WELL might the Nationals spend time at their recent state conference debating the question of over-sized rural electorates.
It’s probably the single most important issue confronting rural Australia today.
As reported in The Land’s regional pages last week, the Nationals moved to seek changes to the NSW electoral laws, to mitigate the ludicrous situation we now have whereby some 60 per cent of the state is now represented by just two gigantic electorates.
One motion carried by the Pokolbin conference called for the law to be amended “so as to insist that the Electoral District Commission shall apply the maximum downward variation from the quota in determining the boundaries of more sparsely populated electorates”.
But given the maximum allowable variation is just 10pc, another motion carried by the conference probably gets closer to the issue.
It called on the Coalition government to “investigate the NSW Electoral Act with a view to allowing the creation of smaller electorates in regional NSW”, size thereof to be “as low as half the existing quota”.
This, of course, would have to go to a referendum.
Unfortunately it was none other than an earlier Nationals hero, Sir Joh Bjelke-Petersen
in Queensland, whose self-serving electoral tinkering in that state left a lasting odium surrounding the term “gerrymander”.
Call it that or something else, but arguably there is nothing innately wrong, immoral or inequitable about giving different population weightings to electorates according to their location or circumstance.
In fact, I doubt if a majority of voters across the state would object to a redrawing of electoral boundaries to better reflect the vast differences in population density that characterise rural and regional Australia.
These differences were recognised in the electoral zoning system which held sway in NSW from 1949 until abolished by Neville Wran in 1979, to be replaced by the present system based on “one vote, one value”.
That noble-sounding concept might be fine, in terms of determining which party or parties win government (and in New Zealand, for example, governments are determined by popular national vote, not by the number of seats won).
But it patently fails the test of providing effective representation once you get into sparsely-settled areas, such as the sprawling Barwon electorate now covered by the Nationals’ well-travelled Kevin Humphries.
As Upper House MP Ben Franklin pointed out, the Member for Barwon has the impossible job of trying to be the “local” member for communities spread over a territory the size of Victoria and Tasmania combined.
And it’s not just a question of distances involved. As anybody familiar with rural NSW will realise by looking at the map, the Barwon electorate covers a multitude of vastly different economic, industrial and social environments.
How can we logically expect one member adequately to represent what amounts to a state within a state, while in metropolitan areas you can find clusters of electorates with broadly similar profiles and issues?
One solution to this dilemma of urban electoral dominance would be to adopt a form of regionally-based “Senate” as a replacement for the present state Upper House – an idea I floated in an earlier column.
But failing that (and I’m not holding my breath!), rural voters need to maintain the pressure for a return to a form of electoral zoning, to restore some necessary weighting to properly reflect the diversity of regional NSW and its importance to the state’s economy.
It’s not as though such a “gerrymander” – as critics would quickly label it – would necessarily favour one party over another.
In Queensland, it worked in Labor’s favour for many years.
The important thing is that the voice of regional NSW is adequately represented on the floor of the parliament, and that country voters within a logical sphere of interest have reasonable access to a local MP.
