Effective on 20 May 2005, for the election of members of the Legislative Council, the state was divided into six electoral regions by community of interest – three metropolitan and three rural – each electing six members to the Legislative Council.[1][2] The 2005 changes continued to maintain the previous malapportionment in favour of rural regions. Legislation was passed in 2021 to abolish these regions and increase the size of the council to 37 seats, all of which will be elected by the state-at-large. The changes will take effect in the 2025 state election.[3][4][5][6]
Since 2008, the Legislative Council has had 36 members. Since the 2013 state election, both houses of Parliament have had fixed four-year terms, with elections being held every four years on the second Saturday in March,[7][8] though the term of the Legislative Council not expiring until May after the election. In the current Legislative Council, elected at the 2021 election, Labor has majority control of the chamber—the first time any party gained the majority in the upper house since 1983.[9]
Six members of the Legislative Council are elected from each of the six regions under a proportional and preferential voting system using the single transferable vote method. Each council region overlaps with a varying number of Assembly seats. Because of the proportional representation system in place as well as the malapportionment in favour of rural regions, the Legislative Council has traditionally been controlled by a coalition of the Liberal and National parties, and minor parties and independents have been more easily elected.[10]
Current distribution of seats
The current composition of the Legislative Council, elected at the 2021 state election, is as follows:
19 votes as a majority are required to pass legislation.
History
Western Australia's first representative parliament was the Legislative Council, first created in 1832 as an appointive body. Initially it consisted only of official members; that is, public officials whose office guaranteed them a place on the Council. The initial appointees were the Governor, James Stirling, the Senior Military Officer next in command to the Governor, Frederick Irwin, the Colonial Secretary, Peter Broun, the Surveyor-General, John Septimus Roe, and the Advocate-General, William Mackie. The Legislative Council first met on 7 February 1832.
Three years later, an attempt was made to expand the council by including four unofficial members to be nominated by the governor. However, the public demand for elected rather than nominated members was so great that implementation of the change was delayed until 1838.
In 1850, the BritishParliament passed an act, the Australian Constitutions Act 1850 (13 & 14 Vict. c. 59), that permitted the Australian colonies to establish legislative councils that were one-third nominated and two-thirds elected, but only under the condition that the colonies take responsibility for the costs of their own government. Because of this provision, Western Australia was slow to adopt the system. In 1867, the governor responded to public demand for representative government by holding unofficial elections and subsequently nominating each elected person to the council. Three years later, representative government was officially adopted and the Legislative council was changed to consist of 12 elected members and 6 members nominated by the governor. Suffrage was limited to landowners and those with a prescribed level of income.
When Western Australia gained responsible government in 1890, a bicameral system was adopted and the Legislative Council became a house of review for legislation passed by the popularly elected Legislative Assembly. This council consisted of 15 members, all nominated by the governor. However, it was provided that once the population of the colony reached 60,000, the Legislative Council would become elective. The colony was expected to take many years to reach a population of 60,000 but the discovery of the eastern goldfields and the consequent gold rush caused that figure to be reached by 1893. The constitution was then amended to make the Legislative Council an elective house of 21 seats, with three members to be elected from each of seven provinces. The first election to the council was held following the dissolution of parliament in June 1894.
This system was retained until 1962 when, over the next two years, the council was reformed, creating a series of two-member electorates. Members were elected for six years with provision for re-election of one every three years. Universal suffrage was also granted in order to bring the council into line with the assembly. This arrangement remained until 10 June 1987 when the Burke Labor government, with the conditional support of the National Party, introduced the present system of multi-member electorates and a method of proportional representation which is, however, 'weighted' to give extra representation to rural constituents. The legislation was made possible because the Australian Democrats in 1986 negotiated an election preference flow to Labor in return for an explicit undertaking on Legislative Council electoral reform, which resulted in the defeat of a number of Liberal councillors who were committed to opposing such reform.[11][12]
Until 2005 the state used a zonally weighted electoral system for both houses of parliament. In effect, this meant that the vote of a Perth voter counted for less than that of a rural voter. The difference was less marked in the Assembly than in the Legislative Council, whose metropolitan regions are numerically weighted so that up to two rural members are elected by the same number of votes needed to elect a single member from Perth. This style of weighting has not been adopted by any other Australian state.
While the Liberal Party and Labor Party were both advantaged and disadvantaged by this system, it strongly benefited the National Party. During the 1990s, Liberal Premier Richard Court considered changing the system along the lines of that in place in South Australia, but backed down in the face of National Party opposition.
Effective on 20 May 2005, for the election of members of the Legislative Council, the state was divided into six electoral regions by community of interest, three metropolitan and three rural, each electing six members to the Legislative Council.[2] The regions were defined geographically and functionally, and also included partial requirements for equal numbers of Legislative Assembly districts. However, all previously elected members remained until the following election on 6 September 2008.[2] Even with the reforms, rural areas are still significantly overrepresented. According to ABC election analyst Antony Green, the rural weighting is still significant enough that it is all but impossible for a Liberal premier in Western Australia to govern without National support, even if the Liberals win enough Legislative Assembly seats to theoretically allow them to govern alone.[13]
In 2021, the government passed a substantial reform of the council electoral system. Starting with the 2025 general election, all seats will be elected in a statewide electorate.[citation needed]
Malapportionment
While Perth accounts for 70% of the state's population, only 30% of the state's population is located in towns and small settlements across an area of over 2.6 million square kilometres outside the Perth metropolitan area.
However, until 2005, the state used a zonally weighted electoral system for both houses of parliament. In Legislative Council elections, this meant a vote in Perth was worth around 47% of a rural vote.
The WA Legislative Council is the last remaining State or Territory chamber in Australia to have a significant rural overweighting.
For example, the Mining and Pastoral Region has 16% of the average number of electors in the three metropolitan regions, which on paper gives Mining and Pastoral voters six times the voting power of those in the city of Perth. However, according to Green, the actual bias is greater due to historically lower turnout in the Mining and Pastoral region.[14][15]
Map of Legislative Council electoral districts in 1885
The Legislative Council Act 1870, which took effect the same year, created ten electoral districts for the Legislative Council, electing twelve members in total.[16] Three later acts of parliament (in 1874, 1883, and 1887) established four more electoral districts, created from the territory of existing districts.
In 1890, following the creation of the Legislative Assembly, the Legislative Council returned to being a completely appointed body, with 15 members. The Constitution Act Amendment Act 1893 was subsequently passed, taking effect in 1894, to provide for seven electoral provinces, each electing three members. Additional provinces were created in 1897 and 1900, and a further reorganisation occurred in 1950 (following the passage of the Electoral Districts Act 1947 establishing an independent electoral commission).
The Constitution Acts Amendment Act (No.2) 1963, effective from the 1965 state election, abolished the ten existing three-member provinces, replacing them with 15 two-member provinces. One new province was added at the 1977 state election. Some of the new provinces bore the same names as the previous provinces.
The Acts Amendment (Electoral Reform) Act 1987, which took effect at the 1989 state election, created six electoral regions to replace the previous electoral provinces. Initially, the South West and North Metropolitan regions each returned seven members, while the other regions each returned five.[17] This arrangement was changed to have each region return six members for the 2008 state election.
The current six regions of the Western Australian Legislative Council
From 2025: State-wide electorate
After the 2021 state election, in which the Labor Party won a majority in both houses of parliament, the state government formed a commission to explore reform to the Legislative Council electoral system.[18] The committee recommended the abolition of the six electoral regions in favour of a single state-wide electorate and the abolition of group voting tickets, among other changes.[19] The Electoral Legislation Amendment (Electoral Equality) Bill 2021 was passed in November 2021 and established a "one vote, one value" system in the Legislative Council for the first time. The electoral regions were abolished and replaced by a single state-wide electorate of 37 members, while GVTs were replaced by optional preferential voting. The changes will take effect in the 2025 state election.[5] Voters will be required to vote for one or more preferred parties above the dividing line on the ballot paper, or at least 20 candidates below the dividing line.[20][6]
↑ After the 2021 election, the Nationals and Liberals formed an opposition alliance. However, it is not a formal coalition and both parties maintain their independence from each other.
↑ Dawkins is a member of One Nation, but the party is not registered with the WA Electoral Commission and Dawkins sits as an independent.
The electoral system of Australia comprises the laws and processes used for the election of members of the Australian Parliament and is governed primarily by the Commonwealth Electoral Act 1918. The system presently has a number of distinctive features including compulsory enrolment; compulsory voting; majority-preferential instant-runoff voting in single-member seats to elect the lower house, the House of Representatives; and the use of the single transferable vote proportional representation system to elect the upper house, the Senate.
Electoral systems of the Australian states and territories are broadly similar to the electoral system used in federal elections in Australia.
The parliaments of the Australian states and territories are legislative bodies within the federal framework of the Commonwealth of Australia.
The Victorian Legislative Council (VLC) is the upper house of the bicameral Parliament of Victoria, Australia, the lower house being the Legislative Assembly. Both houses sit at Parliament House in Spring Street, Melbourne. The Legislative Council serves as a house of review, in a similar fashion to its federal counterpart, the Australian Senate. Although it is possible for legislation to be first introduced in the Council, most bills receive their first hearing in the Legislative Assembly.
The Western Australian Legislative Assembly, or lower house, is one of the two chambers of the Parliament of Western Australia, an Australian state. The Parliament sits in Parliament House in the Western Australian capital, Perth.
The Legislative Council, or upper house, is one of the two chambers of the Parliament of South Australia. Its central purpose is to act as a house of review for legislation passed through the lower house, the House of Assembly. It sits in Parliament House in the state capital, Adelaide.
The Parliament of Western Australia is the bicameral legislature of the Australian state of Western Australia, which constitutes the legislative branch of the state's political system. The parliament consists of the King, the Legislative Council and the Legislative Assembly. The two Houses of Parliament sit in Parliament House in the state capital, Perth.
The Parliament of South Australia is the bicameral legislature of the Australian state of South Australia. It consists of the 47-seat House of Assembly and the 22-seat Legislative Council. General elections are held every 4 years, with all of the lower house and half of the upper house filled at each election. It follows a Westminster system of parliamentary government with the executive branch required to both sit in parliament and hold the confidence of the House of Assembly. The parliament is based at Parliament House on North Terrace in the state capital of Adelaide.
A group voting ticket (GVT) is a shortcut for voters in a preferential voting system, where a voter can indicate support for a list of candidates instead of marking preferences for individual candidates. For multi-member electoral divisions with single transferable voting, a group or party registers a GVT before an election with the electoral commission. When a voter selects a group or party above the line on a ballot paper, their vote is distributed according to the registered GVT for that group.
The North Metropolitan Region is a multi-member electoral region of the Western Australian Legislative Council, located in the north-western and western suburbs of Perth. It was created by the Acts Amendment Act 1987, and became effective on 22 May 1989 with seven members who had been elected at the 1989 state election three months earlier. At the 2008 election, it was decreased to six members.
The South Metropolitan Region is a multi-member electoral region of the Western Australian Legislative Council, located in the southern suburbs of Perth, Western Australia. It was created by the Acts Amendment Act 1987, and became effective on 22 May 1989 with five members who had been elected at the 1989 state election three months earlier. At the 2008 election, it was increased to six members.
The 2008 Western Australian state election was held on Saturday 6 September 2008 to elect 59 members to the Legislative Assembly and 36 members to the Legislative Council. The incumbent centre-left Labor Party government, in power since the 2001 election and led since 25 January 2006 by Premier Alan Carpenter, was defeated by the centre-right Liberal Party opposition, led by Opposition Leader Colin Barnett since 6 August 2008.
This is a list of members of the Western Australian Legislative Council from 22 May 1986 to 21 May 1989. The chamber had 34 seats made up of 17 provinces each electing two members, on a system of rotation whereby one-half of the members would retire at each triennial election.
The Western Australian Legislative Council was elected from six multi-member electoral regions, which are in turn composed of electoral districts which are used to elect the Legislative Assembly. The current number of electoral regions was established on 22 May 1989. Initially, the South West and Northern Metropolitan regions returned seven members to the Legislative Council, while the other regions each returned five members. This arrangement was changed to have each region return six members for the 2008 Western Australian election, increasing the total number of members from 34 to 36. Before 1989 electoral divisions for the Legislative Council were known as electoral provinces.
The 2017 Western Australian state election was held on Saturday 11 March 2017 to elect members to the Parliament of Western Australia, including all 59 seats in the Legislative Assembly and all 36 seats in the Legislative Council. The eight-and-a-half-year two-term incumbent Liberal–WA National government, led by Premier Colin Barnett, was defeated in a landslide by the Labor opposition, led by Opposition Leader Mark McGowan.
The Western Australia Party (WAP) was a regional political party active in Western Australia.
The 2021 Western Australian state election was held on Saturday, March 13, to elect members to the Parliament of Western Australia, where all 59 seats in the Legislative Assembly and all 36 seats in the Legislative Council were up for election.
The 2022 South Australian state election was held on 19 March 2022 to elect members to the 55th Parliament of South Australia. All 47 seats in the House of Assembly, and half the seats in the Legislative Council were up for re-election.
The 2025 Western Australian state election is scheduled to be held on 8 March 2025 to elect members to the Parliament of Western Australia, where all 59 seats in the Legislative Assembly and all 37 seats in the Legislative Council will be up for election.
Wilson Robert Tucker is an Australian politician serving in the Western Australian Legislative Council for the Mining and Pastoral region. He was elected at the 2021 Western Australian state election for the Daylight Saving Party, with 98 primary votes, or 0.18% of the vote – believed to be the lowest primary vote for any politician elected to a parliament in Australia.
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