Australia has a politician problem: not too many, but too few.
Each of Australia’s 150 members of Parliament (MPs) must split their attention between more constituents than ever before: 120,659 voters per MP, over 6000 more than in 2022.
But while there are nine times as many registered voters today as in 1903 (the first election where women could vote), the number of electorates has only doubled.
Since then, Australia’s population, and voting rights, have expanded significantly: Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander voting rights took until 1963, and the voting age was lowered from 21 to 18 in 1974.
As the number of voters per MP grows, the access any individual voter will have to their member necessarily decreases – Australia Institute polling research in 2022 found that only 15% of Australians had ever spoken to their local MP (and only 36% knew their name).
The more voters there are in an electorate, the larger a campaign needs to be to make any difference to the result, giving communities less power to kick out an unrepresentative or under-performing MP.
Australia is a lot bigger and more complicated than it was fifty or a hundred years ago. Australia’s first government, headed up by Edmund Barton, had 10 ministers while Albanese’s first ministry had 30 (plus 12 assistant ministers). That leaves fewer backbenchers to do important committee work and means a smaller talent pool from which to choose government ministers.
Expanding the lower house by 50% – to 225 seats – would bring Australia’s representation more in line with comparable democracies, as well as the states and territories.
It’s time for our representative democracy to get a bit more representative.
2 Comments
One snag is that under Sections 7 and 25 of the Australian Constitution
* The original 6 states must have an equal number of Senators
* There must 1 Senator for every 2 Representatives, or as close as practical
It would take a referendum to eliminate either requirement, and the attempt to eliminate the second requirement in a referendum failed by a large margin, albeit in 1967.
So 225 members of the House of Representatives means 112 Senators, which means adding 36 Senators.
If neither the Northern Territory nor the Australian Capital Territory get any new Senators, then New South Wales, Queensland, South Australia, Tasmania, Victoria and West Australia will each have 18 Senators.
Even if the territories get 3 new Senators each, the states will now have 17 Senators each.
Does Tasmania really need that many? The Tasmanian Legislative Council only has 15 members.
It'd be illuminating to add a line on this graph showing say a backbencher's inflation adjusted remuneration.
I'd like to imagine that increasing the number of MPs would be accompanied by reduction in their individual remuneration, furthering the reconnection of our politicians to the average citizen. But some graphical data might help make the point.