ELECTORAL REFORM.

Evening Post, Volume LXXIX, Issue 117, 19 May 1910, Page 6

ELECTORAL REFORM.

The report of the British Royal Commission on Electoral Reform has been published at an opportune time, so far as this side of the world is concerned. The time of publication could hardly, indeed, be inopportune anywhere, for wherever there is a representative system there are anomalies of the kind which the commission was appointed to investigate and prescribe for. "Make the House of Commons an exact image of the nation," said a manifesto issued at the instance of the Proportional Representation Society in December last, and signed by Lord Avebury, Lord Cromer, Sir William Anson, Dr. Clifford, and other distinguished men, "and. though it may not even then be at all times a perfect guide, it will gain enormously in authority." To make its representative Chamber an exact image of the people may be said to be the aim of every democratic community, but only very roughly indeed has that aim been realised. The latest example, and ono of the most glaring, is afforded by the general election which was held five weeks ago in the Commonwealth. The whole world was amazod by the decisiveness of the victory which the Labour party then secured, but everybody who has looked into the figures has been almost equally amazed by the essentially undemocratic basis on which in the elections for one branch of the Legislature the sweeping victory of the democratic party rests. There were eighteen vacancies in th© Senate, and every one of them was filled by a Labour candidate. Yet in round numbers 2,000,000 votes were cast for Labour, and 1,810,000 for the Deakin-Cook combieation. On the proportional basis, which is supposed to be the criterion of democratic rule, the Deakin-Cook combination was entitled by these figures to almost half of the seats in the Senate. A bare majority for Labour would have been a little more than exact mathematics would have awarded it, but as it is impossible to divide a legislator into vulgar fractions, Labour was fairly entitled, according to tho rough approximations of political mathematics, to ten seats out of the eighteen. Yet Labour has actually been awarded the whole eighteen seats, and no less than 47 per cent, of, the electors are left without a single representative The case of the Commonwealth Sen' ate is of course an extreme one. As each State forms a single individual constituency, returning by a majority of votes the whole of its quota of senators, there is nothing to check the complete dominance of the aggregate majority, as in the case where a number of singlemembered constituencies gives to a party which may be in a minority in the whole State a number of local victories. It must, however, be recognised that in this case, which is the common one, it is really accident and not principle that sets a limit to the power oi a majority to pose in the Legislature as the whole nation. The method of electing the senators of the Commonwealth simply carries out to its logical conclusion the theory that the nation can be accurately represented by an election or a series of elections on which a bare majority of voters is given a hundred' per cent, of the representation, and the result of its severe logic is a "reductio ad absurdum" for all the world to see. Where there are many constituencies instead of one, the effect of the chapter of accidents is, as we have said, to neutralise to a large' extent the operation of this inherent absurdity. If the Blues win in one constituency by a majority of less than one per cent, of the votes, the disfranchised 49 per cent, minority of Buffs have the compensation of seeing their own party get as much more than they deserve in another electorate; and so it is assumed that on the whole the accidents and counter-accidents fairly balance one another. It will astonish those who take this comfortable view and find in it a sufficient justification of the present system to learn that at the British general election of 1886, which was supposed to have killed Home Rule by giving the Conservatives a majority of 134 in the House of Commons, the Liberals actually had a majority of 54,391 of the votes polled, and would on the principle applied to the election of the Australian Senate have secured every seat. And it is hardly necessary to say that in countries where the number of constituencies is smaller, the margin of accident is proportionately larger.