Ron Levy

Electoral Malapportionment: Partisanship, Rhetoric and Reform in the Shadow of the Agrarian Strong-Man

This article revisits the zonal malapportionment and ‘Johrymander’ endemic in Queensland’s electoral system before the Fitzgerald Inquiry and examines how reform was won. Fitzgerald spent little time justifying his intuition that an unfair electoral system eroded accountability, and devolved to the Electoral and Administrative Review Commission (EARC) the task of rewriting Queensland electoral law. It did so by adopting precepts well established in other Australian jurisdictions; the process was one of liberalising, but not groundbreaking, catch-up. The Queensland example is intriguing for the paradoxes it presented. Bjelke-Petersen’s electoral manipulations merged pretence with openness. The concept of zonal weighting was given historical and policy justifications and cloaked behind the work of putatively independent commissions, yet its inherent partisanship was a notorious fact. More curious still, the manipulations were unnecessary either as a means of maintaining the conservatives in office or as a legal subterfuge evading constitutional constraints. Rather, Bjelke-Petersen’s pointed rejection of democratic pluralism married with the projection of an image of leadership by right. Viewing Queensland’s zonal system in the larger perspective of manipulation of electoral maps, this article compares populist strongmen in South Australia (Playford) and Québec (Duplessis), who employed similar rhetoric to entrench themselves in power. Ultimately, as others had, Queensland’s government constructed a long-running but brittle form of agrarian chauvinism, in which the signalling of anti-democratic values inherent in the zonal system was an important rhetorical component. Bjelke-Petersen was proud to govern over, rather than through, democracy.

New Directions for Law in Australia

1 Professor, Law School, University of Queensland. 2 Joan Rydon, ‘The Electorate’ in John Wilkes (ed), Forces in Australian Politics (Angus & Robertson, 1963) 184. 3 Holmdahl v AEC (No 2) [2012] SASFC 110. See Anne Twomey, ‘Compulsory Voting in a Representative Democracy: Choice, Compulsion and the Maximisation of Participation in Australian Elections’ (2014) 13 Oxford University Commonwealth Law Journal 283. 4 Josh Butler, ‘David Leyonhjelm Proposes Abolishing Compulsory Voting’, Huffington Post, 2 March 2016 (Leyonhjelm is a libertarian senator). Voluntary Voting for Referendums in Australia: Old Wine, New BottleProof exists that Law Reform Commissions can still discharge a distinct and effective role in the reform of law and legal policy. In February 2017, some months after the essays that make up this important book were presented at an Australian National University Conference, the Attorney General issued terms of reference for an inquiry by the Australian Law Reform Commission (ALRC) into the incarceration rate of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. Judge Matthew Myers was appointed part time Commissioner, an expert advisory panel of academics and practitioners was installed, discussion paper drawing together the findings of previous inquiries was issued in July, 149 consultations were undertaken in the community, 121 submissions were received and by December an incisive and plainly written report analysing the causes and including 35 recommendations for reducing the rate of incarceration was delivered.Anyone looking at the Corporations Act 2001 (Cth) would be justified in thinking that company law in Australia was both wholly statutory and an instrument of public regulation. Although Anglo-Australian company law may have originally grown out of the law of partnership and been built, largely by the courts, from the material of the private law, the growth over the last 30 years in the complexity, range of matters covered and sheer volume of the Corporations Act would seem to confirm the intuition that Australia’s company law is now both statutory and public. However, while there is no denying the shift in the source of company law, the particular form corporate regulation now takes is actually making Australian company law more, rather than less, private.1 Professor, Faculty of Law, Monash University. 2 R v Birmingham & Gloucester Railway Co (1842) 3 QB 223. 3 US Department of Justice, ‘Siemens AG and Three Subsidiaries Plead Guilty to Foreign Corrupt Practices Act Violations and Agree to Pay

No More Excuses: Automated Synthesis of Practical and Verifiable Vote-Counting Programs for Complex Voting Schemes.

450 Million in Combined Criminal Fines’ (Press Release, 15 December 2008). Improving the Effectiveness of Corporate Criminal Liability: Old Challenges in a Transnational World1 Lecturer, Business School, Charles Darwin University; PhD candidate, School of Politics and International Relations, ANU. This research is supported by an Australian Government Research Training Program (RTP) Scholarship. 2 Australian Council of Social Service (ACOSS), Inequality in Australia 2015: A Nation Divided (Sydney, 2015) 8, www.acoss.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/Inequality_in_Australia_ FINAL.pdf (viewed 24 April 2016). 3 Factor income is the income arising from the factors of production – land, labour and capital. For the changes in shares over time, see Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS), ‘Income at Current Prices, December Quarter 2015’ in ABS, 5206.0 – Australian National Accounts: National Income, Expenditure and Product, Dec 2015, www.abs.gov.au/ausstats/ abs@.nsf/Latestproducts/ 5206.0Main%20 Features 4Dec%2

Erudite Primer to the Constitutional Practice of Deliberative Democracy

We argue that electronic vote-counting software can engender broad-based public trust in elections to public office only if they are formally verified against their legal definition and only if they can produce an easily verifiable certificate for the correctness of the count. We then show that both are achievable for the Schulze method of vote-counting, even when the election involves millions of ballots. We argue that our methodology is applicable to any vote-counting scheme that is rigorously specified. Consequently, the current practice of using unverified and unverifiable vote counting software for elections to public office is untenable. In particular, proprietary closed source vote-counting software is simply inexcusable.

Regulating Impartiality: Electoral Boundary Politics in the Administrative Arena

1Australian National University College of Law, Australia Constitutional Courts and Deliberative Democracy. Mendes, Conrado Hubner. (2013). Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013, . Mendess book offers a wide-ranging primer or literature review of constitutional aspects of what may be called the law of deliberative democracy (Levy, 2013). This cross-over field of scholarship unites deliberative and legal theory.