Of course. Inscrutable as ever. So if Rudd is defeated in Griffith and hence doesn’t attend the Labor Conference would another Ruddite table the proposal? Would the ALP give that authority to any other leader or would it get quietly shuffled off the agenda?
Well the national conference is dominated by unionists, the very people who originally stabbed Rudd Mk I in the back, the guys who supported Julia Gillard, the blokes whose stooge is Bill Shorten.
- I doubt they allow foreign donations.
- You* leftist!
- If you’re not voting, or really doing anything about it, you have a schoolyard definition of “support.”
- Why Rudd?
Thanks. I took a similar quiz and got ALP. Got the same results for this one too.
Rudd is out; Abbott is in: http://www.cnn.com/2013/09/07/world/asia/australia-election/index.html?hpt=hp_t2
What a shock!
I think the photo of Australians voting in this article is absolutely hilarious.
Wow. Straight out of the ocean and into the voting booth. It is rather stereotypically humourous.
It would be like seeing a picture of Canadians in our snowmobile suits and helmets at the voting booth. (Eh)
Stephanie Banister’s quite the intellect, isn’t she?
I think our voting system needs reform. Just a little bit, with regards to what errors would render your ballot invalid.
You see, we have two ballot slips, one for the House of Representatives and one for the Senate. The House ballot is fine - you’ve got 8-10 choices and you have to number them all in order of preference. If the person you voted for comes in last place, your vote gets passed on to your second choice, and so on. But the Senate… each state had between sixty and 110 candidates, on a piece of paper like this. And if you wanted to vote for who you wanted to vote for (voting below the line), you had to number them all, from one to 110. There is also the option to just pick a party and use their set of preferences (voting above the line), but that puts you at the mercy of whatever backroom deals they make for placement in each other’s lists.
My solution? Don’t force us to fill in the full 110 if we vote below the line. If you only list your first three preferences and those three lose out, then your Senate vote stops counting, not before.
Well, it’s not so much the casual beachwear as the cavalier way they’re peeking over each other’s shoulders and actually discussing and consulting each other on their votes. I’ve never seen that in the US.
I’d like to see an end to preference voting entirely, but failing that, I really don’t see why we can’t number above the line on the senate paper as you do with the house of representatives.
It’s impossible to make an informed decision about 80-110 candiates you’ve never heard of, who’ve never campaigned in any meaningful way and about whose policies you have no idea beyond their party name.
I’m not really sure what the solution is, since I think introducing a “No single-issue or lunatic fringe parties” rule would be undemocratic but at the same time, I don’t think saying “Here’s 100 people you’ve never heard of, number them in order or hope their backroom preference deals don’t actually run contrary to what you want” is especially democratic either.
That is an absolutely horrible idea. The lack of preference voting in the US is the only reason why you had idiots blaming Ralph Nader for the fact that Al Gore lost. If 60% of the population want a left-wing senator and only 40% want a right-wing senator, the right-winger should not win just because there were two possible left-wing senators to choose from.
I am sure what the solution is, and it’s the one I suggested. It would give you the option to opt out of preference voting: all you’d need to do is mark a single box, and let your vote expire after that. For everyone else, it would let us specify that our vote should expire once we run out of candidates we’d actually want in power, so that we don’t have to risk our vote being lost completely because we made a mistake filling out the hundred-odd boxes.
I’m not up with US politics so I’m afraid the example doesn’t help or make much sense to me, I’m afraid. One of my concerns with preference voting is the deals involved and the rather complicated nature of the whole thing.
Whilst I’d be very happy with your suggestion, I think something still needs to be done about the literally hundred candidates on the Senate ballot paper, especially considering A) most have them have done literally no campaigning whatsoever, meaning the average person has no idea whatsoever who they are and B) most of them have absolutely zero chance of getting anywhere near a Senate seat.
What I’d really like to know is why all the single-issue/obscure parties don’t field candidates in State elections, where they might actually have a chance of getting elected and might also actually have some leverage if they do.
Three candidates stand for the election representing, respectively, the White Party, the Cream Party and the Black Party. The White and Cream parties have basically identical philosophies, and their policies have only minor differences. The Black Party is their opposite in everything. They go to the polls. The Black Party gets 40% of the primary vote, while the remaining voters are split almost evenly between the White and Cream parties, so they each get around 30%. Without preferential voting, the Black Party win even though only 4 in every 10 people voted for them. With preferential voting, Cream is eliminated with 29% of the vote and those votes are redirected to their 2nd preference, the ideologically-aligned White Party, giving them the majority need to win.
Really, bedsheet ballots and all, you guys are lucky to have single transferable vote.
I am bemused that the pools of utterly hopeless contenders are so absurdly large now. But statistically, it shouldn’t make that much difference to the outcome whether Messrs. Nohoper. Notachance, and Azziff are #43, 44, and 45 or #45, 43, and 44 respectively.
Grumman’s suggestion has merit, though.
A couple of them just got elected.
As far as I understand, this is what happened:
Because of the huge ballot problem (which has been around for a while), Australia allows people to just select a party’s official ballot by marking one box. Pretty much everybody does this. The weird little parties (WLPs) tend to be against the big parties, so they rank other weird little parties first on their official ballots, and they all trade favors in hopes of getting high places on as many WLP ballots as possible.
Normally this doesn’t seem to matter a whole lot, because even the whole WLP vote combined isn’t enough to elect one senator, and after the WLP votes circle around all the other WLPs, the preferences eventually flow to someone more conventional. But dissatisfaction with the big parties was higher, so the WLP vote in a couple of states was high enough to get one of them a senator. In Western Australia, the “Australia(n)* Sports Party” appears to have had one of its candidates elected, and the “Australian Motoring Enthusiasts Party” got one elected in Victoria. Which party got the WLP seat was, from the perspective of the voters, totally random chance that absolutely no voter considered, and both parties got absolutely tiny shares of the first preferences (less than one percent for both). But the little parties all funnel their votes through each other, and the winners just happened to trade places most favorably, probably as a complete surprise to them on the day.
To use the analogy from a few posts back, it wasn’t white and cream combining to beat black. It was more like lime green, orange, and hot pink combining to beat beige and tan. They’re totally different, often single-issue parties, but they hate the big parties and would rather see a totally different single-issue candidate elected than a more conventional candidate.
*The party website is inconsistent on the party’s name. Always a good sign.
And the WLPs have the advantage in states with low populations that the quota required for a senate seat can be up to 14 times lower than in NSW. Thus someone like Bob Brown could be a major figure in Australian politics without ever attracting more than 18,000 first preference votes.
The Liberal Democrats are an example of a WLP, but they seem to have achieved one senator in New South Wales, partly because they got position A on the NSW ballot paper so a lot of people voted for them thinking that they were voting for the Liberal Party. (The Liberals were at position Y.) So you can win because you have a deceptive name, and you win the prime position in the draw for the ballot paper.
How do these 80 or 100 people all get on the ballot? Do they have to demonstrate some level of support, or is just a matter of saying, “I’m in!”