Oz Federal Election 2013 - Discussion and Comments

[doctau]

Re: Abbott in Government

I have to challenge your assumption that voters are required to have full, in-depth knowledge of all parties policies. Voters are responsible for expressing their choice when voting. There is absolutely no limit on how they have to determine that choice. Anyone has the right to say "I like fishing, therefore I'm voting for the fishing party". They would have made a choice that makes them happy. Who are you or I or the LNP/ALP or journalist to force such a person to research all the parties policies.

Sure make all parties publish their full senate ticket. But people are allowed to decide their vote in private using their own methodology.

That's a fair point, I wasn't considering incomplete voting in that bit of my post - I'd support that.

Personally I'd love to be able to leave incomplete the middle numbers, so I could vote for who I wanted, vote against a few groups I do not want to see get in, and then not care about the ones I don't know about. I'm not sure if any ordered-preference voting system does that (range/approval voting would do it, but that's very different).


Introducing ballot rotation so not everyone's ballot was in the same order would get rid on the "first on the ballot" donkey voting too

 

[medhead]

Re: Abbott in Government

Hare-Clark is still a single transferrable vote system - basically a randomised below the line as per Tasmania.
Single transferable vote - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

It's not random. Voters still list their preferences.

Remember the NSW paper had 45 columns and 110 individual names.
To validly vote below the line you had to get 107 numbers+ correct.

And?

 

[amaroo]

Re: Abbott in Government

Introducing ballot rotation so not everyone's ballot was in the same order would get rid on the "first on the ballot" donkey voting too

That's a cracking idea.

Any changes to the system should coincide with the introduction of e-voting - minus the chads

 

[casanovawa]

As long as they don't bring in this 4% rule, i think i might have to start my own party ahead of the next election...

I'll have to put some thought into possible names and manifestos???

 

[moa999]

Re: Abbott in Government

No, just the first 99 with up to 3 errors.

I thought you had to fill out 97%, with up to three errors.

 

[Skyring]

Re: Abbott in Government

Looking more broadly at the issue. It has been suggested that above the line voting is a problem. Why? because the minor parties have worked out the numbers and made a deal. Doesn't that mean deals are a problem? Should the major parties be stopped from making deals?

The problem with above the line voting - and it was a reasonable solution to the number of informal votes by making it simpler to cast a vote with a full preference list already worked out - is that the system is now being gamed by microparties, leading to large ballot papers and consequent increased incentive to vote above the line, making it more and more attractive to register more microparties to make more preference deals.

It is a vicious circle. I'm not suggesting that any candidate or party be discriminated against, and certainly not to the advantage of the major parties, but I am suggesting that the user interface be made more user-friendly and the easiest way of doing this is by optional preferential voting. Number as many candidates as you like in whatever order you like.

 

[medhead]

Re: Abbott in Government

I agree that it's very easy to be uninformed when voting for the senate if doing so above the line. I'm just not sure the answer to lack of knowledge is to change the voting system. If change is needed then why not go towards a counting system that is supposed to make it harder to predict the outcome and presumably harder to do deals.

I guess it's also worth remembering that the major parties have be doing deals for a long time.

 

[casanovawa]

Re: Abbott in Government

Maybe the people just need to take a bit more interest in their voting as the environment changes???

I guess in the US they also have a process where they start with several candidates for the challenging party and whittle them down in primaries until just one is left to vote for against the incumbent... I guess having 500 people to get a party registered is sort of like pre-determining/qualifying if they should get a go, but i wonder if they had anything prior to the election to work out if parties had enough support to go forward onto the ballot, perhaps voluntarily allowing people to choose if they wanted to nominate/vote beyond a certain amount of support, although i'm sure the majors would be better organised to knock most minors out...

 

[moa999]

Re: Abbott in Government

Maybe the people just need to take a bit more interest in their voting as the environment changes???

I guess in the US they also have a process where they start with several candidates for the challenging party and whittle them down in primaries until just one is left to vote for against the incumbent... I guess having 500 people to get a party registered is sort of like pre-determining/qualifying if they should get a go, but i wonder if they had anything prior to the election to work out if parties had enough support to go forward onto the ballot, perhaps voluntarily allowing people to choose if they wanted to nominate/vote beyond a certain amount of support, although i'm sure the majors would be better organised to knock most minors out...

Pass on the US system where the election process takes almost 12 months.
Julia's advance nomination of a date (changed by Kevin) was bad enough.

 

[markis10]

Re: Abbott in Government

Pass on the US system where the election process takes almost 12 months.
Julia's advance nomination of a date (changed by Kevin) was bad enough.

Agree, does wonders for business!

 

[serfty]

Re: Abbott in Government

I thought you had to fill out 97%, with up to three errors.

With below the line you can have up to 3 sequencing errors and need to fill out at least 90% of the boxes.

(That is 88 of the 97 on the Victorian ballot paper and 99 of the 110 on the NSW sheet).

You can vote both below and above the line - a valid below the line vote will take precedence over an above the line vote.

More here: PolitiFact Australia | Voters can exercise their own preference in the Senate

 

[medhead]

Re: Abbott in Government

Maybe the people just need to take a bit more interest in their voting as the environment changes???

I guess in the US they also have a process where they start with several candidates for the challenging party and whittle them down in primaries until just one is left to vote for against the incumbent... I guess having 500 people to get a party registered is sort of like pre-determining/qualifying if they should get a go, but i wonder if they had anything prior to the election to work out if parties had enough support to go forward onto the ballot, perhaps voluntarily allowing people to choose if they wanted to nominate/vote beyond a certain amount of support, although i'm sure the majors would be better organised to knock most minors out...

As best I understand it the primaries are really a party based process for selecting the parties candidate for president. There can be other presidential candidates on the final ballot. In fact apparently primaries aren't even part of the constitution.

Edit: it's not a process for candidates to prove themselves to the electorate, as such.

 

[casanovawa]

Re: Abbott in Government

As i understand it, anyone can nominate to run for President for either of the parties and then they have primaries in each state progressively, i guess you have to be registered members of the republicans or democrats who can vote in those primaries for their party, but to me it sounds like as each primary goes by those that are getting no traction/interest from registered party members drop off until you come down to just the last one or two who keep fighting it out until one becomes the obvious front runner to represent the party or else the primaries actually add up to something until one has one enough primaries votes (??) to be the elected party rep, so i am pretty sure it is a popularity contest to see who will run and then on the day the people get a choice of two candidates, where as here we are just served up a candidate by the party...

Anyway, i am not really talking about a primaries type process, just something cheap, relatively painless and easy which further prequalifies parties to actually have some substance to get on the ballot...

Its just off the top of my head, so no great thought has gone into it, but maybe a party to be registered needs 500 members... They could be perhaps given until 1 month before the election date to get that membership or some form of nominations up to 5,000 and have to go out and sell themselves, maybe as micro parties the Electoral Commission could have a public funded site where every little party could have up there manifestos, alignments, candidates etc in one place to make it easy for the public who are interested in being part of the process, as well as their own websites etc if they are organised/well funded enough, and if they can garner 5,000 nominations/members or something they then get to go on the ballot, like a second hurdle/stage they need to reach to qualify and they have to sell themselves/get the public interested enough to go look at them and take the next step of doing something about it...

 

[Buzzard]

Not only that, but almost all of their "savings" come from axing foreign aid.

As Tanya Plibersek rightly pointed out, $1.5b a year in an economy the size of Australia's barely even qualifies as a rounding error. Who would have guessed a mere week or two ago that the difference between responsible Government and economic vandalism was a few fractions of a percent ?

That comment by Tanya P. made me cringe. If $1.5b is barely a rounding error then why as health minister didn't you get/put several times that amount into fixing health?

 

[Hvr]

Re: Abbott in Government

No, just the first 99 with up to 3 errors.

Yes re the 90% of numbers. No re three errors. As soon as there is a break in consecutive numbers the vote (before the 90% level) is invalid.

 

[Pushka]

They aren't axing foreign aid. They are reducing the rate of increase paid each year, which recently has been well above inflation.

 

[drross]

and it's exctly what labour did for the last 2 budgets.

 

[medhead]

That comment by Tanya P. made me cringe. If $1.5b is barely a rounding error then why as health minister didn't you get/put several times that amount into fixing health?

Still it's a fair point. What's the total budget $400 billion? So hardly worth mentioning a saving of 0.25%. Especially when it is probably the rounding amount over 100d of line items. As for health there's a difference between rounding everything down and actually having the money.

 

[whatmeworry]

As long as they don't bring in this 4% rule, i think i might have to start my own party ahead of the next election...

I'll have to put some thought into possible names and manifestos???

The Australian Frequent Flyer Party.

 

[casanovawa]

The Australian Frequent Flyer Party.

That is one of the obvious ones, but might have some people round here up in arms, but I have one or two other ones i'm pondering...