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The referendum was aiming to end (or at least curtail) malapportionment whereby members of state parliaments from different parts of the state represented wildly different numbers of voters. The Bjelkemander article is probably the best intro to the Queensland situation which was the most prominent of the time.
It's very easy to label a proposal "democracy" (as the very question does) but that doesn't mean everyone thinks in terms of "implementation = good, non-implementation = bad" as a result. Around the world virtually all electoral systems that use constituencies have a degree of variance in the number of voters in each constituency, usually because in addition to the raw numbers they also try to take into account the "community of interest" to ensure that seats represent natural communities and are more than just an arbitrary line drawn around X number of voters. If you have an off-shore island with an electorate of approximately 90% of the average number of voters per seat, is it better to allow a smaller seat based entirely on the island or to add in 10% of the mainland, probably only having a ferry route in common with the island, to get numeric exactitude? A lot of voters on both the island and the mainland would probably prefer the island to have its own seat - it's easier to represent and the strip of mainland can go in with more accessible territory it has more in common with. Others might believe in the supremacy of numeric exactitude over all over considerations but they are introducing complications such as constituencies that don't have much in common and where it is very difficult and expensive for the member to get around, let alone for local interests across the constituency to co-ordinate and make representations. You get the same problem with vast rural areas where it takes a lot longer for a representative to travel round and meet the voters than they would in a compact metropolitan seat. And even in urban areas you can get into problems such as rivers/estuaries in cities often being so wide that a seat crossing them to make up the numbers is messy. In these terms a lot of people don't have a problem with the general idea of some exceptions to a equal seat size. It's notable in the United Kingdom that when boundary reviews happen there are people who simultaneously want equal seat sizes but are strongly opposed to their own village or suburb being placed in any constituency other than the main town they are a satellite for, regardless of the numeric impact. And the UK doesn't have many huge remote areas. Even when malapportionments were generally phased out in Queensland and Western Australia there was still a concession to the problems of representing sparsely populated rural areas.
There's also a few political factors that could have been influential. Australian voters have rejected most proposals for constitutional change and seem particularly sceptical of anything that's aiming to alter the balance between parties (regardless of what the balance is in the first place). And there's the federal/state issue - effectively this referendum would have removed the right of the states to decide the issue for themselves and been part of a broader trend towards the centralisation of power. (And even perhaps a "fair go" attitude - maybe voters in New South Wales felt that if the Queensland malapportionment were to end, it should be because the political will in Queensland wanted it, not because voters in other states imposed it on Queensland.) Timrollpickering (talk) 14:40, 28 August 2009 (UTC)[reply]
If Queensland is malapportioning it's parliament how are the people supposed to realistically submit a vote on the subject? The game is rigged, of course those who it is being rigged in favor of love the situation. That's not the will of the people, it's the will of the riggers.75.137.184.182 (talk) 02:39, 7 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]
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