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For the first time in 40 years, Labor is developing a plan to increase the number of seats in the parliament – a move the Coalition fears will cement Labor’s majority. By Jason Koutsoukis.
‘More snouts in the trough’: The plan to expand parliament
According to other senators, Don Farrell, Labor’s special minister of state, uses parliamentary divisions to tell the opposition and the cross bench what he wants them to do for him. The topic recently is a major reform to representation: a proposal to increase the number of seats in both chambers of parliament, a change that has been made only twice since Federation.
“Oh, they so want to increase the size of the parliament,” one Liberal senator tells The Saturday Paper. “And Don never misses a chance to tease me about it. Like, ‘If we go to four senators in the ACT, you can bring Zed back,’ ” the senator adds, referring to Zed Seselja, who lost his seat at the 2022 election.
“Don keeps asking me, ‘When are you going to give me a bigger parliament?’ ” says another Liberal senator. “Always said with a smile, it’s still very strategic, because even though we’re unlikely to support this, he’s planting the seed, giving those stray, seemingly off-the-cuff remarks a chance to germinate.”
The proposal to increase the size of parliament now sits within a wider inquiry by the Joint Standing Committee on Electoral Matters (JSCEM).
Tasked with examining this year’s general election, including booth safety, political advertising and the flow of donations, the committee will also examine, at Farrell’s request, “the composition of the parliament as a whole”.
That includes the length of parliamentary terms, the case for fixed four-year elections, and whether the number of MPs and senators still reflects the growth of Australia’s population.
The committee is expected to report in the first half of next year, setting the stage for what could become the most significant debate about representation in four decades.
A lot has changed since 1984, when Labor prime minister Bob Hawke expanded the House of Representatives from 125 to 148 seats and the Senate from 64 to 76 senators.
Back then, Australia’s population was just under 16 million. Today, it’s more than 27 million – an increase of roughly 11 million people – yet the number of MPs and senators remains frozen.
Each of Australia’s 150 members of the House of Representatives now represents an average of 120,659 voters – up more than 6000 since 2022, and nearly double the ratio when Hawke made his reform.
As The Australia Institute said in a submission to the current inquiry, parliament has “failed to keep pace with the country it governs”.
“Canada, the UK, France and Germany all have more representation than Australia in their national parliaments,” the submission said. “New Zealand has one MP for every 30,000 voters: four times Australia’s ratio.”
According to a submission from the Grattan Institute, expanding the number of parliamentarians would “provide voters with greater access to national parliamentary representation, while also assisting with the complexities of governing by providing more candidates for committee activity and ministerial positions”.
To make a meaningful difference, the submission argued, “a material lift in the size of parliament would be needed to achieve a more even distribution of voters per electorate nationally and bring Australia closer to the middle of the pack internationally”.
It suggested that the change could be phased in via “a staged process”, adding seats at each of the next three federal elections.
“Additional parliamentarians and supporting infrastructure would need to be funded,” the submission said, but the reform was “worth exploring” and warranted further inquiry into its long-term benefits.
According to The Australia Institute, the real cost of underrepresentation is already being paid elsewhere – through ballooning electorate workloads, growing staff rosters, and the dilution of democratic contact between voters and their MPs.
In the decades since Hawke’s 1984 expansion, the number of electorate staff has risen from two per MP to five, effectively tripling the machinery around each parliamentarian to compensate for electorates that have doubled in size.
“We’re just sort of testing what community views are on more politicians, and views are pretty split, as you would imagine,” Labor MP Jerome Laxale, chair of the Joint Standing Committee on Electoral Matters, told ABC Radio National Breakfast this week.
“All the evidence so far is pretty in favour of it, but, you know, my political spidey senses are like, ‘Well, if we go out and ask the community this, they might have a different opinion.’ So we’ll be taking this committee right across Australia and putting these questions but also getting evidence on how we can make our democracy better.”
According to electoral analyst Ben Raue, who modelled several options for the Joint Standing Committee on Electoral Matters, increasing the number of senators from 12 to 14 per state would translate to an extra 24 lower house seats from the current total of 150. Another option would be to increase the number of senators from 12 to 16 per state, which would equate to an extra 50 lower house seats.
“I recommend expanding the number of senators per state by either two or four, which would add roughly 24-48 seats to the House of Representatives,” Raue said in his submission to the joint standing committee.
Under both scenarios, the additional seats would be distributed between the five most populous states.
New South Wales would gain up to 16 new seats, Victoria an extra 13 seats, with up to 10 extra lower house seats in Queensland, six for Western Australia and four for South Australia. Tasmania, given its low population compared with the mainland states, would remain unchanged with five lower house seats.
Raue argues that any credible reform must also address the imbalance faced by the ACT and the Northern Territory in the Senate.
The ACT’s population, for example, has grown to about 81 per cent of Tasmania’s, yet Tasmania elects six times as many senators.
When the ACT first elected senators in 1975, Tasmania’s enrolment was more than double. Today, it is only 28 per cent higher.
“This discrepancy – where ‘equal representation’ applies as far as Tasmania, but no further – cannot be morally or politically justified,” Raue’s submission said.
While Tasmania’s numbers are constitutionally protected, said Raue, “nothing prevents the Parliament from bringing the territories closer to the states in terms of representation”.
Accordingly, he recommends giving both territories at least four senators each, with all of them elected every three years, alongside the House.
That change, Raue argues, would make territory elections genuinely competitive, ending the near-automatic split between Labor and the Coalition that has defined most contests.
“If the ACT’s population continues to grow closer to that of Tasmania,” Raue warned, “it will become increasingly untenable to leave the ACT with such a small proportion of Tasmania’s Senate representation.”
A change to the size of parliament would require no referendum – only legislation. To pass it, the Albanese government would need the support of either the Greens, who hold the balance of power in the Senate, or the opposition.
While the Greens’ submission to the inquiry makes no mention of the proposal to increase the size of parliament, several party insiders believe the leadership would ultimately back it because an expanded parliament would all but guarantee the Greens at least one senator in every state at each election, while also improving their prospects in the lower house.
Coalition figures, meanwhile, say they will oppose any move to expand the size of parliament, arguing that the optics of a larger parliament – more seats, more salaries, more staff – would be an easy target for populist outrage.
“No one wants to see more politicians,” one Liberal MP tells The Saturday Paper. “Most people would see it as just more snouts in the trough.”
Privately, though, some within the Coalition acknowledge that the politics and the arithmetic of the proposal are not the same thing.
While many Coalition MPs fear Farrell’s real aim is to entrench Labor’s dominance, the more strategic voices inside the Coalition concede that an expansion would, if anything, serve to strengthen their position.
More seats would create new regional divisions in Queensland and NSW – traditional Coalition territory – and restore a balance that has gradually tilted towards Labor as outer-metropolitan electorates have swelled.
“The Coalition will oppose this, no question,” says a senior Liberal senator. “But, at the same time, I think a bigger parliament would actually help us over the long term, and not just in the regions. Take north Sydney, or the eastern suburbs of Sydney, as examples. More seats in these heavily populated metro areas where the teals currently dominate would give Liberal candidates such as Gisele Kapterian and Ro Knox a better chance of being elected.”
Simon Holmes à Court, founder of the fundraising vehicle Climate 200, supports a larger parliament in theory. In practice, however, he is wary of Farrell’s motives.
He argues that other reforms – such as fixed four-year terms, also before the inquiry but requiring a constitutional change – are far more important.
“If Don Farrell really cared about the integrity of our democracy and wanted a more representative parliament, he would never have pushed through his ‘financial gerrymandering’ bill making it harder for independents and minor parties to run competitive campaigns– entrenching the major party duopoly despite their declining primary vote support,” Holmes à Court says.
“Fixing the financial gerrymander and fixed terms are much higher priorities. The majors have no interest in the first, and Labor won’t touch the second without strong Coalition support, which will be elusive.
“Farrell put out the same feelers about a bigger parliament last JSCEM, but it was a decoy. Instead, he used the committee to set up the biggest set of changes to our laws in 40 years, which tilt the playing field and threaten to turn our federal parliament into the same as Vic, SA and WA: a dominant Labor, perpetually weak Coalition, and no cross bench.”
For now, Farrell isn’t rushing. The Senate, as he likes to remind colleagues, rewards patience.
He declined to speak while the committee is considering submissions.
This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on November 15, 2025 as "‘More snouts in the trough’: The plan to expand parliament".
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