Australian Politics and Policy - Senior, 2019a

New South Wales
parliament as the final consent authority for redistributions in 1949. Currently,
the commissioners for a redistribution are a judge of the Supreme Court (past or
current), the electoral commissioner and the surveyor-general. Redistributions are
automatically triggered after every second general election, if more than a quarter
ofelectoraldistrictsdonothaveanequalnumberofvotersorifthereisachangein
the number of members of the Legislative Assembly. 21
As in most other states, for many years non-Labor and Labor governments
alike used zonal systems to attempt to maximise their chances of election by
manipulating the numbers of votes required to elect a representative from Sydney,
regional areas around Sydney and rural areas. Reforms by the Wran ALP government
in 1979 abolished the long-term over-representation of rural voters in the
Assembly. In 1991, the government’s right to call an early election was replaced by
a fixed four-year electoral term, with elections held every four years on the fourth
Saturday in March. These changes were entrenched in the NSW constitution, so
they cannot be repealed without a referendum. 22
Until the 1980s, election candidates raised their own campaign funds and were
not required to reveal who had provided them with funding. In 1981, NSW passed
the first laws in Australia providing for public funding of elections and public
disclosure of political donations. Within a few years, public funding of candidates
winning 4 per cent or more of the vote proved relatively uncontroversial. 23 By
contrast, public disclosure of the sources and sizes of election donations has
become an increasingly contentious and complex issue over the past decade. The
controversies began with claims that some donors and candidates had used
loopholes in the rules to disguise their funding arrangements, or had simply broken
the rules without detection or punishment. Recent efforts by a series of NSW
governments to ban contributions from particular types of donors, including
property developers, to cap contributions from other donors and to restrict the
amount that candidates can spend on campaigns have been highly contentious and
subject to legal challenges. How much influence election donations buy and how
such donations should be regulated are ongoing questions in NSW. 24
The political contest
The political contest in NSW since the advent of representative and responsible
government in 1856 can be divided into five broad eras: faction politics in the
early colonial period; a late colonial period dominated by Free Traders and
Protectionists; an unstable contest between Labor and anti-Labor parties from the
21 Clifford, Green and Clune 2006; Parker 1978; Smith 2003.
22 Twomey 2004.
23 Turner 1985.
24 Gauja 2012.
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