Victoria’s constitutional time bomb

One of our attentive readers has pointed out (for which we thank him) that Section 40 (2) of Victoria's Constitution Act states that "all questions arising in the Assembly shall be decided by a majority of members present other than the Speaker and when the votes are equal the Speaker shall have a casting vote." The problem this creates for the current eighty-eight member Assembly is that, in the event of a precisely split parliament, it effectively denies the Speaker any sort of vote. If there are eighty-seven "voting members" there can be no tie unless a member is absent and not paired. We know of no Westminster-derived parliament in which a presiding officer cannot vote and Victoria has had this problem only since 2003. In the 1960s and 1970s the Assembly had seventy-three members until this was increased to eighty-nine in 1982. An electoral redistribution is likely to be completed by the end of 2013 and if this issue is not addressed now the problem will be locked in for another decade. The article below has been amended to reflect this point.