The Division of Sydney is one of Australia's 150 seats in the House of Representatives (in 2025). It is considered a safe seat for the Australian Labour Party. In fact, since the division's inception in 1968 it has never not elected Labour. Labour has polled at 60% or greater in every election since 1968.

Calling the Division of Sydney a safe seat feels like an understatement. It has never once, not been a safe seat for Labour. There is no record of it not being a safe seat for Labour in 57 years. However, not even this fully grasps how safe this seat really is.

Prior to the 1968 redistribution, what area the Division of Sydney currently spans comprised instead the Divisions of Dalley, East Sydney and West Sydney. The Division of Dalley first elected Labour in 1910, and then never again elected a party besides Labour. This is almost the same for the Division of East Sydney, however, in 1931, the Division of East Sydney tried a member of the United Australia party for 1 month before then, also, never not electing Labour ever again. The Division of West Sydney elected Labour first in 1901, when Labour first formed, then again in 1917, and then every election since.

So the last time Labour didn't hold any part of the Division of Sydney was actually in 1932, in the Division of Dalley, 93 years ago. And even before 1932, at most times, Labour still held the seats. It's important to recall that Australia federated in 1901. So there is not much of a time span. Of all the elections ever held, Labour has failed to win exactly 8 of them, all between 1901 and 1932.

Suppose that in the upcoming election, no less than 60% of the 125,421 registered voters vote Labour. This means that there are 50,168 people who vote for a different party. What happens to these votes?

In a winner-takes-all electoral system, quite simply, nothing. They account for nil.

This is a problem. There is a disparity between voters in Australia. If you are one of these 50,168 voters, you effectively have no influence on the federal election outcome. Whereas, if you merely live in a different part of Australia that is not such a safe seat, your vote has a greater plausibility to affect the outcome.

Democracy

Its a popular sentiment in democracies that voting, even if only for its symbolic value, is crucial. Without such a resolve of an innate virtue in voting, voters would have sufficient reason to not show up to vote in the first place. However, if they were to do what their reason dictated, then the voter turnout would approach zero. Contradictorily, anyone who did vote would have too great a say in the outcome since their vote would be counted amongst a very small minority of voters. However, the election outcome would go onto affect everyone's lives. In democracy, its important that no minority gains control over the many. This problem is an example of Tragedy of the Commons. This is partly why Australia has compulsory voting. Furthermore, for societies that value their democracy, there is justice in pushing your fellow citizens to vote, as doing so maintains its worth.

A more formal way of describing this "democratic spirit" is that although each vote, by design, cannot alter another vote, votes are not statistically independent of one another. Votes in large groups move and sway together in chaotic, but revealing motions. This democratic spirit is truly, the result of not any individual, but a society together, exercising their democratic power.

As nice as this all sounds. This is not the problem that I'm describing for the Division of Sydney.

The problem

The issue here is not that an individual among 125,421 people is only 1/125421 of the outcome, and that just a single vote is so small. The problem is that for some Australian's, their votes are literally not worth anything. These Australians know who they are: voters registered in the Division of Sydney and who dissent the local popular party. Simply by being an individual who ticks both these two conditions, effectively nullifies your vote. Let me fully capture this phenomenon.

If every single one of these 50168 people, (and likewise, immigrants and those not born yet) never voted in the Federal election ever again, then this would have a total, aggregate effect of nothing. To be clear, its not that any single one of these people would be better off not voting, its that all of them would be. These Australians can safely never vote again in their life, all as one, and still, there would be no difference in the outcome, for any election, ever.

Party loyalty and strategic voting

Let's instead put ourselves in the shoes of the 75,252 likely Labour voters in Sydney. It would seem that this group have an unwavering support for Labour. Labour, we should expect, is far more worried about appeasing Australians in other seats than Sydney.

Safe seats can make political parties less accountable to their voters. If voters grant political parties votes unconditionally, then political parties are free to do worse a job without cost to their voter base.

A vote is much like a bargaining chip. Voters have desires for how they want the world to be. Voters also have selfish desires, desires that don't relate to the world but their own individual standing. Trivially, politicians pork barrel, or "buy votes" from people in particular areas. More regularly, politicians must act to to bring about change in accordance with the desires of their constituents. A vote is a bargaining chip that allows one to make demands of political parties.

So then would it not be daft to give a political party your vote unconditionally? This could create situations wherein a political party is not held accountable for incompetence.

There are three potential reasons why Sydneysiders don't vote more tactically:

1. Party loyalty. Put simply, some people form ideological or emotional attachments to political parties. In this sense, their votes in effect, are mere expressions of their support.

2. People may simply feel like one party is the better of two (or more) evils. They may feel like the alternatives are simply bad in themselves. Perhaps, like the above, they have an ideological hatred for the alternatives. Or, perhaps they have genuine reason to dislike or even fear the alternative. This doesn't seem like the best explanation in the case of Sydney. Since this is a distaste of the alternatives, all that would be needed to alter the outcome would be for a new party to appear. If a new party appeared, and if it doesn't resemble any of the existing parties, then it would be a 50/50 split between Labour and it. This is clearly not the case in Sydney. However, this could be the case in other situations, particularly places where there is a binary system such as the U.S. presidential election.

3. Spoiler effect aversion. Withholding your vote from your favoured candidate in order to get more out of them is a form of strategic voting. This can cause the spoiler effect. An awareness of this phenomenon could create a psychological aversion to it in a voting population. As someone who has conversed with fellow Sydneysiders, I can confirm, we're not an informed people. This is probably not a major effect in this case.

Of the three, it would seem that party loyalty is the most relevant.

There is an additional harm in this party loyalty. Since the system is winner-takes-all, the opposition gains nothing by pork barrelling or swaying voters in the division. Suffice to say, nobody in Sydney gets any pork.

The solution

The solution to this problem is a new electoral system: mixed-member proportional voting.

"Mixed" refers to the combination of two types of voting systems. On the one hand, you still have single-member districts, like we have now, where each electoral division sends a single representative to the House of Representatives. But the mixing comes in the form of compensatory seats that are allocated based on overall party vote share. These additional seats aim to make the overall composition of the parliament more reflective of the proportional voting that Australians deserve.

"Member" refers to the individual representatives, who are still elected by voters in their specific districts. The twist here, however, is that while these district representatives are chosen the traditional way, the party seats are distributed in such a way that the overall makeup of the parliament aligns more closely with the proportion of votes cast for each party across the country. This means that the Division of Sydney could still elect its local representative, but the overall outcome of the election would better reflect the party preferences of the nation as a whole.

"Proportional" ensures that the composition of "members", or representatives, is proportional to the vote distribution. It addresses the issue of voter disempowerment that occurs in safe seats like Sydney.

Under this mixed-member proportional system, let’s consider how the 2025 election might play out. Suppose that in Sydney, 60% of the electorate votes for Labour, while 40% votes for the opposition. In a standard system, those 50,168 opposition votes hold very little weight, as the Labour candidate is likely to win by a wide margin. However, in the mixed-member proportional system, these votes would still result in electing respective members. The additional party seats would help ensure that the proportion of the House that reflects non-Labour votes is more in line with their true share of the population's preference. So, while the Labour candidate would still win a majority, the national result would be much more representative.

In essence, mixed-member proportional voting would give each voter, regardless of where they live, a greater stake in the overall election outcome.