The Western Australian government has introduced a "One Vote, One Value" system of voting for the Legislative Council, the state's Upper House. No electoral system is perfect, whether it is First Past the Post, Preferential Voting or Proportional Voting. These different systems all have positive and negative aspects. What is certainly true, however, is that governments, of every political persuasion, favour the electoral system that provides them with the most chance of gaining and retaining political power.
That was the exact reason why then Australian Prime Minister, Billy Hughes, and the leader of the newly formed Country Party, Earl Paige, introduced preferential voting in 1920. It meant Hughes' conservative United Australia Party and Paige's conservative Country Party, could both safely run candidates in elections against Labor, without splitting the conservative vote.
If one conservative candidate did not win, then the preferential system of voting allocated the losing conservative candidate's votes to the other conservative candidate, effectively giving some conservative voters two votes.
Proponents of Preferential Voting argue that this is a more democratic system than the "First Past the Post" voting system because it ensures that the winning candidate always has more than 50% of the popular vote...even if a lot of those votes are recycled votes that were first cast for a defeated candidate.
For instance, an election could result in votes being allocated as follows: Labor 45%, United Australia 35% and Country Party 20%. Labor would win the First Past the Post contest, but with less than 50% of the vote. However, in the Preferential system, most of the Country Party's 25% would be recycled to the United Australia candidate, giving him or her eventual victory, with 55% of the total vote. (with 36% of those votes counted twice)
What preferential voting definitely did do was favour the two Australian conservative parties. So much so, that, under various names, these parties have operated in coalition for most of the last 100 years, most recently as the Liberal and National Parties
Today, though, some conservative politicians are not quite so happy about preferential voting. It enables Greens voters to allocate their preference votes to Labor, if the Green candidate loses...as most of them usually do.
Premier McGowan's proposed system gives every Western Australian voter an equal vote in electing members to the Legislative Council. This is an objective Labor has actively promoted for over a century. It is similar to the whole of state voting systems that already operate to elect members of the upper Houses of New South Wales and South Australia. Of course, Queensland dispensed with its Upper House altogether in 1922.
Some of McGowan's critics claim his One Vote, One Value system will favour the city, where most of the voters live. However, there is no doubt that senior parliamentarians, elected under this system, will be given Ministerial responsiblity for various regions of WA. It will be in their interests to promote and protect regional interests. If they do not, voters will vote accordingly in future elections.
To compare McGowan's "One Vote, One Value system' with the proportional voting Australian system used to elect politicians to the Senate, where each state is given the same number of senators regardless of population, is like comparing Granny Smith apples with cow pats.
Based on population, NSW would be entitled to many more senators than WA or Tasmania. If that was the constitutional model put forward before the referendum on Federation, it is certain that all the colonies with smaller populations than NSW and Victoria, would have voted strongly against the formation of the Commonwealth of Australia.
Under the Constitution, each colony/state is regarded as an equal member of the new Commonwealth, which means each colony/state is entitled to equal representation in the Senate, which was originally named the States' House. Sadly, it did not turn out that way. On many occasions we have seen senators vote as their parties dictate, against their own states' interests. That is the nature of party politics.
Members of non Labor parties are now arguing strongly against Mr McGowan's "One Vote One Value" system. We may be sure that this is because they do not think the new voting system will be as politically advantageous to them as the regionally weighted previous system was.
That too, is the nature of party politics. It has been ever thus.
