Being a Tasmanian, I should have thought the answer was obvious - go for the Hare-Clark system to cover the whole of Australia. The German or Aotearoa/NZ system is good too, but of course the major parties don't like it as they want majority control. That's why here in Tasmania in 1998 they reducted the seats in each electorate to five rather than seven to get rid of the Greens and save money but they failed on both counts.

Coalitions are the norm in any democracy and work perfectly well with the political will to negotiate.

John Phillimore's article is timely and to the point. I agree with his concerns. These are very serious matters. The question really is what are we doing about it? As I have argued on a number of occasions proportional representation is the answer, which is exactly what the major parties are NOT interested in. In NZ it came about more or less as a "comedy of errors" in spite of major parties having serious problems with it as well. The NZ system is certainly proportional but it is also a compromise between single-member district systems and the proportional system as practiced in the Netherlands and the Scandinavian countries. In the latter countries party list are presented to voters in an entirely transparent way and with ONE mark voters can indicate which party they prefer and who on that party list. There is no horse trading behind the scenes there, as is the case with our Senate elections, the vote is extremely simple and effective, there are not two classes of politicians (those elected by the old system and the others the result of top-up), and the counting is much easier than with our Senate (an immense task). There is no pork barreling associated with PR, one of the most negative aspects of single-district systems. It is far more democratic, creates diversity in the parliament and changes the adversarial culture of sterile two-party adversarialism that results from single-member systems.
You will have to vote for Senate candidates that advocate proportional representation to achieve this kind of change and jointly they need to be in a balance of power situation to achieve acceptance of this kind of change. There is no other way. Greens, Democrats and my own group listed under P (Beyond Federation, NSW) are committed to PR. On Saturday voters have a real opportunity to express their preference for a different electoral system. When you come to think it not voting for major party Senate candidate at all
would very likely guarantee a change in our electoral system.

Klaas Woldring,
Ph. 4341 5170
woldring@zipworld.com.au

Klaas' post has prompted me to re-read the article.

Could I suggest it is time to think much more carefully about the electoral system we presently have (focussing particularly upon the legal/historical, mechanical, and forensic accountancy aspects of it), rather than proposing changes that may well be based upon unsound assumptions?

In saying this, I am not necessarily claiming that the system we presently have cannot be improved, but that by rushing to change it we witlessly trample residual evidence in what could be considered a long term crime scene.

A common feature of many commentators upon the electoral scene is a reflexive preclusion of sophisticated electoral fraud as a significant factor in the distortion of results, before proceeding to sing the praises of a favoured alternative system in an electoral environment presumed free of fraud or the motivation thereto.

Lest it be thought that in my post earlier, the eighth in this thread, I have been unwittingly self-contradictory in making reference to the paradoxical outcome of the 1987 Federal elections, let me make things quite clear. In 1987, 'targeting of the marginals' was given credit as the reason for the paradoxical re-election of the Hawke Labor government. In 2007 erudite commentators like John Warhurst and John Phillimore seem to be foreshadowing a possible survival of the (presently Howard) Coalition government at the 2007 Federal elections for exactly the same reason, a seemingly successful 'targetting of the marginals'.

If such targetting of the marginals comes to be credited to having been effected, not by the weapon of the pork barrel, but by the operation of sophisticated electoral fraud, then an inference would exist that any such electoral tampering or manipulation was ultimately orchestrated from OUTSIDE either major political grouping. That being said, it would then have to be accepted that significant numbers of successful candidates in BOTH major parties were seen as being potentially, or even dependably, useful to the unidentified orchestrators of such long-continuing fraud in the shaping of public policy.

Is this a dangerous idea, or merely an idea whose time has come?