A similar malapportionment existed in the upper house. In the 2001 Legislative Council election it took nearly twice as many voters to elect a metropolitan member compared to those elected from country districts. The overall effect was that country voters, who made up 25% of WA’s population, elected 40% of the Legislative Assembly and 50% of the Legislative Council seats.
In the 1800s malapportionment was very common. Then the right to vote was seen as dependent on person’s economic role and social status in the community. Even after one person-one vote had been introduced property qualifications and plural voting gave more voting power to the middle and upper classes. Rural weighting was regarded as a natural result of the greater economic importance of the rural economy at the time.
In some modern democracies this has been replaced by a strict adherence to one vote-one value. In the United States the Supreme Court has rules that electorates must be of exactly equal size. In Australia some variation (usually 10% either side of a quotient) has been allowed in the numbers of electors to help create seats that have a ‘community of interest’ or to preserve as much as possible other political zones, such as local government areas.
The rural weighting that still exists in WA has been defended on many grounds.
These include:
- important community groups (i.e. rural dwellers) need greater voting power for their voices to be heard
- rural areas still contain the industries that generate the largest proportion of WA’s economic output (farm and mineral exports)
- it is difficult for members of parliament to service large and remote electorates
- if factors such as ‘community of interest’, other boundaries and physical features are to be taken into account the Commissioners must be able to create quite unequal seats
However, since Federation there has been a strong move to remove malapportionment. This reflects several factors:
- the belief that democracy requires all citizens to have an equal vote – that the right to vote belongs to the people, not to social and economic interests
- the claim that the problems of distance and remoteness have been reduced by modern communications, and those that remain can be overcome through the provision of extra assistance to rural politicians, not by unequal votes
- the distinction between urban and rural leads to illogical results (in WA ‘rural’ Mandurah has much greater voting power than ‘urban’ Rockingham – even though both are similar fringe metropolitan beachside areas)
- malapportionment may be a factor in political corruption as it can entrench in power the political parties that benefit from it. The Fitzgerald Royal Commission in Queensland saw it as a factor in the corruption it found within the National Party Government that had been in power for over 30 years
Malapportionment was an issue in the 2001 WA State election. Reform of electoral boundaries has been a long-standing Labor Party policy. The Liberal Party highlighted this difference between the parties in an attempt to maintain its support in non-metropolitan seats. After it election victory the new ALP State government began the debate by floating a reform proposal to create a uniform quotient of 21 000 voters for all Assembly seats (with a 10% variation allowed around this average). Its preferred option for the Legislative Council would be to divide WA into five zones with a total of 34 seats although there are proposals to increase this number to 36. Twenty-one of these would be the three metropolitan zones (with some outer metropolitan seats included as part of the non-urban zones). Two Bills were involved, the Electoral Distribution Repeal Bill 2001 and the Electoral Amendment Bill 2001. Both Bills passed through the lower house but they did not, however, gain an absolute majority in the Legislative Council (18 votes). In the end, this legislation failed to be passed and WA’s lower house electoral boundaries have since remained unchanged.
