A Short Remark on A Tradeoff
Posted by Jacques Chester on Tuesday, October 31, 2006
At some point in the future, the Northern Territory will be admitted to the Commonwealth of Australia is a State. The Self-Government Act will be swept aside and replaced by a Constitution of some kind.
Before this august day arrives, however, I expect that every man, woman, child and greenie and their dogs will line up to try and write their pet cause into that Constitution.
Here’s one of mine; a modest proposal designed to balance the interests of tax payers and tax consumers:
Income and payments from the Government, or a vote: pick one.
With a population of just over 200,000, the Northern Territory Legislative Assembly is composed of 25 MLAs. Each MLA represents between 3,000 and 5,000 voters. Numerically, the Assembly is dominated by Darwin and its outlying areas. And these areas have very high proportions of NT Government employees, often in the vicinity of 10% and above.
Such employees can form a solid bloc of voters in any election where the numbers, entitlements or wages of NT Government employees are at stake. Indeed the ALP campaign in 2000 emphasised that there would be no redundancies under the ALP, and this has been delivered in spades with a rapid expansion of the NTPS.
NT Government employees even exceed the margin in some seats, as this table shows:
| NT Public Servants and electoral margins compared, election 2004. | |||
| Seat | NTPS | Margin | Held By |
|---|---|---|---|
| Arafura | 7.5% | 14% | Scrymgour, ALP |
| Araluen | 19.5% | 4% | Carney, CLP |
| Arnhem | 9.3% | 17.2% | McCarthy, ALP |
| Barkly | 14.8% | 21.4% | McAdam, ALP |
| Blain | 17.2% | 1.9% | Mills, CLP |
| Braitling | 20.6% | 0.9% | Braham, IND |
| Brennan | 15.3% | 1.9% | Burke, ALP |
| Casuarina | 25.4% | 16% | Vatskalis, ALP |
| Daly | 13.9% | 3% | Knight, ALP |
| Drysdale | 11.6% | 1.3% | Natt, ALP |
| Fannie Bay | 17.8% | 15.8% | Martin, ALP |
| Goyder | 16.7% | 1.5% | Warren, ALP |
| Greatorex | 19.1% | 1.4% | Lim, CLP |
| Johnston | 18.3% | 5% | Burns, ALP |
| Karama | 18.6% | 17% | Lawrie, ALP |
| Katherine | 18.1% | 2.7% | Miller, CLP |
| MacDonnell | 7.4% | 1.7% | Anderson, ALP |
| Millner | 13.4% | 2.7% | Bonson, ALP |
| Nelson | 13.9% | 6.6% | Wood, IND |
| Nhulunbuy | 13.8% | 16% | Stirling, ALP |
| Nightcliff | 20.3% | 15.5% | Aagaard, ALP |
| Port Darwin | 13.1% | 1% | Sacilotto, ALP |
| Sanderson | 23.9% | 8.4% | Kiely, ALP |
| Stuart | 7.1% | 21% | Toyne, ALP |
| Wanguri | 21.5% | 20.8% | McCarthy, ALP |
| Source: NT Electoral Office |
|||
Out of the 25 seats, only 5 have margins larger than the number of NT Government employees. 4/5ths of the seats in the NT Legislative Assembly can be swung by public servants voting together. The other 5 seats are all safe ALP seats, more dominated by a traditional strength of the ALP amongst indigenous voters than public servants.
Now it’s not perfectly clear that public servants would always vote with their hip pocket. Like any voter, motives can be a quite complex interplay of loyalties, personal beliefs, habit, passion and apathy. But it would be foolish to suppose that NT Government employees would not have a special interest in maintaining the status quo: in the NT average weekly earnings in the public sector are $1039 for a fulltime adult worker and $983 for their private counterpart (source: ABS 6302.0 table 14G). The NTG employee enjoys more holidays, more generous allowances, are much harder to dismiss than private sector employees (a gap which has widened under WorkChoices) and so on.
Is it any wonder that public servants might wish to vote to protect their superior pay, conditions and security?
But this presents a conundrum for anyone who might seriously want to slim down the size of the NT Government. It lures people away from the private sector and encourages governments to look for new taxes and charges to fund their public sector largess. But any politician who so much as mutters quietly is likely to be voted down into oblivion, regardless of any other merits.
My solution is to present citizens with a tradeoff between payment and voting. Those who receive government stipends, wages, payments and such like would be barred from voting, on the basis that they have a conflict of interest. In practical terms it removes the political incentive to play pork politics. There would be zero gain in votes any time the service was expanded, and much less political risk in reducing its size (bearing in mind that family members might be voting).
In theory this would allow some more objectivity to enter policies affecting the size, wages and conditions of the NTPS. There would still be the usual shennanigans of capital works tenders, grants for this group and that club, but such special interests are by far much more diversified than a massively influential public service with coincident interests.
There you have it: an idea to sink any party game enough to try it on. I have some more to try out on the unsuspecting readers of Troppo, but I’ll wait until this little missive has had its day.
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This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 31st, 2006 at 8:03 AM and filed under Libertarian Musings, Politics - Northern Territory.
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15 Responses to “A Short Remark on A Tradeoff”
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Of course, you’d also have to disenfranchise the vast majority of indigenous Territorians (30% of the population), because many perhaps even most of them are on some form of government benefits. And age and invalid pensioners, and those on sole parent benefit, Austudy, Newstart and so on.
And if your broader principle is that people who may have a vested interest in voting for a particular party which (allegedly) favours a set of policies which advantage the public sector, why should we not (equally in the interests of eliminating voters who might have a vested interest in voting for a particular party which favours a specific set of of policies which advantage that group of voters) also disenfranchise all participants in motor sports (because the CLP advocates the resuscitating the Cannonball Run), all participants in gun sports (because the CLP advocates legalising paintball), and all people who have drivers licences (because the CLP appears to oppose moves to impose a mandatory speed limit, demerit points etc even though these initiatives are apparently being imposed at the behest of the Howard government)? Why sould we regard some vested interests as warranting disenfranchisement but not others? If we eliminate everyone with a vested interest that might appear to some to militate in favour of their voting for a particular party (even though in fact many of these people vote for other parties), elections would be very simple to administer: there would only be half a dozen or so Territorians eligible to vote. It wouldn’t be democratic, but it would certainly be cheap.
Posted on 31-Oct-06 at 8:38 am | PermalinkIn answer to your original question, my “broader principle” is to strengthen the rights of tax payers and to reduce incentives to pork barrel.
While I appreciated that most excellent slippery slopery which followed, your reply raises a more important legal issue that I did not consider.
That is, the interaction between this proposal and Ss 7 & 30 of the Australian Constitution. Can state votes be disentangled from federal votes?
The other thing you may noticed that I did not address is that in reality, Territorians in the private sector are not paying anything near the wages bill of the public sector. It’s coming from elsewhere, so it could be argued that such a system is pointless when voting patterns are upset by the “silos” of state bounaries.
Posted on 31-Oct-06 at 9:16 am | PermalinkJC,
NT will only become a state when it has the population to make it so which means never
Posted on 31-Oct-06 at 11:39 am | PermalinkThat goes against political equity; enfranchisement is a base right of being an individual under the jurisdiction of a government. A limit on the size of government would be better dealt with by some entrenched act, requiring a super-majority to be repealed, that stipulates the maximum size, or boundaries, of government.
Posted on 31-Oct-06 at 12:01 pm | PermalinkI think Ken said it all. Fun post Jacque but not really a sensible idea. What would make much more sense to me than disenfranchising those who have a real stake in an election is disenfranchising those who do not. I am talking about voluntary voting.
Posted on 31-Oct-06 at 12:17 pm | Permalinkdogs - write - pet quote. pet.dogs.
beautiful
Posted on 01-Nov-06 at 10:11 am | PermalinkIt’s an interesting theory, especially where it argues that individual snouts in the public trough are evil but corporate snouts in the public trough are not. It would be interesting to count up the number of shareholders, employees and subcontractors (with their own shareholders, employees and subcontractors) and see what excluding them form the electorate would do.
It goes without saying I assume you’d ban all advertising by government as a blatant attempt by the current trough-holders (and their advertising and media consultants with their attendant lordships of shareholders, employees and subcontractors) to keep their snouts up where they want them to stay.
Posted on 01-Nov-06 at 12:54 pm | PermalinkAlan;
I did give consideration to that problem before penning this wildly unpopular ditty. But more than anything it just highlights the way the state has entangled itself in every aspect of our lives. In much the same way that every drop of water I drink has been urinated out of something during the life of the planet, every movement I make and every dollar I spend has been touched, regulated, or spent by the state before I got there.
To put it another way, how far can this scheme be pushed? Is it applied only to wage-earners, as my proposal above implies? Or can it be extended to those who get FTBs or work for companies on the public tit?
I suppose what I’m trying to say is that I’m not saying “individual snouts in the public trough are evil but corporate snouts in the public trough are not”. I’m just choosing the simplest workable scheme based on the principle that conflicts of interests exist not just in the private sphere, but every time a person reliant on the state goes to vote.
Cheers.
Posted on 01-Nov-06 at 1:04 pm | PermalinkI must also add that I’m surprised nobody has hauled me up on the squillions of typos, grammos and other errors in the piece.
Take for example this gem: “With a population of just over 200,000, the Northern Territory Legislative Assembly is composed of 25 MLAs”
Probably should have read “the Northern Territory’s” to avoid the confusion about a 200,000 person Assembly being composed of 25 people.
Posted on 01-Nov-06 at 1:06 pm | PermalinkI utterly condemn without equivocation or tergiversation of any kind the sqzuillhions of tyjpos, gramlmos and others exxxrrors in the piece.
More (or possibly less, seriously) I do not why see why the test of simplicity allows you to escape private sector conflicts of interest while repressing public sector conflicts of interests. The test of simplicity (the simplest workable scheme) is a nothing argument. Shooting everyone charged with murder is the simplest workable scheme for dealing with such cases, but has little else to recommend its adoption.
Posted on 01-Nov-06 at 1:46 pm | PermalinkAlan;
Taking the position that my scheme is the “simplest possible”, how would you go on to generalise it?
Posted on 01-Nov-06 at 1:52 pm | PermalinkJacques
The Australian Constitution forbids politicians from holding offices of profit under the Crown (or contracts with it), because politicians are meant as far as possible to represent the public interest and not their own private ones. However, that isn’t and can never be true of the general voting public. We not only can but must project our private interests in the voting decisions we make. Thus, once you attempt to contruct an argument for disenfranchising people who hold some particular sorts of self-interest while treating other sorts of self-interest totally differently, you instantly and unavoidably tie yourself in inextricable logical knots.
In fact, as I observed in my initial rather flippant comment, people don’t generally vote in accordance with any one particular aspect of self-interest anyway, because we all have lots of aspects to our self-interest, not to mention broader belief systems that don’t even flow from narrow self-interest at all. Hence the NT CLP had little difficulty in garnering the majority of public servants’ votes over 23 years of unbroken rule, despite several purges to public service numbers during that time. Their/your best prospect of getting back into government is to stop navel-gazing with silly plans like this one (or for that matter advocating a resumption of the Cannonball Run or whatever), and start presenting positive, sensible mainstream economic policies while forcefully pointing out the Martin government’s failings. Jodeen Carney doesn’t do a bad job of the latter, but she’s essentially a one woman band as things currently stand. It isn’t healthy for democratic accountability. I hope you’re not still working for David Tollner and filling his cavernous cranial spaces with nonsense ideas like this post, or God help us all.
Posted on 01-Nov-06 at 5:12 pm | PermalinkKen;
I am not a member of the CLP (nor have I ever been a member of any party), I don’t work for any politician, and this is all my own work, right down to the grammatical errors and general atmosphere of tentativeness. As you know I resigned from student politics at the beginning of this year - that also included declining to join the CLP.
Now that I think about it more, I think that cam’s was the best reply. As usual the underlying problem is not this law or that legislator, but rather the power of the state in the first place.
I suppose that the genesis of my “what if?” in this direction was the famous old chestnut, usually attributed to Alexander Tytler:
Posted on 01-Nov-06 at 5:22 pm | PermalinkJacques:
You’re actually reviving an ancient argument from the century before last. In colonial NSW, for example, there were stern arguments that shopkeepers and the like could not be JPs (when local government in the colony essentially consisted of a meeting of all local JPs) because they would favour their customers over others. Roughly the same argument was mounted at every debate over expanding the franchise or paying MPs.
I think it was most succinctly stated by the late Russ Hinze, who once said the ALP are always in favour of integrity reforms (not his actual words) because, and I quote:
‘If you shook the whole ALP caucus upside down, you’d be lucky to get 20 cents between the lot of them.’
Posted on 01-Nov-06 at 5:30 pm | PermalinkAs Max Gillies’ impression of Q’ld racing Minster Russ Hinze once remarked:
Posted on 03-Nov-06 at 10:52 am | Permalink