That’s right Cronulla, your likely next local member isn’t actually local. But, he promises he will be real soon!
Good luck with that!
Having lived in super safe-seats and marginal seats, I promise it’s far better to live in a seat that flips every election!
I think the whole “local representative” thing is lost on today’s voters, who likely identify more with a particular party than policy and due to a desired Prime Minister (probably from watching too much of US elections). I wouldn’t be surprised if a large proportion of Australian voters don’t know the name of their local member but just the party and that is all they care about.
Personally, I do but that’s probably just because I pay attention to politics.
I think you’re mostly right, although there definitely is some incumbency bias, which shows that at least some voters do vote because they like “their guy”.
However, to the extent that it is true, I don’t blame voters. I blame parties. When your local member is going to vote the party line every single time, it just makes sense to vote for them based not on who they are, but on what their party’s policies are. I think that’s unfortunate, because frankly it does mean you get worse local representation, unless you happen to be locally represented by an independent or maybe a minor party. In a non-proportional system like our House of Representatives, I think it’s actually really important, for it to function as intended, for party discipline to be quite weak.
Or you can do away with the local representatives, use proportional representation, and then people are well-represented not via their local region, but via a better fit politically-speaking. Or both (MMP!). But the way we do it right now is entirely encouraging people to ignore who their local MP is, and just look at the letters next to their name. It’s kinda the worst of both worlds.
I’ve been pondering the idea of proportional representation, I think it would mean more representation of parties like the Greens due to how they certainly reach a lot of people, however, are unable to claim many victories because of the sparsity of their supporters. Most of the people in my region are idiots unfortunately who fail to critically analyse the bias of their news sources and believe whatever shit they read on Facebook or see on TikTok.
The regional representation may have made more sense before the internet and fast transport exposed people to more ideas leading to greater diversity of opinion. Electorate boundaries are completely arbitrary and in some cases drawing them around different areas would probably lead to different election results
Yeah 100%. With 150 seats in Parliament, at the 2022 election the Greens should have gotten 18 or 19 seats*. Instead they got 4. And that was a lucky upswing for them, a 4x increase in seats on the back of a mere 1.9% swing in votes.
Of course, the flip side is that One Nation should have gotten 7 or 8 and United Australia should have gotten 6 or 7†
It’s why I kinda don’t love getting into the specifics of parties. Yes, a proportional system would help out my preferred party, but I believe people should support it regardless of that, just because it provides better democracy. It’s a better representation of what the people actually wanted. Even if what they wanted is harmful, as I believe it is in Germany when they vote for AfD, in NZ for NZ First, and One Nation here—or as their voters undoubtedly would think of the Greens.
One handy feature of these systems is that you tend to get coalitions rather than majority governments. And as Australia saw in 2010–2013, this is actually really good for delivering high-quality legislation. Governments are forced to compromise and communicate and work with each other, rather than being extremely polarised and highly oppositional, as our current Parliament tends to be.
You can even keep the local representation, if you want it! MMP is a fantastic proportional system where roughly half the seats in Parliament are local seats, and half are used to top up Parliament so that the overall result is proportional.
* assuming no change in vote preferences from first preference lower house votes
† unless there were a 5% minimum threshold, which some countries use. Both parties got 4.x% of the vote.