EVEN the Greens who gained 10% of the South Australian state election primary vote were ripped off: they got zero seats.
A fair-minded person would probably say they deserved one seat, maybe two. But welcome to the rigged reality of Australia’s preferential voting system, with South Australia’s Labor Party sweeping up 72% of the seats in the Lower House from 37.6% of the vote.
The Independents got 4.8% of the vote (47,025) to win four seats, as did One Nation who picked up 22.5% of the vote (220,626). One Nation has seven seats in total in the SA Parliament including three in the Upper House.
The overall picture is of a skewed electoral system where the party in power rigs the electoral boundaries to best fit the inner city areas and outer suburbs where, as in the case of SA, the Labor tradition runs strong.
The situation in the Federal Parliament is even worse, with Labor winning just over a third of the primary vote to gain about 90% of the seats in the House of Representatives.
Cairns News’ recent story on this situation created a firestorm on X, with the ABC’s now retired election analyst Anthony Green defending the system “because it’s been like this for 108 years” and “if you’re complaining about the fact that Labor gained far more seats than justified based on its primary vote, then you should be arguing for proportional representation”.
If proportional representation is what it takes to give Australians a more representative parliamentary system in Lower Houses, then so be it. New Zealand has such a system, which gives medium to small parties a chance to at least have some seats in the parliament.
State Upper Houses, also known as Legislative Councils, and the federal Senate, do have proportional representation, which is why you see minor parties occupying seats.
In the case of South Australia, Labor with its 36.9% of the primary vote gained only 4.4 quotas or four of the 11 contested seats. One Nation with 24.5% of the vote won 2.9 quotas or three seats. The Liberals on 17.7% of the vote lost two of their eight seats and the Greens won one seat to give them two in total.
With the support of the Greens, Labor will retain control the SA Legislative Council, unless the one seat still in doubt goes to a conservative leaning candidate, which would tie the chamber 11-11.
New Zealand is currently governed by a coalition of three parties – the Nationals (the main party similar to our Liberals) plus the conservative New Zealand First and the libertarian ACT Party. These three represent a broad spectrum of voters from small L liberal to hard-line nationalist-populist.