Who’s ever ahead after 5% wins.
Spend the day at a local polling booth handing out flyers for an ex Lib independent. Periods of the day it was sheeting down. Looks like we pulled just 3.0%.
With virtually all the minors referencing LAB, the LIB incumbent was always up against it. Looks like a 7% swing.
Morrison is conceding now. Good riddance.
LAB got a primary vote of 31.5% which is a worry
I’m also glad to see Morrison is out. How the LNP thought taking him into the election was a good idea is beyond me.
I can understand it because he’s an effective campaigner. He’s a useless leader IMHO and I wouldn’t piss on him if he was on fire. But I still think he’s an effective campaigner. It would seem that his uselessness as leader has outweighed his abilities as a campaigner but I don’t think it was a no brainer that it would turn out that way.
Is he, though? Pretty much every single campaigning thing he has done as been met with ridicule that I’ve seen, even factoring in social media bias.
I mean, some of the LNP flyers I got had stuff like “If you vote Labor, you’ll be voting for XYZ” and I (not a Labor supporter) am thinking “Those sound like awesome Labor policies, maybe I will move them up my preferences now. Thanks for making me aware of them!”
That’s not good campaigning at all, IMO.
His personal approval etc went up as the campaign went on
I think Australians understand that voting is an exercise of political power, and not a form of self-expression. Good for them.
Same applies under FPTP when one votes for, in effect, a second preference candidate in order to keep out the "over my dead body’ candidate. The whole point of voting is, after all, both self-expression and an exercise of political power.
Of course someone is going to be elected however one might try to game the system, and I understand the rationale for requiring all candidates to be ranked. But in a system that allows the voters more options, it seems odd to require them to use them all.
Query, please: what is a « teal independent »? I’ve seen the term in some of the Canadian coverage, but no explanation of what it means.
They are a new phenomenon (at least as a coherent power bloc).
Wealthy city electorates have traditionally voted for the Liberal (ie right wing) party.
However several women ran as independents in those electorates - with great success as it turns out. They are not a single political party but broadly ran on a common platform of climate change action and political integrity. They all received substantial funding from one particular billionaire who is concerned about climate change.
They are known as “teals” because many used that colour in their campaigns.
To go into more IMHO territory, they have gained the traction they have - at least substantially - because both the major parties are hamstrung on climate change because they are beholden to powerful entrenched interests.
The Teals represent (upper?) middle class people who have traditionally supported the right wing party but who have the financial security to be able to vote with their conscience.
I would.
The ‘Teals’, named after their blue-with-a-bit-of-green campaign colour are independents running in traditionally Liberal Party seats on a fairly limited platform. They support climate change action, an independent Federal anti-corruption commission and more transparency. The notional constituency is professional women who would otherwise have voted Liberal but otherwise hate Morrison and the party’s overall direction.
They have been targeting the seats of Liberal moderates [the ones who are likely to have been pushing the party for climate change and anti-corruption action] and been very successful. The result is a bloodbath on the moderate end of the Liberal Party. On the ABC election coverage, the Lib Simon Birmingham, a moderate was looking very lonely and shell-shocked at the end of the night.
They also took some very high profile scalps among them [seats like Wentworth and Kooyong are poster-child Liberal seats].
They really helped to split the Liberal campaign, and force them to spend big to defend seats they’d consider rock-solid safe. If they hold the notional balance of power they will have power but reflect a mixed bag of political stances apart from their key platform.
But, thanks to them the Liberal Party in opposition will have had a moderatectomy. They know that they have been effective as right-wing reactionary shits [see former PM Tony Abbott], and may decide its more fun to be wreckers than to take the message that they have lost a critical part of their constituency needed to form government.
What’s really interesting is in my reading of the “teal” policies, they came across as nearly identical to the Greens on the big ticket items, to the point where I honestly couldn’t see much difference between them.
Absolutely nothing about the teal candidates I saw said “LNP but we care about climate change and LGBTQ”.
Having said that, I’m glad to see lots of independents in parliament and not wanting the country to alternate between flooding and being on fire is a good thing.
Interesting. Thanks, all.
I spent yesterday on my feet yesterday for 10 hours offering how-to-votes to a generally sympathetic but largely unresponsive voter base.
After a good night’s sleep my legs have recovered sufficiently that I can now walk in a sufficiently straight line so as to make to the loo without bumping into the walls.
In what is the strongly LIB booth of North Drummoyne, which is curiously south of the East Drummoyne booth, about 1,500 votes were cast and I got all of 47!
About one vote every 13 minutes. There’s a budding professional political career in there somewhere.
Though I reckon that anybody who voted for my candidate had already formed that view well before they ran the gaggle.
When you are on the line you spend a lot of time looking at people who are generally avoiding eye contact , trying to assess whether the voter has any interest in your product, or will take the proffered pamphlets just being polite or consider you as the guy who buys Satan’s cigarettes.
An observation was that there seemed to be a high proportion of people who went into the polling booth with well masked/blank/determined faces and yet who came out smiling.
This might have been relief. It might have been satisfaction. I didn’t keep any mental tally at the time, but in hindsight a lot of these voters were women.
Now 85% of the cast at “my” booth were cast for women. I suspect this was the “Teal” effect, though my candidate was effectively the Teal candidate but on this particular ballot paper it didn’t translate into a solid voting bloc. You could argue this because she wasn’t overly high profile, had in fact split from the right wing of the LIBs, didn’t pitch herself as a “Teal” and wasn’t competing against an incumbent who was a middle aged, white LIB male. Ergo, we got minimal traction.
Not a fun day, but satisfying in a strange way.
You can hand out campaign literature at polling booths?
That view would only hold is you can excise economics from the political debate, which curiously enough you could from this particular election.
An ugly term but it sounds just about right to me.
Possibly a Pyric victory for the Teals could be their knocking off Josh Frydenberg in the blue ribbon seat of Kooyong. With ScoMo going to the backbench then Frydenberg as his deputy would have been the heir apparent, probably unopposed. He would have been more than capable, indeed already has, sat down with Albanese and discussed a more progressive/aggressive response on climate policy.
Instead, with a Teal in Kooyong, the next LIB leader seems likely to be Peter Dutton, bringing back all the worst memories of Tony Abbott, with the inclinations and parliamentary support of the LIB/NAT right wing.
Methinks that you are prescribing plenipotentiary, nea diety powers on the independents.
An inconsistent voting bloc in the political middle while in opposition is one thing. An inconsistent voting bloc with the balance of power is quite another. If the great questions to be addressed by the next parliament are climate/energy policy and an integrity commission then that’s the Teals long suite and they will serve us well. If the great issue is a geopolitical conflict with China, maybe then not so much.
Yes; they have to be a certain distance from the polling booth entrance though (generally they’ll be set up outside the school gates if the polling place is a local school, for example).
I’m honestly not. Personally I’m deeply concerned by the number of people who think voting for Green/Teal candidates will magically stop the country flooding or bushfire season from being a thing, but I am pleased there are now people in parliament who can at least table concerns about some of that stuff (and some potential mitigation strategies) without being told to get back in the kitchen and make the men a sandwich, too.
@Martini_Enfield
Apologies, I read your comment diametrically incorrectly!
Totally OK, I probably wasn’t quite as clear as I could have been 
Yes how to vote cards, example below.
From the AEC regulations
Canvassing near polling booths and pre-poll voting places s. 340
- Note: That where a building used as a polling booth, pre-poll voting office or office of a DRO is situated in grounds within an enclosure, those grounds (by notice) may be deemed by the DRO to be part of the polling booth, pre-poll voting office or office of the DRO and the entrance to those grounds would become the entrance to the polling booth, pre-poll voting office or office of the DRO as the case requires.
- A person must not engage in any of the following activities within 6 metres of an entrance to a polling booth on election day, or at a pre-poll voting office or office of a Divisional Returning Officer during early voting:
- Canvassing for votes
- Soliciting the vote of any elector
- Inducing any elector not to vote for any particular candidate
- Inducing any elector not to vote at the election
- Exhibiting any notice or sign (other than an official notice) relating to an election.
So, as @Martini_Enfield posted, if the polling booths are located say in a school building, as the majority of booths are, then the school perimeter fence is the enclosure and the school yard gate is the entrance to the polling booth.
I (with the other parties) located ourselves on the street outside council chambers which was a fairly busy intersection. When it was belting rain we moved under the only available shelter which was the council portico and within 6m of the entrance but the AEC turned a blind eye, likely because no voters were braving the rain. When the rain eased we moved back out.
There was minimal, cordial banter between us. Neither major wanted social media footage of discordant behavior (though the LIBs had overnight stripped every LAB poster from every booth in the electorate). Apart from offering a how to vote pamphlet and saying the party name any verbal interaction with voters was minimal though the girl from the Greens got into regular policy disputes.