W.A. Election Law Needs To Change

Editorial - The Australian

Making some votes worth more than others, and calling it democracy, is about the oldest trick in the political book, and one that should end in Western Australia, where the largest city seat has 42,000 voters, more than four times the number in the smallest country electorate. It may suit politicians who are now elected in the bush with a fraction of the votes of their urban colleagues, but it does not help the interests of the state's voters.

Attorney-General Jim McGinty deplores the existing situation, where 40 per cent of the state's 57 lower house seats are in the underpopulated countryside, and has been trying to do something about it for years – without much luck. Mr McGinty's electoral reform legislation passed the lower house of parliament last year, but its passage was never going to be as smooth in the upper house. With the Government needing the support of all five Greens in the Legislative Council, plus the president – who currently does not vote – to give it the 18 votes required for constitutional change, passing the reforms into law was a challenge.

Premier Geoff Gallop was ready with parliamentary manoeuvres to get the legislation through, but was defeated by a decision of the state Supreme Court that the council president could not vote on electoral reform. He was not helped by the Greens deciding that the Labor MP who is president of the council should be required to remain impartial. The Government is now playing its last card, and will put the whole sorry affair before the High Court in April.

It is hard not to sympathise with the Government. It has a thumping popular majority, but is being denied the right to pass legislation that will benefit the vast majority of the state's voters by an infernal combination of legal precedent and political opportunism. Its tactics to secure passage of the legislation through the upper house were too clever by half, at least in the view of four of the five Supreme Court judges. And the Government miscalculated the political perversity of the Greens who chose to oppose the electoral reforms.

But whatever the failings in the strategy to date, Dr Gallop should continue the fight. Any claim that his Government's electoral reforms will deny country voters fair representation in parliament is not correct. The old argument – popular with the Bjelke-Petersen government in Queensland – that increasing the physical size of bush seats would reduce the ability of MPs to service their constituents assumes large barren spaces require the ministrations a politician as much as those full of people. The Opposition's suggestion that the Government's High Court challenge is a waste of taxpayers' money is equally unconvincing. Nothing is more fundamental to the proper functioning of a democracy than for every elector to know their vote matters. The commonwealth and other states all have legislation that requires electorates to be the same size, with a small tolerance for country seats. It is a sound and essential principle, and one that Dr Gallop should be allowed to enact.