The new Legislative Assembly has broken ground with a female majority, but when it comes to multicultural diversity it is still a story of overwhelmingly white rule.
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Could it be all in the name?
The Canberra Times used the research tool favoured by Andrew Leigh, the federal MP for Fenner, in his book, The Luck of Politics, and found 88 per cent of the new Assembly (22 members) had a name with English, Scottish, Irish or Welsh roots.
Dr Leigh, formerly an economics professor at the Australian National University, found some evidence that ethnically identifiable – non-Anglo – names were penalised at the ballot box when he analysed all federal election candidates since Federation.
"Candidates with Asian names do 1.5 percentage points worse, candidates with continental European names (for example, Willy Bach or Teresa Farruggio) do 0.7 percentage points worse, and candidates with Muslim names (such as Irfan Yusuf or Safwan Nasser) do 2.3 percentage points worse," Dr Leigh said in his book. This disadvantage was after other external factors, such as incumbency, were accounted for.
According to the Onomap classification, only three of the MLAs were elected without an Anglo-Celtic surname: Michael Pettersson, whose name derives from Sweden; Elizabeth Kikkert, which is Polish; and Steve Doszpot, which Onomap did not have information on but is most commonly found in Hungary, the country of his birth.
The root race or ethnicity of a name was not, of course, a firm indicator of country of birth. For example, Liberals Elizabeth Lee (whose surname has English origin) and Elizabeth Kikkert grew up in South Korea and Tonga respectively. But the breakdown shows that, in name alone, anyone without a European surname was not directly represented in this Assembly.
At face value, about one in seven or 14 per cent of the 141 candidates this year had a non-Anglo-Celtic name, which broadly suggests the parties are no more inclined to put forward diverse-named candidates than the voters are to elect them.
Dr Leigh, speaking about voters generally, said he suspected a kind of implicit bias was occurring.
"We know from a range of careful studies in psychology that when people have to make snap decisions their implicit biases come to the fore, and people that would not naturally have a racist bone in their body make decisions against minority groups," he said.
"I think that's particularly true when people don't know the candidates. One of the rules you find is people picking people with familiar names."
Dr Leigh said in a multi-member system, such as the ACT's Hare-Clark, it was less likely that you would personally know all the people standing.
The dominance of those with an Anglo-Celtic name should not be a surprise, using the imprecise indicator that 80 per cent of the ACT's usual residents, at the time of the last published census, were either born in Australia (75.8 per cent), England or Scotland.
