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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1997 Week 12 Hansard (13 November) . . Page.. 4166 ..

MS TUCKER (continuing):

In fact, the donkey vote problem may become worse because of the ban on giving out how-to-vote cards outside polling booths, because people are less likely to follow a party's preferred order. It would be a great pity if the personal approval gained by members of this Assembly could be easily lost against a competing candidate who has the luck of the donkey vote. There is a real problem here that needs to be corrected if our voting system is to maintain credibility in the eyes of voters. Two members in this Assembly partly owe their election to the luck of the donkey vote. These two members may not have been in the Assembly today had their names not appeared in the right place on the ballot paper. That placement was purely a matter of chance. The election of candidates should not be affected by luck, but only by the merits of the respective candidates as perceived by voters. This motion is not about singling out Mr Hird or Mrs Littlewood. It is in the interests of all Assembly members, and of all candidates for that matter, to ensure that the voting system is as fair as possible.

There can be no doubt that Hare-Clark is the world's best electoral system, but we must continue to work to make it even better and fairer. Dr Kirschbaum should be commended for doing the detailed analysis of the extent of the donkey vote problem and proposing a relatively simple solution, which, perhaps if accepted by the Assembly today - well, I know it will not be now, but we are getting this on the record and hopefully it will be accepted in the next Assembly - will be known as the Robson rotation with the Kirschbaum twist. My amendment is a direct copy of Dr Kirschbaum's proposal. I should note that I have received the full support of Dr Kirschbaum in putting up this amendment. It simply involves increasing the number of rotations of the ways in which ballot papers are printed. It would add significantly more fairness to the election, with negligible side effects.

The Electoral Commission acknowledged the donkey vote problem in its report but thought that it would be too complicated to change the Robson rotation system. The genius of the Kirschbaum proposal is that it involves a relatively simple change to Robson rotation but with significant impacts. The amendment merely involves adding another set of rotations to the set of rotations in which candidates' names are printed on ballot papers as specified in the existing Schedule to the Electoral Act. The second set of rotations would have the same candidate on the top of the party list, but the order of all other candidates in that list is inverted. For example, to an order of candidates 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 we would add an additional rotation of 1, 5, 4, 3, 2. This would have the consequence that the donkey vote would be shared between two candidates, and where it came to a competition between two candidates for one available seat the effect of the donkey vote from excluded candidates would be evenly shared between the contestants.

This system is still not perfect, in that it does not provide a completely random distribution of the candidates' order on the ballot paper. However, to get such a random system would be technically very difficult to print and very expensive. The Kirschbaum amendment provides an optimal compromise which improves the fairness of our elections but requires minimal increased printing costs. The number of ballot papers remains the same but they would be printed in slightly more lots. Dr Kirschbaum calculated that printing costs would increase by less than 4 per cent, which seems to me like a good investment in democracy. Voters would not notice any difference in the ballot papers they fill in, and the amendment would not add any further complexity to the counting of votes.

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