British political arrangements helped shape the birth of Australian democracy in 1901. But modern Australia has evolved a far more sophisticated and advanced model of representative democracy. Patrick Dunleavy argues that it is Australia’s constitutional and political systems that now hold key lessons for the UK.

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Australian democracy is unique in the world. Not only is voting compulsory for every adult citizen, but when voting people must indicate multiple preferences, not just their top one. Arguably this demanding model has helped give the country 30 years of continuous economic growth, effective government and only very limited political polarisation.

Australia’s parliament is also a bi-cameral democratic one, meaning different voting systems are used in the lower and upper houses to create a remarkably balanced representative system. Competition between the top two parties in the lower house fuels periodic shifts in government policies, forestalling any democratic sclerosis. But simultaneously a genuinely diverse elected upper house acts as a moderating policy-improving  influence.  So how might these same two lessons transfers to the UK?

In the Alternative Vote (AV) used to elect the House of Representatives  voters must number preferences across at least five candidates.

Count multiple preferences, not just top ones

In order to cast a “formal” (i.e. effective) ballot in Australian elections, voters have to set out multiple preferences. Combined with compulsory voting, this means that everyone’s vote counts in some way to shape who gets elected. And if a voter’s top party choice is not going to shape the final outcome, then their second and subsequent preferences are still involved.

In the Alternative Vote (AV) used to elect the House of Representatives  voters must number preferences across at least five candidates. If no one wins a majority outright, the bottom-ranked candidate is eliminated, and their voters’ second preferences are reallocated. The process continues until a majority endorses someone – which occurs automatically at the stage when only two candidates are left in the local race (the Two-Party Preferred stage). AV has ensured the top two parties ( Liberal-National and Labor) have always dominated the lower house, and only they have ever formed a government – but always with a national Two Party Preferred (TPP)majority. In 2022 Labor won the federal election despite getting just 33 per cent of primary (first choice) votes – because at the TPP stage it won 52 per cent by gaining second or later preference support from the Greens and others. (The Senate is also elected via a system (STV) that counts multiple preferences ).

Could the UK count second preferences in the same way as Australia?

To see what a difference this makes to governing, compare the current positions of the UK and Australian PMs. Kier Starmer won a “loveless landslide” with just 34 per cent support at the July 2024 multi-party general election. Thanks to “Labour sleaze” scandals and cutting winter fuel payments to OAPS he has subsequently seen government  poll rating collapse further to 28 per cent (almost on a par with the just-defeated Tories), and the government’s low legitimacy prompted a petition for another general election purportedly signed by over 2 million UK people. In Australia Anthony Albanese of Labor similarly won power in 2022 on just 33 per cent of first preference votes, and that has fallen since to just 30 to 27 per cent now, apparently far behind the Liberal-Nationals on 37 per cent. But Albanese’s  TPP support in polls remains quite close to the Coalition, at 48-49 per cent to their 51-52 per cent, thanks to backing from the Greens voters and others. That information is vital for good governance, and for Labor’s understanding of its chances at the upcoming 2025 federal election.

Clegg’s folly led directly to the Tories’ subsequent 2018 move to scrap SV and reinstate first-past-the-post voting for mayoral and police commissioner elections, a regressive change that Labour has still not promised to reverse.

Could the UK count second preferences in the same way as Australia? In 2011 the Liberal Democrats under Nick Clegg comprehensively wrecked the best chance of doing so by forcing an ill-prepared AV referendum onto the coalition PM David Cameron, and then ham-fistedly neglecting to explain how its considerable system complications would be handled. UK voters responded by voting 2 to 1 against AV, with many seeing it as just a LibDem plot to engineer their own success. The referendum might have been won if only Clegg had chosen the well-understood and far simpler Supplementary Vote system – an X-voting model for top 2 preferences only, that was successfully used since 2000 for the London mayor and all other mayoral and police commissioner elections in England and Wales over decades. SV guarantees that only one of the top two candidates on first preferences can win, and might have gained Labour’s strong support (as it had for mayoral elections) and been crystal-clear to voters. Instead, Clegg’s folly led directly to the Tories’ subsequent 2018 move to scrap SV and reinstate first-past-the-post voting for mayoral and police commissioner elections, a regressive change that Labour has still not promised to reverse.

Yet counting multiple preferences at elections is still growing slowly in the UK. The devolved legislature in Scotland and Wales and the Greater London Assembly all have been elected since 2000 using a kind of ‘double first preference system’ (the Additional Member System, AMS)  that at least allows voters to support different parties in local constituencies and bigger top-up areas, with a third to two fifths “splitting their tickets”. Northern Ireland uses STV for all elections and Scotland introducing STV for local government elections in 2004. This autumn the Welsh Senedd has proposed to bring in a well-designed STV voting system for its elections. (Some Welsh councils may also adopt STV, despite needing  a very high (67 per cent) vote in councils to scrap FPTP).  

Something radical like SV will also surely be needed for increasingly multi-party Westminster elections.

Electing an upper house to constrain and stabilize policy-making

The Government’s  extraordinarily timid pseudo-reforms to finally scrap the last inherited peers in the Lords, and perhaps in future make peers retire at 80 (while still being allowed to  use Lords facilities) fall far short of the radical reforms urgently needed in the UK. These trivial changes do absolutely nothing about the wider corruption of the chamber, now grossly inflated to 850+ members by 14 years of successive Tory PMs’  malversation appointments of donors, spies, hacks and the PM’s undisclosed relatives to life-long legislator status. Instead, Labour aides have repeatedly floated “trial balloon” stories that Starmer plans to inflate the Lords’ size even more, by appointing up to 200 “working peers”, allegedly needed to get more controversial legislation through. Ironically, this option has been prevented so far by the PM’s failure to reform UK public life standards (including Lords appointments) and the growth of “Labour sleaze” scandals over large donors getting favours.

Thanks to STV, the top two Australian parties have almost never commanded an overall Senate majority in modern times.

Labour’s repeated epic fails over decades on Lords reform are driven almost solely by an utterly unfounded  conviction that an elected upper chamber cannot feasibly be combined with House of Commons sovereignty in a Westminster system. Yet the Australian Senate shows this fixed idea is completely false. Senators are elected by an STV version in 6-member state-wide districts, where again citizens must vote by either endorsing a whole party’s list of candidates (“voting above the line”), or instead numbering 12 individual candidates in their own preference order from different parties (which many do). Every state (big and small) has the same number of seats, so that nationally the Senate is deliberately “malapportioned”. Yet the distribution of Senate seats between parties has often eerily matched national patterns in how people voted in Senate elections – in particular ensuring that many more smaller parties and independents have won seats, thus representing far better the diversity of modern public opinion.

Thanks to STV, the top two Australian parties have almost never commanded an overall Senate majority in modern times. And so they have had to negotiate their legislation (and even some executive actions) through the revising chamber, creating a powerful but constrained moderating influence that has improved the quality of Australian legislation and policy-making, and helped stem the potential for elective dictatorship that otherwise often curses Westminster systems. The Senate’s checks and balances powers have clearly been valued by Australian voters, many of whom vote differently for the upper chamber to prevent single party dominance of Parliament.

The Wakeham Commission on Lords Reform under Blair commissioned but then totally ignored a detailed report on alternative ways of electing the Lords  that is still apt reading for today.

Could the UK elect a similar Senate, a smaller policy-moderating body of around 100 to 200 members, chosen in national constituencies in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, and in regional areas within England? The Wakeham Commission on Lords Reform under Blair commissioned but then totally ignored a detailed report on alternative ways of electing the Lords (by Helen Margetts and me) that is still apt reading for today. It showed how an STV-elected chamber could complement the Commons’ erratic landslides, generating a far more diverse picture of what voters want, and stabilizing UK democracy to cure contemporary imbalances for good.

Australia’s sophisticated and evolving democracy is working well, and public support has grown more supportive of liberal democratic values

Conclusions

Australia’s sophisticated and evolving democracy is working well, and public support has grown more supportive of liberal democratic values as Figure 1 shows. By contrast, the  two countries used as founding models in 1901 have seemingly both descended further into decline – with over-polarization and extraordinary democratic backsliding in the USA, and chronic, so far unrelieved governance failure in the UK. Shifting voting systems to count at least first and second preferences and electing an upper chamber to create constitutional balance on the Australian model are the top practicable reforms for the UK, with many more detailed design lessons also.

Source: Evans, M; Dunleavy, P; and Phillimore, J. (eds) Australia’s Evolving Democracy, LSE Press, 2024. Figure 28.9, from Lowry Institute data.
Note: Respondents were asked to choose one of the three statements in Figure.

All articles posted on this blog give the views of the author(s), and not the position of LSE British Politics and Policy, nor of the London School of Economics and Political Science.

Image credit: EQRoy in Shutterstock

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