Australia has entered into an unofficial election campaign. Although an election doesn’t have to be held until May (it may be held sooner), political parties have started test driving new slogans, and outlining new policy positions. While this may seem a short period of campaigning compared to the United States, it feels long for Australia, where only 33 days are required between issuing the writ – to formally organize an election – and election day.
Since the last election in 2022, Australia’s population has increased by about 1.5 million people. Yet curiously the House of Representatives will be losing a seat in the next election, dropping from 151 seats to 150. Western Australia (WA) is gaining one seat, while New South Wales and Victoria are losing a seat each. While WA’s percentage of growth is the highest in the country, in terms of raw numbers Victoria grew by double the amount of people.
With Australia’s population increase it would make sense for the House of Representatives to increase its seats. Australia’s political cousin in Canada has been doing this – incrementally adding seats to its House of Commons over the years in line with population growth, with an additional 30 seats added in 2015, with constant planning to add more.
Yet in Australia there is a problem. Australia has a unique constitutional provision stating that the House of Representatives should have “as nearly as practical” twice the number of seats as there are in the Senate. In other words, an increase in the number of seats in the House means increasing the number of seats in the Senate.
The last time this occurred was in 1984, when the House of Representatives was increased from 125 seats to 148. The Senate therefore had to be increased from 64 to 76 seats. The Australian Electoral Commission (AEC) has used the phrase “as nearly as practical” to tinker with this over the past four decades to compensate for the distribution of population within the country – increasing up to 151 seats in 2019 without having to increase the number of senators. The return to 150 seats is due to trying to balance seat distribution between each state in relation to their population changes.
However, since the last major addition of seats Australia’s overall population has increased from 15.5 million to 27.5 million, meaning the number of people each electoral district represents has grown significantly. The obvious solution would be to simply increase the number of both houses of Parliament in line with population growth. But this is something that the major political parties are loath to do.
The Senate is elected by a unique proportional-preferential voting system, which makes it easier for smaller parties to be elected to the chamber. It now incredibly rare for a party forming government in the House of Representatives to gain a majority in the Senate, leaving it with a lot of negotiation with other parties or independents to pass legislation. Increasing the numbers in the Senate would lower the quota needed to win a seat in the chamber – with potentially more minor parties that governments would need to deal with.
The Senate was designed as a “states’ house” as a way of encouraging colonies to join the federation and allowing them to exert power outside of their respective populations. This is due to the large differences in population – Tasmania with a population of 575,000 people has 12 senators; the same as New South Wales, with a population of 8.5 million.
While this design may have been intended for states to perform the role of the “house of review,” this isn’t the way the chamber functions these days. Senators vote in line with party interests, rather than the interests of their states. While an increased number of senators has the potential to return the chamber to its initially designed function – with a greater number of senators primarily working for their states – this is also something the major parties also have no interest in.
Of course, the other solution to this problem of political representation is a referendum that would alter the constitution so that the House of Representatives can increase its size without increasing the size of the Senate. However, Australians are deeply suspicious of referendums. Of the 45 that have been held since federation in 1901 only eight have been successful.
Of those eight, seven were conducted with support from all the major parties – preventing campaigns from becoming overly partisan. While this could be a path forward, Australians’ increasing distrust in political parties in general may work against a referendum. It also may be difficult to sell the public the idea of more politicians in Canberra. Australians may feel more comfortable being under represented instead of being proportionally represented by people they don’t like.