Mark, would your opinion change if QLD had an upper house?

Throwing the baby out with the bathwater would be ditching STV to move to PR.

Election thresholds are often implemented with the intention of bringing stability to the political system. However, they can sometimes seriously affect the relation between the percentage of the popular vote and seat distribution. A striking example is Turkey. The 10% threshold in Turkey was established mainly to prevent multi-party coalitions and put a stop to the endless fragmentation of political parties seen in ’60s and ’70s. However, coalitions ruled between 1991 and 2002, mainstream parties continued to be fragmented and as a serious side effect, the 2002 elections caused 45% of votes (cast for below-threshold parties) to be unrepresented in the parliament.[1]. Similar case happened at Russian parliamentary elections in 1995, with 5% threshold excluding parties with more than 45% of votes (in 1998, Russian Constitutional Court found the threshold legal, taking into account limits in its use[2]).

Setting a threshold as low as .74 would have the lowest threshold on the planet, by a factor of at least 2. I’m not quite obsessed enough to run the mathematics, but but I suspect a threshold that low would result in serious disproportion as you dispersed too much of the vote across a wide range of parties. Of course you could cure that by allowing votes to be transferred, but then you’d be moving from MPP to STV so your argument would collapse. You’d also need both overhang seats to counterbalance the overrepresentation of small parties, and then balance seats to counter the overrepresentation of large parties that receive overhang seats

I’m not joking, Germany has both overhang and balance seats, both of which expand the parliament beyond its ‘official’ size. MMP sounds great, but as soon as you start analysing it falls apart. In any case what’s so great about a system that empowers parties at the expense of voters.

You’d be hard-pushed to find anyone in NSW that was eager to adopt MMP so that Iemma’s ability to control his MPs was expanded. Adopting MMP is not throwing out the baby with the bath-water, it’s drowning the baby first.

As for where to set the threshold? The threshold should be the point at which a party can gain one seat if the entirety of the count was used to allocate the extra seats.

Say in Queensland we allocate 45 seats to restore proportionality to the results of the 89 seats we currently have. That puts the theoretical threshold at 0.74%, something of which most parties are capable. If 0.74% of the state votes for a party, they can qualify for 0.74% of the seats. Any party with less and 0.74% of the statewide vote can pretty much said to have a lack of support. Parties who win seats but don’t gain the 0.74% threshold (such as One Nation) are still entitled to hold their seats, obviously.

This evidence-based threshold is far superior to the 2% or 5% which is common elsewhere. A party’s success in any PR system should only be limited by the number of seats on offer not by arbitrarily drawing a line at a number.

In an STV election every vote at least gets counted. MMP thresholds vary widely and there’s no obvious formula for setting it. I wonder how high JWH’s intellectual successor would choose to set the threshold? 5%? 6%? 10%? Bear in mind we’re not talking here about the total percentage of votes that get thrown away. Set it at 5% and put a couple of parties just under that threshold and you’ve disfranchised almost 10% of the electorate.

MMP typically relies on a close list, and even where the list is theoretically open, it is remarkably rare for the for a candidate to be defeated, or even moved down the list, by by personal votes. It’s really hard to understand why a country sued to STVPR would suddenly adopt MMP.

AMS with the Single Transferable Vote means people can vote for who they want to represent them without having to choose a Prime Minister/Premier in the same decision. When there’s a large number of extra seats up for grabs, minor parties will flourish. A reasonable threshold (say, 2-5%) should be enough to see a number of minor parties get a candidate up when, if those voters lived in the same seat, they would get one elected under single member electorates.

There is a balance between list and electorate seats to be achieved; major parties may just throw their powerbrokers on to the list to ensure their election without having to campaign heavily in an electorate. Of course, this isn’t entirely a bad thing because it avoids having “parachute” candidates installed against the local branch’s wishes.

It’s a tricky business to get any PR system up and running for a lower house but it’s inherently much fairer than the de facto First Past the Post that we’ve got here in Quinceland.

But speaking of reform of govt processes, can we have a thread to discuss the things that Sen Faulkner is ramming through at present in the area of political donations, electoral rolls, govt. advertising, etc.?

He’s effectively rolling back Howard’s worst excesses in this area – which will hopefully provide the kind of extra checks and strengths that Andrew Bartlett discussed above.

3 or 4 year terms – I can go with either – but it’s only one part of the jigsaw.

I always liked Bracks, but the greatest thing he did was reforming the upper house and introducing fixed (four year) terms.

On the derail re public transport – I’m reluctantly voting Greens until they fix the system. Lots of other people think this way, and the ALP tracking polls will have to pick that up, I hope and expect some big wads of cash to be found sometime in a year or two. Unfortunately PPPs aren’t resonating in the public yet so that will be the financing method.

Being Queensland, we should aim to have something slightly strange about our fixed terms. 3.5 years between elections? 1000 days?

Of course, if a government is found to be acting illegally it’s possible for the Governor to sack them before the end of their term. Restarting the election cycle from there allows the new government a full term and the date changes. How often do you think a government gets sacked, though?

My preferred electoral system involves an Additional Member System of Proportional Representation so that we get localised representation but still allow a voice to the minority parties. AMS, done well, can ensure that all voices are heard. Compulsory preferential voting on the local ballot and a simple checkbox (radio button) on the party list ballot.

Under Brumby?