Like quite a few other despairing commentators, I have, on occasions, referred to the Northern Territory as a “failed state”, most recently here:

“Until now, although holding grave fears about the quality of Northern Territory political governance under both the previous Labor government and the current CLP one, I have taken the optimistic view that things are bound to improve as the Territory grows and matures, and that therefore the self-government experiment is worth preserving. I have also felt that many of the deficiencies about which people complain also exist to a significant extent in other Australian States, it’s just that they are much more exposed and visible here because the population is so small. In a very real sense, the Northern Territory means the tiny city-state of Darwin whose population is around 140,000 people.

“Unfortunately, at the end of the day that is also the reason why self-government is an unsustainable failed experiment. Not only are there not enough people to provide a revenue base to support either the full bureaucratic apparatus of a State government or the necessary relatively sophisticated political establishment to make it efficient and accountable, but there aren’t even enough people to provide a sufficient number of talented politicians, apparatchiks or bureaucrats …”

When I raised the point again very recently in the wake of the CLP’s crushing election defeat by Labor, commenter Marks observed:

“I am not sure I buy into this Territory exceptionalism theme. I don’t see, for example, that the NT has worse governance than NSW. Or Queensland in the not so distant past.”

In one sense you can’t really argue with that, given Queensland’s political history especially under Sir Joh Bjelke-Petersen, and NSW’s 200-year history of Tammany Hall-style politics. But in recent years both those states seem to have lifted their games in terms of their quality of governance and accountability. New South Wales, for example, has an active and effective anti-corruption commission, rigorous political donations disclosure and regulation regime, and an upper house of Parliament. The Northern Territory has none of those mechanisms. The NT’s deficiencies in governance are longstanding and systemic, but capable of change for the better.

In my considered view, the Commonwealth imposed an inappropriate model of self-government in 1978 — the Northern Territory (Self-Government) Act — for a polity of the Territory’s size and stage of development, a model that entrenches single-member electorates, prohibits the co-opting of ministerial talent from outside the Parliament, lacks inbuilt accountability checks and balances, and largely ignores the key fact that Aboriginal people constitute one-third of the population, own half of the land and have a culture and material needs and aspirations that differ radically from those of the majority non-Aboriginal population.

By contrast, the other two tiny Australian polities, the ACT and Tasmania, do not exhibit the stark racial divide that is the most prominent feature of the Territory’s political culture and have both opted for multi-member electorates with MLAs elected by Hare-Clark proportional representation. That sort of system not only enhances diversity of political representation and encourages mature deliberation and constructive compromise, it also ensures significant continuity and stability of representation for the major parties (albeit at the price of  seldom achieving the sort of complete single-party domination, aka elected dictatorship, that the NT ALP will now enjoy for the next four years).

According to the NT Electoral Commission’s Two Candidate Preferred statistics, the ALP ended up with about 44.8% of the vote, CLP 30.9%, independents 15.7% and “Exhausted” (essentially the Greens, 1Territory and unsuccessful independents) 5.9%. Yet, because of the vagaries of the current system of single-member electorates combined with optional preferential voting, we have ended up with the ALP holding 18 of 25 seats, the CLP just two seats and the independents 5 seats.  Clearly the election has not resulted in political representation reflecting anything remotely like the expressed preferences of voters.

Moreover, this sort of drastically lopsided election outcome is quite common in NT political history.  Here are the results of each NT election since 1974 (pre-self-government) when the current voting system was introduced (except for optional preferential voting, which was unwisely enacted by the Giles government earlier this year) :

  • 1974: 19 seats — CLP 17, ALP 0, independents 2.
  • 1977: 19 seats — CLP 12, ALP 6, independents 1.
  • 1980: 19 seats — CLP 11, ALP 7, independents 1.
  • 1983: 25 seats — CLP 19, ALP 6, independents 0.
  • 1987: 25 seats — CLP 16, ALP 6, NT Nationals 1 (former CLP Chief Minister Ian Tuxworth), independents 2 (both CLP defectors).
  • 1990: 25 seats — CLP 14, ALP 9, independents 2.
  • 1994: 25 seats — CLP 17, ALP 7, independents 1.
  • 1997: 25 seats — CLP 18, ALP 7, independents 0.
  • 2001: 25 seats — ALP 13, CLP 10, independents 2.
  • 2005 : 25 seats — ALP 19, CLP 4, independents 2.
  • 2008: 25 seats — ALP 13, CLP 11, independents 1.
  • 2012: 25 seats — CLP 16, ALP 8, independents 1.
  • 2016: 25 seats — ALP 18, CLP 2, independents 5.

Labor’s two-party preferred vote for the decade before it finally won government for the first time in 2001 sat between 42% and 44%, and yet it typically managed to win only seven of the 25 seats in the Legislative Assembly. Conversely, in 2005 the CLP was reduced to just four out of 25 seats despite still achieving 40.19% 2PP, and in the 2016 was reduced to just two out of 25 seats despite a 2PP vote of 41.5% (to the extent that figure remains meaningful).

The key point for present purposes is that NT political history tells us that the current voting system regularly delivers very large disparities between votes cast and seats actually won, and regularly results in an opposition too weak numerically to provide effective opposition and therefore hold the government to account.

Moreover, the last 15 years have also produced extraordinary volatility with many seats (comparatively speaking) changing hands at each election. For the first 20 years after self-government in 1978, the accepted wisdom among pundits was that the tiny size of NT electorates (until recently well under 5000 voters) meant that political representation was remarkably stable because incumbency was critically important. MLAs could develop personal relationships with a high proportion of voters in their electorate and therefore were much more difficult to displace than in large states with much larger numbers of voters per electorate.

That truism is clearly no longer true. With the benefit of hindsight we can now see that it never was. MLAs retained their seats not because they were much more chummy with local voters than “down south” politicians, but predominantly because of a polarised public attitude towards Aboriginal land rights. White voters in Darwin, Alice Springs and Katherine mostly voted CLP because the party vehemently opposed all Aboriginal land claims, while Aboriginal voters in remote/bush seats mostly voted ALP for essentially the same reason.

*This article was originally published at Club Troppo. Read the rest at Crikey blog The Northern Myth