As happens every three years, the parliament’s Joint Standing Committee on Electoral Matters (JSCEM) is conducting an enquiry into the conduct of Australia’s last federal election. If you’re particularly keen, submissions are currently being accepted, and the first public hearing was held yesterday. You can also check out my thoughts on the previous such enquiry here, and the one before it as well.
This year there’s been quite a bit of interest aroused by the government’s request in the terms of reference that the committee should consider “the number of elected representatives relative to the growth in population and the electorate.” Since the size of parliament hasn’t increased since 1984, it’s thought that this might be the occasion for the government to push for more politicians: never a popular move with the electorate, but one that a government with a big majority might think it’s in a good position for.
Kevin Bonham presents a detailed case for expansion in a recent post, in which he also refutes some foolish claims about the likely political effects of the move, made (from politically opposing sides) by George Brandis and Kos Samaras. Bonham argues, correctly, that a bigger House of Representatives would iron out some of the distortions currently caused by seats having to be allocated in whole numbers to small states, as well as providing for better representation and better constituent services.*
But it’s complicated. It’s fairly easy to see that doubling the average population of an electorate means that voters are going to be less likely to get personalised service from their MP if they have problems. Smaller electorates might also make it easier for them to keep tabs on their MP’s performance – but not necessarily. If voters depend on what they see on the TV news, for example, their MP will be more likely to show up in a parliament that is half the size.
Consider some numbers. In 1903, the first federal election with adult suffrage, there were 1.89 million enrolled voters, who elected 75 MPs: an average of a little over 25,000 per electorate. From that parliament was drawn a cabinet of eight members, which governed (within the framework of the British empire) a continent of approximately 7.7 million square km.
To state the obvious, we cannot now reproduce all of those ratios. As of this year’s election, there were just over 18 million on the rolls; if we wanted the advantages of a small chamber with just 75 members, they would each have to represent about 240,000 voters. Conversely, if we wanted to go back to the member-to-voter ratio of the early days, we would need a House of 717 MPs. And if we wanted to preserve both those proportions, we would need to divide Australia into nine or ten separate polities.
Manifestly we are not going to do any of those things. Instead we compromise and balance them as best we can, within the constraints of legal and practical limitations and of political inertia. The size of the House of Representatives has not increased by a factor of ten, but it has doubled, while the size of cabinet has roughly trebled (now at 23).
Other countries have shown less flexibility. The United States House of Representatives, for example, has been fixed at 435 members since 1912, over which time the population has increased by a factor of around 3.5. Implicitly, there’s a judgement there that the dilution of representation is an acceptable price to avoid having a legislature with some 1,500 members. Perhaps they’re right.
Democracy and constitutional government were born in a world where political units were smaller across the board. Members of the political class mostly all knew one another; citizens could interact directly with their representatives in ways that are now unthinkable. In moving away from that world we have made many gains: the JSCEM enquiry reminds us that we have lost some things as well.
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* Although as he notes, “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.”
The World is Not Enough 
“…If voters depend on what they see on the TV news..” — the writers of “Yes, PM” made that same cynical point decades ago:
https://user.fm/files/v2-2c2647ab526c4f7a6486748bc618d2ce/How%20the%20Media%20and%20Literati%20Class%20Determines%20the%20Politics%20of%20a%20Nation.mp4
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I’m not sure that more parliamentarians would change much for ordinary people. If someone goes to see their local member about an issue, they are more likely to wind up dealing with a staff person in the electorate office, than they are to see their MHR.
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Yes, that’s true; some problems can be alleviated just by adding more staff (or perhaps redirecting the existing ones to constituent services & away from branch-stacking). But increased population must eventually put more pressure on the MPs themselves, even if they don’t deal with very many of them personally.
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Two things. First, the functions of government have expanded massively since 1903, therefore the issues which a government must manage (and for which it must be held accountable) have also expanded. Secondly, the electorate is better educated and less likely to accept the blandishments of the great and good – and even though there was no radio or TV in 1903, people today are less likely to accept the framings and content provision of traditional media.
What it will do is make traditional media analysis of the next election even more inane than it is now. Even the most insidery insider has no idea which way new seat X will go if it is made up from bits of surrounding electorates and no sitting MP is available to yarn about it to journalists, on or off the record. Surely an expanded Senate would have to be elected all at the same time (i.e. a double dissolution), as happened in 1984, rather than a staged expansion over two general elections. The environment legislation could well become a DD trigger.
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