Labor’s parliament expansion plans could introduce 40 more MPs
https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/labor-s-plan-for-dozens-more-mps-could-bring-back-frydenberg-20260223-p5o4ls.html
Labor’s parliament expansion plans could introduce 40 more MPs
https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/labor-s-plan-for-dozens-more-mps-could-bring-back-frydenberg-20260223-p5o4ls.html
26 Comments
Can’t beat or stop independents, so just get more of your own to dilute their power.
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Cool might be able to get a job there
Good – allow more voices into our government, allows more people to be heard!
Last thing we need is more bloody politicians
At this stage it looks like the only way the Libs will get more MPs.
While more politicians doesn’t seem like a good solution to any problem, it kind of makes sense? Last time the parliament was expanded was under Hawke in 1983 and electorate populations have grown a lot since then.
It’s hard to see how it’s possible for a single member to represent an electorate when you have some that have over a hundred thousand people in them. I doubt this will change anything but it’s a reasonable idea.
Just what we need – more politicians
The classic paradox. People want more representation in parliament but don’t want more politicians.
Population has almost doubled since last expansion in 1983.
Canada has 340 MPs vs our current 150. For 40M v 27M.
This is reasonable. I hope they get cross-party support so it doesn’t become some populist football.
I’d like to see the quality of our politicians increase before we increase their numbers.
My local member is a bench warmer. She does precisely nothing as an MP, but is in a super safe Labor seat.
Paywalled, but this would likely only make cities/urban areas have more sway in Parliament right?
Not necessarily a bad thing, since that is where people mostly live.
A nicer headline would: Labor’s parliament expansion is a long overdue correction to four decades of population growth
I’m wondering whether a MMP style lower house may be worth considering. Or would that make things too complex?
This proposal doesn’t go far enough.
The House of Reps should be increased to at least 200 and the Senate to at least 100 (16 per state, 4 per territory). Even with 200 seats, the 5 Tasmania seats will be under quota.
It would be better to go to 224 in the House of Reps and 118 in the Senate (18 per state, 4 per state). This would give Tas approx 5 quotas, ACT 4 quotas and NT 2 quotas).
This is basically to help solve the Tasmania problem where they are required to have at least 5 MPs but the population is too small, causing imbalanced divisions. It’s a required change that’ll help make the HoR more proportioned to how people vote.
Finally! My road as politician will come into fruition!
People saying that it should rise with the population assume that the numbers were perfect in 83. Is that really a fair assumption? Since then technology has made it far easier to communicate with the electorate.
Whilst I would absolutely prefer an increase in the quality of our politicians, this proposed expansion actually does make SOME sense.
Before the 2020 redistribution, the AEC was considering crunching NT down to one seat despite its population being 260k (today), whilst Tasmania gets the minimum of 5 seats as a state despite its population being 576k (today’s population).
So, there is an obvious in balance there. Adding more seats makes maintaining a consistent ratio population and seats across the states and territories a bit easier.
40 more MP salaries ought to fix things.
FYI.
Tasmania – 412,000 enrolled voters, around 350 politicians across all levels of government.
ACT – 322,000 voters, 30 politicians in total.
Don’t need any more pigs in the trough
We feed enough of the useless fools.
Commentators have also pointed out expanding Senators to 14 per state instead of 12 means you elect 7 rather than 6 per election. This means that generally speaking there will be a 3/4 left/right split in either direction, which generally better represents the will of the people.
Most states have elected some variant of 3/3 splits irrespective of the fact that one state might lead several percentage points left/right to the other.
I heard earlier this week that Australia has the largest government bureaucracy in the world.
Sweet, we need more overpaid fuckheads running around.
Looking forward to seeing the reno bills on the house for this one. 40 more desks for a pack of rodents that only show up half the time.