Daniel Wills: SA has a history of crooked elections where the people’s will is blunted. In 2022, the system will get even murkier.
Shonky elections litter SA’s political history and Premier Steven Marshall has missed an opportunity to fix them once and for all, State Political Editor Daniel Wills writes.
Opinion
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Naively, you might think that elections in this state are decided by looking at who scores the most votes, or quaint notions of the majority of people deciding who gets to govern.
That has rarely been the case, and with the State Government looking likely to lose a belated push for electoral reform which is being launched relatively late in the current cycle, all bets are off about what the rules will be when the next vote’s held in 2022.
SA’s electoral history is crooked, and there’s no sign that anyone with the power has a serious plan to fix it.
The three-decade reign of Liberal and Country League premier Sir Thomas Playford, arguably SA’s greatest leader, was built on the shonkiest of electoral platforms.
From 1936 to his defeat in 1965, the electoral system in the state was massively rigged in Sir Thomas’ favour. Seats in country SA, where he held most popular appeal, had far fewer people than those in the city.
The most insane example was in the seat of Frome, which still exists today and includes Port Pirie, which had just 4500 voters. That compared to 42,000 in the city seat of Enfield.
The effect was to ensure an effectively permanent conservative government, as Sir Thomas racked up big seat counts in the country based on a relatively small number of actual votes, locking Labor out of power.
Two-party vote counts are unavailable before 1944. But in the seven subsequent elections that Sir Thomas won before being finally tipped out in 1965, the Liberal and Country League had a popular vote majority in just four. In one of its losses, Labor had 54.3 per cent.
In perhaps the greatest, and certainly most thankless act of statesmanship SA has known, Sir Thomas’ successor as the next Liberal and Country League premier, Steele Hall, later set about undoing the “Playmander”.
He set a new democratic framework which ushered in a lengthy era of Labor rule in which the state was popularly led by the only man who challenges Sir Thomas’ position in SA’s political pantheon, “great reformer” Don Dunstan.
But in trying to repair that crooked old system, the state came up with something arguably just as warped.
A “fairness” clause was inserted in the state’s constitution, which asks a troika of experts to trick up seat boundaries between each election in a bid to ensure that the party which gets the majority of the two-party popular vote, as Labor did in many of gerrymandered years, also wins enough seats to be the government.
Recent history shows that is a terribly difficult task, which has been executed with very little success.
Labor has not won a two-party vote at a state election in SA since 2006. In fact, it has barely been ahead in a popular opinion poll for a decade. Nonetheless it won government in 2010 and 2014. In the latter case, it had only 47 per cent of the two-party vote. On primary votes, or the number of people who put a “1” in the box next to their preferred party, Labor got just 36 per cent.
The Liberals, who lost, were the first choice of 45 per cent in SA.
That did spark a new round of hand-wringing about the state of democracy in SA, which devolved into a largely partisan spat.
Liberals claimed they had moral claim on being the government, and had the will of the majority of people behind them. Labor claimed it won fair and square, by understanding the rules and targeting marginal seats. It’s possible that both are right, and that election displayed in neon how the shape of electoral boundaries and clever political tactics in a clutch of key suburbs matter more than what a majority of people want.
That is a clearly flawed system.
It’s always been possible for leaders who don’t win the popular vote to end up running the show, think US President Donald Trump or former prime minister John Howard.
But when it happens so frequently, and on such huge margins, concepts of “democracy” are tested.
To underscore the point, Premier Steven Marshall won the 2018 election despite both his primary and two-party votes going backwards. The big difference was the boundaries, which were decisively redrawn after legal action which tested application of the “fairness” clause. It was a victory built more in the courtroom than a ballot box.
Labor, seeing that “fairness” harmed their chances of victory, tore it up before leaving office. Mr Marshall is now seeking to put it back in, and getting little love from key Upper House MPs in what’s seen as a partisan push.
The end result is total confusion about how the boundaries will be drawn between now and the next election, as those in charge work with a shredded law.
There’s a huge missed opportunity to have had some sort of independent review or constitutional convention to find a bipartisan fix.
Instead, heading to 2022, put a bet on red or blue and we’ll spin the roulette wheel one more time.