Australian Federal Election 2019.

[penultima_thule]

@penultima_thule

There’s quite a long line of rednecks with the potential to successfully garrote.
Abbott, Dutton, Leyonhjelm, Anning, Bernardi, MacDonald, One Nation.
What are the odds on a job lot?

Bewdy bonzer, one gone.

David Leyonhjelm fails in bid for NSW upper house.

An odious reptile who won a Federal Senate spot when the ducks aligned 1) giving him first spot on the ballot paper blanket, 2) using the party name Liberal Democrat caused enough Liberal voters to cross the wrong box and 3) a benevolent preference flow from those Liberal votes whose preferences didn’t exhaust.

He knew he had Buckley’s change of doing that in Election 2019 so he tried for the NSW State Assembly.

Two weeks ago he claimed his electoral victory was evident and published a manifesto.

See ya!

[Northern_Piper]

What are the major issues?

And is half your Senate up for election as well as all of the Representatives?

[StrangeBird]

@penultima_thule

You’ll note Plibersek used the cheap “some people say”

In this case, I took that as a reference to Dutton initially defending his comment about Ali France by saying that people had raised the issue with him. But I could be wrong.

[Krav_Manga]

@penultima_thule

You’ll note Plibersek used the cheap “some people say” line. She doesn’t have the bottle to say “I think he’s a horrible human being”

Nonsense. Plibersek was using Sutton’s pea hearted attack using the ‘some people say…’ line he used against Ali France.

Dutton said (of France):

A lot of people have raised this with me. I think they are quite angry that Ms France is using her disability as an excuse for not moving into our electorate.

Plibersek said (of Dutton):

I hear from some people that Peter Dutton is a horrible human being — put that on the record," she said.

[penultima_thule]

And is half your Senate up for election as well as all of the Representatives?

Yes.
All 151 seats in the House of Representatives and 40 of the 76 seats in the Senate.

@Northern_Piper

What are the major issues?

This is Australia mate, just a replay of virtually every election since Gough left in '77.
It’s greed vs gravy, and you always put your money on self-interest … it’s the only horse trying.

We got the LIBs saying we have been utter shits for the last six years but we try to keep everybody’s taxes down.

We got the LABs saying we were utter shits six years ago but now we have new plans to try to give everybody a cream bun.

The voting public want both the cream bun, and the lower taxes.
They get the shits.

[penultima_thule]

@StrangeBird

In this case, I took that as a reference to Dutton initially defending his comment about Ali France.

If that is the case I missed the reference, I don’t spend much time listening to Dutton.

[Krav_Manga]

@penultima_thule

If that is the case I missed the reference, I don’t spend much time listening to Dutton.

Right - so you only saw Plibersek’s comments without any context as to what Dutton had said.

[Aspidistra]

So, as others have said, the election is basically hip pocket, hip pocket with a side order of hip pocket, so I try to lighten the experience by finding the most interesting loonies I can, and give 'em a good mocking. Clive “Make Australia Hate The Colour Yellow Again” Palmer is definitely up there, but I was recently graced with a fantastic election pitch from a local hopeful by the name of (no, seriously) Teresa Van LieShout (camel case mine…) on behalf of - if I’m reading her URL correctly - the “Voter Ights Party”

Specific Ights that this party is in favour of start off with the ight to take away a receipt of your vote from the polling place. Ms DontQuiteUnderstandTheSecretBallot then goes on to propose abolishing all income taxes, close all psych hospitals, close all womens’ prisons (in fairness, there’s a ‘protecting Indigenous Women’ angle to this that I’d like to acknowledge as having her heart in the right place, even as her brain is on another planet), abolish the concept of a ‘fine’ (yes, no fines as well as no prisons. What could possibly go wrong?) make home loans have 1% interest rates and promote ‘natural therapies’ (can I get a ‘woo’? yeah, I think I can)

It would be unfair to characterise the Voter Ights Party as ‘Teresa Van Lieshout plus a bunch of crash test dummies artfully arranged behind phone lines, one per state’, however. Why, they’re even had a candidate in WA once! Oh, yeah, it was her

[penultima_thule]

@Krav_Manga

Right - so you only saw Plibersek’s comments without any context as to what Dutton had said.

I didn’t see Plibersek’s comments either.
I responded to StrangeBird’s post.

[penultima_thule]

Given the certifiable nature of the major parties having a couple of loonies like the Voter Rights Party in the mix is of some comfort.

I though it was a very nice touch that one of the central planks of the Party’s platform, amongst some radical social reforms and global trade proposals, is a cleaning program for the Darebin Creek.

[Aspidistra]

I expect great things too from the Involuntary Medication Objectors party - AKA Anti-Vaxxers and Fluoride Conspiracy nutters - too.

Just as long as “great things” doesn’t under any circumstances involve “getting anyone elected”. Somewhere between impressed and horrified that among the eight people willing to agree to actually put their names and faces on the line to this platform, there is someone with an actual PhD. Hissssss!

[penultima_thule]

This is true, but I’m simply horrified that in Federal election 2016 175,000 people gave One Nation candidates their HoR first preference vote.
And that 178,000 gave their first preference to Fred Nile’s heretic burning Christian Democrats.

I am getting some sense of faith in my fellow Ozers in that since One Nation’s dalliance with the NRA seeking $millions in campaign funding in exchange for weakening/repealing our gun laws their support has fallen from 11% to 4%, which is still 3.95% too high.

[Flyer]

@penultima_thule

Yes.
All 151 seats in the House of Representatives and 40 of the 76 seats in the Senate.

The number of seats seems quite bizarre to me. In America, there are two main systems used: (1) Pick a nice round figure for the total of seats for both houses combined (say 100) and then split that figure up between the two houses (usually in multiples of 5 or 10, for example a 65-35 split); or (2) make sure that each house has a nice figure for its own total.

It it really asking too much for you people to pick a sensible number of seats for your legislature?

[penultima_thule]

Oh dear, you know, merkins have given the world a great many advances and improvements but how to run elections and determining electoral divisions is not one of them.
Exhibit #1 for the prosecution your grotesquely distorted (gerrymandered) districts.

For Australia there is a formula determined by an independent body and reviewed by a bipartisan committee.

State/territory entitlement to electoral divisions

in précis:
Each of the 6 states has 12 senators = 72. The two territories get 2 senators each.
6 senators per state elected every cycle plus all the territory senators = 40

The number of seats in the House of Reps for the 6 states is double the number of state senators = 144
That establishes a population quota = 164,788 per electorate.
The states get the number of seats as their population divided by the quota rounded to nearest integer. (Tasmania, the smallest state gets a minimum 5)
The two territories get their number of electorates by the same quota.

Which gives
NSW 47
VIC 38
QLD 30
WA 16
SA 10
TAS 5
ACT 3
NT 2
TOT 151

Redistributions are done after every election based on the last population census.
When the population quota gets too big the senate will be increased to 14 per state.
(which will totally bugger the minor parties representation, but that’s another matter entirely)

[penultima_thule]

@Northern_Piper

What are the major issues?

For something empirical, the list below comes from the ABC’s Vote Compass.

It claims to be based on 119,516 respondents nationally.
The ABC demographic skews left and affluent and people who respond to these sort of surveys skews youth. The change from 2016 is included.

% respondents #1 election issue
2019 vs 2016
Environment 29 +20
Economy 23 - 2
Healthcare 8 - 8
Superannuation 8 - 4
Employment 6 - 1
Immigration 6 - 3
Government 5 0
Education 5 - 7
Poverty/inequality 5 +1
Cost of living 4 +1

Anybody who thinks that only 4% of voters will consider cost of living the #1 factor when they stand in the voting booth, as distinct from when they are doing an on-line survey on their iPad whilst sipping a latte is delusional.

[Aspidistra]

On the other hand, there’s four or five factors on that list that could be bundled together as “money worries”, and it looks like those numbers add up to 100, ie they’re a list of “number 1 issues”. I bet the people who put ‘Economy’ number one are also putting ‘cost of living’ and ‘employment’ somewhere pretty close to the top.

I’m amazed that so many people put ‘Environment’ first (I do myself, but then I live in the inner suburbs and am sipping a latte as we speak!) because it feels like an ‘economy’ election to me. On the other hand, a) yes, ABC online poll DOES provide a particularly unrepresentative sample and b) numbers of people supporting climate action is going up

Here’s another poll, from Essential Media (Guardian-sponsored, ie also lefty)

Q. To what extent are you concerned about the following issues?
I worry about this:…all the time…often…sometimes…never
_
Health of myself and family 27%…35%…31%…7%
My ability to pay for basics .27%…29%…25%…19%
Impact of climate change …21%…30%…28%…21%
Crime in my community …19%…31%…35%…16%
Threat of terrorism …19%…26%…36%…19%
My job security …16%…22%…20%…41%
That has ‘cost of living’ pipping ‘climate change’ to the post, but there’s not much in it.

I suppose, if they’re smart, Labor will be trying to keep “Health” somewhere close to the top, and the Libs appear to be going for “Job security” and “Pay for the basics”.

[penultima_thule]

I think we are getting to a very similar position from opposite perspectives.

For me, climate change is the economy and likely no country on the planet is better positioned in terms of options and capacity to benefit from switch to renewables than Aust.

[Aspidistra]

Whereas I would probably say - yes, you can achieve environmental goals when you have great prosperity - and this happens when wealthy countries decide that all that pollution is messing with our personal quality of life. But in order for that to happen we have to choose that actively - it’s possible to look at any level of great prosperity and say ‘yeah, but it’s not enough - we’ll do something about global warming when we’ve got just a little bit more cash’ - and keep doing that till the waters close over our heads

[penultima_thule]

Another reason to feel good about being an Aussie.

The 2019 election will boast the highest enrolment rate in Australian history(96.8%) and a record enrolment rate for young Australians (88.8%): AEC.

Of the 16.4 million Australians now enrolled to vote, 1.69 million are young voters aged between 18 and 24.

Overall, there are 750,000 more people enrolled for this election than for the 2016 election. The Australian Electoral Commission have described it as “the best roll in history”, with an enrolment rate “unlikely to be matched anywhere in the world”.

The electoral commissioner, Tom Rogers, said a 96.8% figure was previously “thought to be unattainable”.

“It is something all Australians can be proud of,” he said.

One of the primary reasons why it’s improbable for Australia ever to fall into the partisan trench warfare and gridlock of US style politics.

In Australia the political centre is enfranchised, enrolled and votes.

[penultima_thule]

Well, notwithstanding the absence of repartee between locals on this message board, the Australian Federal election is now into its last two weeks.

The election has been a bit unusual in that since the Hewson defeat in 1993 the opposition parties (and sometimes the governments) run small target strategies. [Hewson’s centre piece was the introduction of a goods & services tax.]

This time Labor’s Bill Shorten is running a mid-sized target campaign with a few social and economic policies out of the old Labor kit bag.

A feature has been the number of candidates who have been dis-endorsed by their parties (10 at last count) based usually on unsavory social media posts, some from many moons ago, some more recent. Few were in with a chance of winning but they remain on the ballot papers.

The demise of One Nation’s Steve Dickson after getting rumbled in a Washington strip club behaving how you’d expect a drunken ratbag and oaf would in that environment was something I was quite chuffed about. He was the same goose over stateside trying to get NRA funding with a quid pro quo of weakening Australian gun laws. His intermediary turned out to be an Al Jazeera journalist.

The polls are suggesting its a 52:48 tussle, possibly even tighter, but because the LIBs need to win seats to retain government (they finished the parliament as a minority government) the odds are that ScoMo is stuffed.

The usual cohort of LIB attack dogs are well muzzled with Peter Dutton in a major fight to retain his own seat, Tony Abbott similarly self absorbed in his own struggle and Christopher Pyne retiring. The LIB campaign is almost exclusively being conducted by Scott Morrison.

LABs have been blanketing Shorten with a surrounding phalanx of strong women.
One can only hope the girls can hold their ground when the old guard of factional warlords get a sniff of putting their own bums or those of their proteges on the Treasury benches.

Two largely gaff free leaders debates have been held. Probably marginal wins to Shorten in both but he’s not the natural politician that ScoMo is.

The two battleground states appear to be Victoria and Queensland and they are politically polarised.
Every policy one party deploys to win a vote in Queensland (Australia’s Florida) costs them a vote in Victoria (Australia’s New England) and vice versa.

Not sure that the Greens are making any progress, and most of the minor parties will go backwards in representation. Clive Palmer (Australia Trump, though with more money and more political nous) seems to be on the way to getting a reasonable bloc of votes though how Palmer gets seen as batting for the battler is beyond me.

The proportion of people taking the option of voting early is getting higher, maybe 25% of votes and up to 50% in some electorates will have voted prior to May 18th. More young people are voting than ever before.

I think people have broadly made up their minds. Paradoxically because we are sick of them changing the Prime Minister, we are going to change the Prime Minister. Go figure.