Activist judge supports WA Labor Party's hypocritical vote challenge

After WA Attorney General, Jim McGinty, was rebuffed by the state Full Court in his attempts to ram through parliament his hypocritical “one-vote one-value” legislation to reduce the country representation in WA’s parliament, he took his case to the High Court. In a decision handed down last week the High Court supported the Supreme Court contention that the legislation was illegal. In a dissenting judgement in the High Court's 5-1 ruling, Australia's leading activist judge, Justice Michael Kirby got on his judicial high horse and declared that WA's laws appear to breach United Nations rulings on the fundamental rights of citizens to equal political participation. Justice Kirby went right over the top when he compared the alleged breaches with a recent finding of the UN Human Rights Committee on the unequal voting system in Zimbabwe.

The WA Labor party has been chanting its “one-vote one-value” mantra for years and yet is one of Australia's most undemocratic institutions. The stand-over merchants of the union movement have little concept of fairness or democracy yet they control 50 per cent of the voting power of the Australian Labor Party. This is not one-vote one-value. But it is how the Labor party is controlled and run. WA's electoral laws were designed to prevent the heavily populated metropolitan area dominating the sparsely populated farming, mining and pastoral areas, by giving extra weighting to the farming and outback areas.

McGinty's hypocrisy was exposed when it was revealed he only wanted to reduce the weighting of the Liberal/National farming areas and leave untouched the mining and pastoral areas held by the Labor Party.

Australian Constitution provides for vote weighting

Both Kirby and McGinty overlook the fact that the Australian Constitution provides for vote weighting. When the founding fathers drew up the Australian constitution they considered that fair representation by the less populous states was more important than equal representation when electors voted for Senators. The Constitution provides for an equal number of Senators for each state, regardless of population.

Each state is currently represented by twelve senators. The ACT and the Northern Territory have two senators each. Although the Senate was originally conceived as a states house, today it makes, amends and blocks laws according to the dictates of the party machines, with little regard to the interests of the states. 

One Northern Territory vote worth 14 NSW votes

At the 2001 federal election it required 670,287 votes to win a Senate seat in NSW while a WA candidate required only 191,923 votes to win a seat, thus making one WA vote worth 3.49 NSW votes.

A Northern Territory candidate required only 47,851 votes to win a Senate seat, amazingly  making one NT vote 14 NSW votes. 

Does Justice Kirby regard the Australian Senate as undemocratic as the Zimbabwe regime?

What Kirby said

"Those who think otherwise should familiarise themselves with the findings of the HR concerning the electoral laws of regimes with which Australia  would not normally wish to be compared" he said.