methods like the D’Hondt method or having PR districts for each state or territory would mean less representation for regional, rural and remote communities.
First past the post, our preferential voting system or should we have some other process? Proportional Representation is possibly a fairer system than we have now. Proportional Representation allocates seats in proportion to the number of votes each party receives. For example, if a party gets 30% of the vote, it gets roughly 30% of the seats. Although I am not a huge fan of the Greens, I do sympathise with them. At the 2025 election, the Greens received more first preference votes than the LNP and The Nationals combined. Translated into seats, the Greens gained only one seat in the parliament whilst the LNP/Nationals registered 25. If they had won the election, the LNP/Nationals would score a mass of ministries and the Deputy Prime Ministership of the country as well. The Greens registered 12% of the vote and would receive 12% of the seats in the parliament if we had Proportional Representation as a system of voting. I don’t think the majors would like that!