In Australia everyone's a democrat. Or at least, anyone who might have doubts about the notion that government derives its authority from the consent of the governed will almost certainly refrain from saying so when seeking public office. The fact that democracy wins universal plaudits does not, however, mean that we're all agreed on what's required to keep our politics as vigorously democratic as most Australians like to think they are.
The Abbott Government that will be sworn in this week is democratically legitimate in an obvious and fundamental sense: the Coalition won the election, and will have a comfortable majority in the new house. But if governments want to claim that they are broadly representative of the nation — and, left or right, they all do make that claim — then it is surely a problem that the cabinet of 20 includes only one woman.
And it hardly answers the point to note that there would have been two if Sophie Mirabella had held her seat of Indi, or to suggest, as Tony Abbott has, that at some unspecified future date more women will be knocking at the cabinet-room door. It is not as if there are no contenders now. A talented, long-serving Liberal parliamentarian like Marisa Payne, for example, could reasonably ask why the door isn't already open for her, and why she has been relegated to the outer ministry instead.
'Broadly representative' is, of course, a vague term. It implicitly acknowledges that even introducing quotas for under-represented groups of the population would not result in a government that resembled an Identikit image of Australia. But vague is not the same as vacuous. To say a government is or isn't broadly representative of those it governs is to recognise that representation is not only a matter of votes and head counts.
Indeed, sometimes even rigorously proper voting procedures produce outcomes that, although legitimate, cannot seriously be regarded as democratic.
The Senate that has just been elected is a case in point. When the new senators take their seats in July next year, they will include a Sports Party member from WA, who won just 0.22 per cent of the first-preference vote, and a Motoring Enthusiasts Party member from Victoria, who won just 0.52 per cent. The fact that these and candidates from other so-called micro-parties, which were unknown to most voters until they received their Senate ballot papers, were successful at the election has attracted much mirth and some praise.
But the many who derided the Senate result and the few who have defended it have often missed the point.
It matters little that the Motoring Enthusiast senator-elect, Ricky Muir, enjoys throwing kangaroo faeces at people and until very recently could be seen engaging in this pastime in a YouTube clip. It is more worrying that his Sports Party counterpart, Wayne Dropulich, has no policies other than support for junior sport. And it is cause for alarm that the Liberal Democrats, a party that has more than a tad in common with Tea Party Republicans in the US, including support for relaxing restrictions on the sale of all types of firearms, has won a Senate seat in NSW.
All of these crossbenchers will be courted by the Abbott Government as it tries to negotiate its legislation through the Senate.
The real problem with the Senate result, however, is not the dubious nature of the micro-parties' platforms, or lack of them. It is the fact that they represent tiny fractions of the electorate yet will potentially wield great legislative power. (The Liberal Democrats did win almost nine per cent of the vote in NSW but, as they admit without embarrassment, this was because many voters confused them with the Liberals, and because they were placed first on the ballot.)
Defenders of the Senate result, who typically say that more diversity in parliamentary representation is good in itself, are evading the issue. The consternation caused by the result is not an attack on the Senate itself, as some have claimed.
Nor is it a reaction against the use of proportional representation in Senate elections, which does indeed produce greater diversity of representation than the system used for electing the House of Representatives. That is why the balance of power in the Senate has often been held by parties with little or no representation in the house, such as the Greens and before them the Australian Democrats and the DLP. That has been no bad thing, for over time the lack of major-party dominance has allowed the Senate to work more effectively as a revisory chamber.
It is preposterous, however, to suggest that the latest Senate outcome is merely an intensification of this democratic process. It is the result of manipulative trading of preferences, which has allowed the micro-parties to win seats by preferencing each other before the majors, regardless of policy differences.
This manipulative deal-making could, and should, be eliminated by some simple reforms. If the present choice between above-the-line and below-the line voting were abolished and replaced by optional preferential voting, so that voters would only have to number the same number of boxes as there are senators to be elected, the deal makers would be out of a job.
And, as is the case in many other countries that use proportional representation, candidates should also have to pass a threshold before they can be elected — say, 4 per cent of the primary vote, the limit already set for public funding of campaigns.
Ensuring that representative systems are genuinely democratic requires getting both the institutional settings right (reduce the scope for secretive electoral pacts) and inculcating the right ethos (it is not acceptable for a 20-member cabinet to include only one woman). The latter is the hard part, for whether political parties and movements see democratic process merely as a means to power or as something intrinsically worthwhile depends on whether they are genuinely democratic themselves.
And that is why the drawn-out process for electing the new ALP leader, which will give rank-and-file members a vote, is perhaps the most important reform in Australian politics for many years. It is not surprising that beneficiaries of the old, factional deal-making system, such as Stephen Conroy and Julia Gillard, have condemned the reform. And it should be remembered that one of the reasons that Kevin Rudd is so widely hated in the Labor Party is that he has sought to stand outside factional alliances.
If it turns out that the new system for electing the leader is his legacy it will be no mean achievement, whatever else his detractors will say of him.
Ray Cassin is a contributing editor.
Australia jigsaw image from Shutterstock