McGowan’s massive mistake.
It will be much easier for minor parties to control the WA Legislative Council
By Brian Burke The West Australian 14 March 2025
Most people of a certain age will have heard of General Jubilation T Cornpone. He’s the tactical wizard who burnt the crops and left his troops with nothing to eat.
And General Jubilation T Cornpone must surely have been the brains behind the Labor Party think tank that thought through and brought forth the new electoral laws that made such far-reaching changes to the Legislative Council.
After 120 years of electoral defeat, Labor won control of the Upper House for the first time in 2021 in the biggest landslide in Australian political history. Then-premier Mark McGowan promised not to change our electoral laws. But within a year or so he and his intrepid attorney-general John Quigley knocked off developing a theory of relativity to announce far-reaching changes that made General Cornpone look clever.
The McGowan Government managed to:
Ensure that the Labor Party will never again control of the Upper House;
Guarantee that minor parties and independents would find it easier to be elected and to have the balance of power;
Move to disenfranchise the country and regional WA with parties required to nominate a Statewide slate of candidates that will inevitably compound and amplify the drift of power to Perth;
Make sure that the handful of country seats with Labor members turned conservative when they were enlarged to meet the one vote, one value hurdle.
Contrary to what Mr McGowan maintained when he said the proposed changes would make it much more difficult for single-issue candidate to win seats in the Council, the opposite is the case. The Legalise Cannabis Party is a case in point.
It won two seats after preference flows and most observers thought that undesirable. Well, guess what? Legalise Cannabis retained its representation and has now been joined by One Nation and the Australian Christians. And Legalise Cannabis and One Nation have a very slim chance of picking up a second seat.
So much for making their election more difficult.
Worse still for Labor, the balance of power will be held by the Greens whose leader is already boasting: “We can actually force them (Labor) to the table.”
Not that his aggression matters much because Premier Roger Cook says: “It doesn’t matter who has the balance of power.”
Well, it does matter and that will become apparent just as soon as the Greens hold the Cook Government to ransom over the expansion of our natural gas industry or in any one of the myriad matters where the State’s industrial expansion depends on parliamentary approval.
It beggars belief that a Labor Government could turn its back on the decades of policy commitment to abolish the Legislative Council. And it beggars belief that the changes could overlook the quota requirement that countries insist on then they make changes like this.
Most countries where a similar electoral system prevails, guarantee sensible results by requiring: candidates who wish to be “above the line” to have a constitution, a certain membership, party officials and other practical things that mean they are a real party; and a minimum threshold of support — say 5 per cent. The changes made in 2021 fail to set any threshold or minimum vote to be elected to the Legislative Council which is the most powerful second chamber in Australia and perhaps anywhere in the world. The result is that the quota for election is the lowest anywhere in Australia making it clear that even when one party wins a majority as big as Labor won in WA at Saturday’s election — it will not have a majority of members in the Legislative Council.
In other words, it will be very, very difficult for any party to win a majority in the Legislative Council.
The corollary to that is that it will be relatively easy for a minor party or a well-organised group of independents to achieve the balance of power.
It need not have been so.
The McGowan government could simply have added the Legislative councillors to the Legislative Assembly without increasing the number of members of Parliament and implemented one vote, one value to ensure its policy.
While the number of members would not increase, the electorates would be smaller with a country and regional spread, not simply city-centric.
And, not that anyone seems to care, the Labor Party would have some prospect of retaining country representation because a number of the smaller electorates would be based on country towns that vote Labor but will now likely be lost as they are expanded into rural areas that support the conservative parties.
Importantly, country and regional WA would be better represented than ever before.
General Jubilation T Cornpone has become shorthand for ineffective leadership which, I suppose, is appropriate.
Brian Burke is a former Labor premier of WA