Mark McGowan gives WA’s gerrymander the punt

Mark McGowan swept back into office in WA in a landslide, and he’s now about to make it much harder for the conservative side of politics in the state to maintain its traditional control of the upper house of Parliament.

The WA Nationals are up in arms over a proposal to do away with weighted electorates in the Legislative Council, which has blocked previous attempts at electoral reform.

Under the current system, there is a wide discrepancy in the worth of a vote in the Legislative Council, against which WA Labor has been campaigning for decades in favour of one vote, one value.

But the Nationals have described the recommendation by the Ministerial Expert Committee on Electoral Reform as “another nail in the coffin for fair representation for regional WA in the state’s Parliament”.

When the McGowan government won office with a massive majority, including control of the upper house, it commissioned a report by an expert panel to make recommendations on electoral reform.

In addition to abolishing the malapportionment of voting in upper house electorates, the committee also recommended the abolition of group voting tickets — or vote harvesting — which resulted in a daylight-saving candidate winning a seat in the upper house with only 98 votes.

Opposition Leader Mia Davies has attacked McGowan for denying electoral reform would be on the government’s agenda should Labor be returned to office.

“He denied it again and again and then arrogantly made it his government’s first order of business,” Davies said.

But the proposed reforms should have been no surprise both to the Nationals and the Liberals, given Labor’s well-known criticisms of the existing system.

McGowan described the Legislative Council as “the most undemocratic of any state or territory in Australia”.

“It lags behind most parliaments in the developed world,” he said.

Draft legislation has already been introduced into the Parliament under which the Legislative Council will become a whole-of-state electorate and will no longer be regions-based.

Former Fremantle Mayor Brad Pettitt, the only Greens member in the WA Parliament, says the Greens will be a beneficiary of the legislation, which will render election outcomes more transparent rather than a random lottery.

“Smaller parties like the Greens will be able to have greater certainty in their representation in the Parliament,” Dr Pettitt told Crikey.

“It will now mean the Greens will consistently get three or four seats in the Legislative Council assuming their long-term vote hovers around 10%.”

Dr Pettitt said the expert committee report and proposal was excellent and aligned closely with the submission the Greens made in support of one vote, one value.

“It will be no surprise then that I will be strongly supporting this in the Parliament,” he said.