Australia should say No to the Voice

Give a Voice to all Australians, not just Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander ones

The Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice

Australia is voting on Saturday October 14th on whether to create what is called the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice, usually shortened to Voice. This would be a talking shop (it would have no powers to legislate or deliver services) that will give independent advice to the Parliament and Government on what Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders want.

Where the Voice falls short

Obviously, in a democracy, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders (who make up 3.8% of the population) should have a voice. But so should all Australians.

And in fact there is a body -- the Australian parliament -- whose job it is to give a voice to all Australians. The lower house of parliament is the House of Representatives, which elects members in 151 single-seat constituencies with each member being elected by Instant Runoff Voting. This means that if you're a group within Australian society and you're about 4% of the population, then unless that population is concentrated in a few constituencies, then you probably won't be able to get one of your own elected.

Who is a "group"?

In the previous paragraph, I talked about a "group within Australian society". So, what are the groups and how many people are in each?

My answer is: let the people decide! That's the democratic thing to do. A group is defined by who votes for an electoral list.

So, what's a better solution?

I propose the Australian electoral system be modified so that any group that gets greater than a certain proportion of first preferences be guaranteed representation in parliament.

How much should "a certain proportion" be? Well, Aboriginals and Torres Strait Islanders are 3.8% of the population. So we could naively use that number. But that wouldn't work because there're not a hivemind, they don't all vote the same and they aren't all going to vote for the same electoral list. So I propose a threshold of 0.5% of the electorate: that is, any electoral list that gets >0.5% of first preferences (out of the total in all 151 constituencies) is guaranteed a seat.

This would work by the 151 constituencies being kept, and 76 top-up seats added, so there would be a total of 227 seats. All lists with >0.5% of the total vote and no constituency seats get a top-up seat, and then any remaining top-up seats are allocated by d'Hondt, the same as they are in AMS.

This means that any group of 1/200th or more out of all Australian voters -- whether they are Aboriginals and Torres Strait Islanders or not -- gets a voice. And since their voice will consist of parliamentary seats, with votes, the government will have to listen to these voices, if it wants to win parliamentary divisions. Because there is nothing more futile for the voters than a government pretending to consult the people, attentively listening to what they say, and then just doing what it intended to do all along!