Tasmanian Legislative Council - History

History

The Tasmanian Legislative Council was first created in 1825 as a unicameral legislature. The Australian Colonies Act passed by the British Parliament gave Van Diemens Land a free government when it split from New South Wales effectively granting nationhood to the colony under the British Crown and Privy Council. Starting as a body with six nominee members chosen by the Governor of Tasmania, an Imperial Act in 1828 enabled its expansion to 15 members, with the Governor as Presiding Officer.

The Council remained fully nominative until 21 October 1851, when the council was expanded to 24 members, with sixteen of them facing the voters and eight nominated by the Governor, who ceased to be a member. The first Speaker of the new Council was Sir Richard Dry. The franchise for these elections was extremely limited—only men over 30 could vote, and were required to own a certain amount of property. Former convicts, who made up a significant percentage of the colony's population, were not able to vote. The 1851 arrangements were a compromise struck by the Governor between the colonists' demands for representative government and the Colonial Office's wish to control the colony through the Governor.

On 24 October 1856, an Act was proclaimed permitting the introduction of a bicameral, representative Parliament with the creation of the Tasmanian House of Assembly, where the power of the executive government resided, and the abolition of nominee positions on the Council. The Speaker's position was renamed President. An interesting feature of the Act is that it does not enable the Governor to dissolve the Legislative Council.

Like other democratic upper houses of that period, it was established using single-member seats elected using the first-past-the-post system, with Hobart and Launceston being created as multi-member seats. Voters would simply cross off the names of those whom they did not wish to vote for. Members were elected to a six-year term, and terms were staggered in such a way that two or three members' terms expired each year and elections were held in the first week of May. In the event of resignation or death of a member during their term, a by-election would be held to complete their term.

The 1907 reforms which saw the House of Assembly switch to using the Hare-Clark system, introduced preferential voting to the Council. A redistribution in 1946 broke up the two multi-member seats into single-member seats.

Suffrage gradually improved from the late 19th century onwards, with the property franchise being first eased then abolished; ex-convicts, ex-servicemen and then women being granted the vote; the age of majority being reduced; and finally, full adult suffrage in 1968. The first woman to sit on the Legislative Council was Margaret McIntyre in 1948. The first woman to chair the upper house was Phyllis Benjamin in 1956.

In the 1990s, various Tasmanian governments attempted to cut the size of parliament. Various reports proposed reducing the Tasmanian Legislative Council from 19 seats to 15. Others including the Morling Report proposed abolishing the Council and merging some of the electorates into the Tasmanian House of Assembly. However the council wouldn't agree to any of these proposals. During Tony Rundle's government the Legislative Council finally allowed the Parliamentary Reform Bill 1998 passage, reducing the number of seats in the chamber from 19 to 15, and redistributing all seats through an independent Distribution Tribunal, abolishing a previous rural bias which had led to unequal seats. However, the seats were not named after their geographic location, often using land district or county names unfamiliar to most residents, so considerable confusion for voters ensued in determining which seat they were to vote within.