Upper House Reform

16th September 2021

Country people in Western Australia have a couple of simple questions to answer when they assess the Labor Party plan to get rid of country regions in the make up of the Upper House of State Parliament.

The first is whether parliamentary representation simply means the number of votes per MP, or does it refer to people’s capacity to interact with MPs, so that an MP might understand and serve them, their family, their businesses and their community.

If the answer is the former and democracy is purely about the numbers, then the Labor proposal, which will see half of our regional MPs shifted back to Perth, is on target.

But in my view most regional people actually think the latter. They believe that their parliamentary representatives should have visited their community and have a working knowledge of it. They believe that it is the role of MPs to be a local champion for the issues that impact them. And in what might come as a surprise to the Labor Party they believe they should be able to see their local MP face to face and eyeball them sometimes.

If, like me, you believe that democracy and the role of Parliamentarians is to get to know and serve the community instead of political party leadership, the second question you have to answer is whether the current system will be improved when the Labor Party gets rid of Upper House regions and all Legislative Councillors are elected on a state wide basis? 

Up until now regional WA has elected 18 of the 36 Upper House MPs, but only represents a quarter of the population. But has that really provided an advantage? Does that mean that with additional Upper House MPs the services and facilities in country areas are better than those in Perth?

The answer I invariably get to that is no. They are generally far worse, and often non-existent.

Not even the Labor Party could believe that vote weighting in the Upper House has resulted in better services in any regional centre than the metropolitan area.

So if you believe that votes are just numbers, you could support the Labor position. But if you believe that politicians are there to look after the community and not just their own jobs you would have to be implacably opposed to them.  

Following the changes simple maths says that the city will elect three quarters of the MPs, or 28 of the now 37 member chamber. The country if it votes uniformly will elect the remaining 9.

That is a halving of country representation, which matches the loss of country seats when Labor did the same thing in the State’s Lower House fifteen years when 8 seats were shifted from country to city. 

Undermining country representation has been part of the genetics of the Labor Party; Minister John Quigley last week pompously claimed that it was the achievement of a 120 year Labor goal.

This is despite the premier telling us many times before the election it was “not on his agenda.”

That wasn’t true, and neither is Labor’s justification for the changes.

This proposal is entirely about delivering on the best interests of the Labor Party by disenfranchising country voters.

Regional Labor MPs should oppose the changes, but I suspect they will all be forced to toe the line. WA may be a democracy but the Labor Party is not.

The representation and the voice of regional communities have been sacrificed to maximise the Labor vote from now on and forever more.

I just hope that when we do get to another election, regional voters remember and respond accordingly.