Catherine Helen Spence devoted in 19th Century to converting South Australian elections to proportional voting
Plaster bust for statue of Catherine Helen Spence by Lithuanian-born Adelaide sculptor Ieva Pocius. Top right: The single-member South Australian federal electorate of Spence named after her in 2018. Bottom centre: From 2023, Catherine Helen Spence shared naming of a Canberra suburb with trade unionist and politician William Spence. Bottom right: Spence's Jubilee 150 plaque on North Terrace, Adelaide city.
Main image courtesy State Library of South Australia
Catherine Helen Spence made "effective voting" her most important cause, devoting herself to it for the last 50 years of her life in South Australia. Spence believed effective voting to uphold democracy was more important than the other South Australian cause she supported: votes for women.
Spence saw the fairness of effective voting for members of parliament as only achieved by proportional representation – the “hope of the world”. Proportional representation (as later adopted for the Australian senate and the South Australian Legislative Council) went against the concept of single-member electorates that would be used in the 20th Century to chose members of the federal House of Representatives and the South Australian House of Assembly.
Under proportional representation, members were chosen by achieving a quota of votes from the widest possible pool of voters. Spence was 66 when she first mounted a platform to explain to South Australians why they should demand proportional representation, as argued in her political manifesto A plea for pure democracy: Mr Hare's Reform Bill applied to South Australia.
From February 1892, Spence delivered about 40 public addresses to audiences “of various political standpoints” in Adelaide and the southeast and northern area of South Australia.
Spence’s added to refining the proportional representation concept with her thoughts about distributing preferences from the surplus votes of candidates who’d achieved their quotas. From her initial idea of randomly distributing the surplus votes, Spence in 1894 adopted a suggestion, by her friend Annie Martin, to give fractional values to all preferences..This formed the Hare-Spence system of proportional representation embodied in a bill submitted unsuccessful to the South Australian parliament almost every year form 1902 until 1910.
Meanwhile, in 1907, Tasmania adopted the Hare-Clark proportional voting system for its House of Assembly. This was a modified version of that proposed in 1856 by Englishman Thomas Hare, also the source of Spence’s ideas.
Spence, who became the first Australian woman to stand for election, at the 1897 federal convention, had Jeanne F. Young join her and carry on the crusade for proportional voting as secretary of the Effective Voting league. Young completed and published her mentor’s unfinished autobiography in 1910. Ellinor Walker, a member of the Electoral Reform Society. also was a member of the League of Women Voters that campaigned for effective voting until it ended in 1979. The Electoral Reform Society continued in South Australia.
