Unbridling the Tongues of Women - The University of Adelaide

Unbridling the tongues of women
She did make a contribution to the method of distributing preferences, however.
When the surplus votes, cast for a candidate who was already elected, were distributed
at full value, the results might be different if in counting, the preferences were
being taken from the top or the bottom of the pile to be distributed. Spence’s first
solution sounded like a recipe for plum pudding: ‘Let all voting papers from all polling-places
be well mixed together, and then take the votes as they come to hand’. 64
By 1894, she had decided, as have later generations of Australians voting in elections
for the Australian Senate, that such random distribution in a large election stood
little chance of unjustly affecting the results. However in 1894 she adopted a suggestion
made by her friend Annie Martin, to give fractional values to all preferences
but the first, unknowingly echoing the system devised by J. B. Gregory in 1882, and
anticipating its implementation in Tasmania in the 20 th century. 65 This then formed
the Hare-Spence system of proportional representation, embodied in a bill submitted
to the South Australian parliament almost every year from 1902 until 1910. 66
Such technical difficulties clearly indicate why Spence’s campaigns never achieved
their goals. Proportional representation might be the ‘fairest’ electoral system that a
democracy can devise. However as recently as 1980, an Australian Senator observed,
‘It is an unfortunate fact, but still a fact, that the fairness of electoral systems has
a direct relationship to their complexity’. 67 A political scientist noted, earlier, that
‘Without compulsion, it is possible that the numbers voting would have fallen
heavily in protest at difficult and complicated voting methods: e.g. Proportional
Representation in Senate elections’. 68 A different analysis, sharing some of the concerns
expressed by the Reform Movement in South Australia in the early 1890s,
might contend that elections, fair or otherwise, are only one of several ways in which
states and their policies can be shaped in capitalist economies. However for Spence,
electoral reform became a creed: it was the necessary condition for the elevation, educational
and spiritual, as well as economic, of all humanity. That conviction dominated
the last 20 years of her life, becoming so familiar that it was like a habit, so
strong that it threatened to make her a bore, but it was also the means by which she
realised her childhood’s ambition for greatness. On the platform, Spence achieved an
even more important independence from the constraints of a patriarchal social order
than she had as a journalist. Moreover, on the platform, she was there to hear when
people applauded and cheered.
This they did, throughout her campaign of 1892-93. The Reform Movement
offered support: its paper Voice reported meetings she addressed; Medway Day as-
134