More worry about preferences

The other day I drew attention to the online discussion I participated in at the Robert Menzies Institute on the future of the two-party-system. One thing that particularly struck me there was the scepticism coming from what was evidently a right-leaning audience about preferential voting, with suggestions that perhaps Australia should switch to first-past-the-post.

I responded by trying to give some of the history of the issue, which we’ve canvassed here in the past. Briefly, preferential voting was a response to the emergence of the Country (now National) Party, allowing the non-Labor parties to contest the same seats without wasting their votes; later they also got a boost from preferences from the DLP. For the same reason, Labor generally supported first-past-the-post and would have liked to get rid of preferences or at least water them down.

In the 1980s, however, the ground started to shift. The DLP had disappeared, preferences from the Democrats and later the Greens were favoring Labor, and the Coalition parties, paranoid about the appearance of disunity, were cutting back on the number of three-cornered-contests. But attitudes often lag behind electoral reality, and Liberal Party members at the time still thought of first-past-the-post voting as a left-wing plot, even though preferences had begun to work against them.

Now, however, the wheel has come full circle, and there’s a serious campaign on the right against preferential voting. It’s fuelled by the result of May’s federal election, where the Liberal Party, with 26.2% of the vote,* won only 18.7% of the seats, while Labor with 34.6% in votes won 62.7% in seats. And the critics observe, correctly, that if the votes had been counted as first-past-the-post then the Coalition would have won (net) an additional 13 seats (12 Liberal and one National): eight at the expense of Labor, three from the Teals and two from independents.

It doesn’t follow, though, that getting rid of preferential voting would actually deliver that sort of bonus to the Coalition. Changing voting systems changes voter behavior, and there is a long history of parties that have fiddled with the system only to have the changes come back and bite them. The risk for the Coalition would be that first-past-the-post voting would force Labor, the Greens and the Teals to co-operate – or that if they didn’t, their voters would make the strategic decisions for them to maximise their yield in seats.

If that happened, the Coalition in turn would be pushed towards co-operation with the parties to its right, particularly One Nation. Not only would that be intrinsically more difficult, since the far right’s voters are a more ornery lot, but it would be electoral poison in middle Australia. Preferential voting helps to moderate polarisation (hence the debate over its introduction in the US), and polarisation at the moment is not the Coalition’s friend.

It’s also important to realise that Labor’s over-representation is not primarily the result of preferences: most of it is simply the advantage that naturally accrues to a party with a big lead in a system of single-member districts. That’s the theme of a post this week by Kevin Bonham, who carefully breaks down the different factors that worked in Labor’s favor (warning – some of it is fairly technical).

Bonham notes that in addition to the over-representation you would generally expect from a major party with that sort of lead, Labor also benefited from the distribution of its vote. It wasted a lot fewer votes in seats where it was uncompetitive, so although its primary vote was only 2.7 points ahead of the Coalition total, the median gap on the primary vote was almost twice as big, 5.2 points.

That’s why, even if preferences hadn’t changed anything, Labor would still have won a big majority: 86 out of 150, as against 40 Liberals, 16 Nationals and eight others. If fairness is your concern, you should stop worrying about preferential voting and push for a move to proportional representation, which would award seats to the parties that directly reflected the numbers that vote for them – rather than supporting, as Bonham puts it, “the pointless abomination that is first past the post.”

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* You won’t find that figure on the AEC’s website; I’ve obtained it by disaggregating the merged votes for the LNP in Queensland and CLP in the Northern Territory. But the disproportion is much the same whichever way you cut it.