Legislation was passed in 2021 to abolish these regions and increase the size of the council to 37 seats, all of which will be elected by the state-at-large.

Because of the proportional representation system in place as well as the malapportionment in favour of rural regions, the Legislative Council has traditionally been controlled by a coalition of the Liberal and National parties.

This removes the malapportionment which favoured the National Party, which often generated a Coalition majority in the state's upper House.

The initial appointees were the Governor, James Stirling, the Senior Military Officer next in command to the Governor, Frederick Irwin, the Colonial Secretary, Peter Broun, the Surveyor-General, John Septimus Roe, and the Advocate-General, William Mackie.

Three years later, an attempt was made to expand the council by including four unofficial members to be nominated by the governor.

However, the public demand for elected rather than nominated members was so great that implementation of the change was delayed until 1838.

This system was retained until 1962 when, over the next two years, the council was reformed, creating a series of two-member electorates.

Universal suffrage was also granted in order to bring the council into line with the assembly.

This arrangement remained until 10 June 1987 when the Burke Labor government, with the conditional support of the National Party, introduced the present system of multi-member electorates and a method of proportional representation which is, however, 'weighted' to give extra representation to rural constituents.

The legislation was made possible because the Australian Democrats in 1986 negotiated an election preference flow to Labor in return for an explicit undertaking on Legislative Council electoral reform, which resulted in the defeat of a number of Liberal councillors who were committed to opposing such reform.

During the 1990s, Liberal Premier Richard Court considered changing the system along the lines of that in place in South Australia, but backed down in the face of National Party opposition.

[2] The regions were defined geographically and functionally, and also included partial requirements for equal numbers of Legislative Assembly districts.

According to ABC election analyst Antony Green, the rural weighting is still significant enough that it is all but impossible for a Liberal premier in Western Australia to govern without National support, even if the Liberals win enough Legislative Assembly seats to theoretically allow them to govern alone.

The WA Legislative Council is the last remaining State or Territory chamber in Australia to have a significant rural overweighting.

However, according to Green, the actual bias is greater due to historically lower turnout in the Mining and Pastoral region.

The six individual Single Transferrable Vote (STV) districts for the Legislative Council have been dissolved.