In Australia everyone's a democrat. Or at least, anyone who might have doubts about the notion that government derives its authority from the consent of the governed will almost certainly refrain from saying so when seeking public office. The fact that democracy wins universal plaudits does not, however, mean that we're all agreed on what's required to keep our politics as vigorously democratic as most Australians like to think they are.
The Abbott Government that will be sworn in this week is democratically legitimate in an obvious and fundamental sense: the Coalition won the election, and will have a comfortable majority in the new house. But if governments want to claim that they are broadly representative of the nation — and, left or right, they all do make that claim — then it is surely a problem that the cabinet of 20 includes only one woman.
And it hardly answers the point to note that there would have been two if Sophie Mirabella had held her seat of Indi, or to suggest, as Tony Abbott has, that at some unspecified future date more women will be knocking at the cabinet-room door. It is not as if there are no contenders now. A talented, long-serving Liberal parliamentarian like Marisa Payne, for example, could reasonably ask why the door isn't already open for her, and why she has been relegated to the outer ministry instead.
'Broadly representative' is, of course, a vague term. It implicitly acknowledges that even introducing quotas for under-represented groups of the population would not result in a government that resembled an Identikit image of Australia. But vague is not the same as vacuous. To say a government is or isn't broadly representative of those it governs is to recognise that representation is not only a matter of votes and head counts.
Indeed, sometimes even rigorously proper voting procedures produce outcomes that, although legitimate, cannot seriously be regarded as democratic.
The Senate that has just been elected is a case in point. When the new senators take their seats in July next year, they will include a Sports Party member from WA, who won just 0.22 per cent of the first-preference vote, and a Motoring Enthusiasts Party member from Victoria, who won just 0.52 per cent. The fact that these and candidates from other so-called micro-parties, which were unknown to most voters until they received their Senate ballot papers, were successful at the election