According to reporting in the Sydney Morning Herald today, and from other conversations with journalists, it sounds like the federal Labor government is on the verge of announcing a plan to expand the size of the parliament prior to the 2028 federal election.
Such a decision is to be welcomed, and I have been strongly advocating for this for a while. You can read all my posts on this topic here.
In my submission last year, I made a modest recommendation that the Parliament should be expanded to 14 senators per state. That seems to be where Labor is likely to go, based on today’s reporting.
But since I wrote that submission, I have come around to the idea that if we’re going to expand the Parliament, we should go bigger, with at least 16 senators per state.
In particular, Travis Jordan’s paper for the Electoral Regulation Research Network laid out the scale of under-representation.
Expanding the parliament is a very rare occurence. The first expansion took place 48 years after the federal parliament was established. The second took place 35 years later. If this expansion kicks in at the 2028 federal election, it will have been 44 years.
If expansions happen only once every 40 years, we may not see another expansion until around 2070. I will be in my eighties by then.
It is a rare moment when a government recognises the need to have a parliamentary expansion. There is a lot pushing back on it, both populist opposition to more politicians, but also politicians who see that a larger parliament is likely harder for political leaders to control. I doubt we will see another expansion soon.
It is also a large exercise to redraw the electoral map for the five mainland states.
The 1949 expansion increased the number of senators per state from 6 to 10 – a 67% increase. The 1984 expansion was a 20% increase. If we were to bump up the size of the parliament by two senators per state, that would be an increase of 16.7%. An increase of four senators would be about 33%.
I expect there will be some pushback from a parliamentary expansion, but I doubt it will make much difference as to whether that expansion is for 14 senators or 16. But I think it will make a big difference to improving representation.
An expansion from 12 to 14 senators would likely increase the number of seats in the House from 150 to 175. An expansion to 16 senators would bump up the House to about 200.
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So I am calling on the government to raise its ambitions, and put forward legislation to elect at least 16 senators per state.