We moan about them, complain they don’t work hard enough. But Australia has a shortage of federal MPs. For democracy’s sake, we need more.
There are a few things that attract almost universal condemnation. Try saying in a polite crowd that interest rates are too low or that Scott Morrison should have taken on more secret ministries and then prepare yourself for opprobrium that would drown out an MCG-sized crowd.
When prime minister Billy Hughes, who still holds the record as the nation’s longest-serving federal member of parliament, was first elected in 1901, there were 75 MPs. As the member for West Sydney, he represented 14,661 voters. When he died in 1952, serving as the member for Bradfield, he was representing 43,800 voters.
Federal parliament’s longest-served MP, Billy Hughes, represented 14,300 voters when he was first elected in 1901. By his death in 1952, he was representing 43,800.Every seat in Victoria and NSW is – on average – home to about 110,000 voters and more than 170,000 residents. The seats of Durack in Western Australia and Lingiari in the Northern Territory span such incredible distances both are larger than Peru, while Victoria’s largest seat, Mallee, is the size of Austria.
In rural and remote electorates, where our national growth patterns mean they get larger as urban centres swell, these sprawling seats increasingly bring with them their own dangers. The last substantial increase to the parliament was in 1984 when Bob Hawke upped the number of electorates from 125 to 148 . Australia’s population has grown by 10 million since then.
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