Is Australia's lower house “gerrymandered”?
wheelreinventor.substack.com
wheelreinventor.substack.com
What he's complaining about (that the system of one representative from each electorate biases against candidates who could never win in one electorate but have a modest amount of support in the entire population) is worth contemplating, but isn't gerrymandering. New Zealand addresses this problem by giving everyone two votes, an electorate vote and a party vote, and members are chosen from electorates and party lists. New Zealand only has one chamber. Australia has two. Australia's Upper House is elected at a state level with multiple members from each state, so this is where minor party candidates get elected.
There is a revolt underway on the right of Australian politics as various factions battle to decide what exactly the right wing is going to stand for. That contributed a lot more to their election defeat than the concerns this gentleman raises. There were significant swings against both major parties, although the Labor party just lost a few votes while the Liberals were eviscerated.
That isn't gerrymandering, that is losing lots of votes leading to the loss of an election.
By that definition, one might say that Australia has a single layer of gerrymandering – gerrymandered at the systemic level but not at the district level – while the US has two layers of gerrymandering – gerrymandered districts in a gerrymandered system.
Use of the word gerrymander in this way ("having boundaries at all is gerrymander") is meaningless.
It depends on what you are comparing it to. Preferential voting (aka ranked choice or alternative voting) is less favourable to bigger parties than first past-the-post is. But it is more favourable to bigger parties than other systems such as single transferrable vote (STV) or mixed member. The biggest reason why Australia hasn't moved to STV or mixed member for the House of Representatives, is that doing so would benefit smaller parties at the cost of the bigger ones.
> Use of the word gerrymander in this way ("having boundaries at all is gerrymander") is meaningless.
An STV or mixed member system would still have boundaries, but would be less advantageous to the bigger parties. Why isn't choosing a system which is intentionally more advantageous to the bigger parties a "gerrymander"?
Where the evidence for that claim? More likely is that there's no impetus for change, at the least, and quite possibly no interest in it given people's feelings about how the Senate is voted and the proliferation of smaller parties there.
He goes on to say an unconventional approach (no electoral boundaries) is better and the politicians are guilty of not adopting it out of self interest, even though no one has seriously proposed or considered it, and in Australia this would have essentially no support in the electorate (Australians having no problem with their system).
Anyone can make outrageous claims to promote their blog, why is this getting any attention.
By resisting electoral change, these parties are engaged in the political manipulation of electoral district boundaries with the intent to create undue advantage. This is called gerrymandering.
We'll call this "gerrymandering" now 'cause it's a well known term that everybody knows is wrong.
Not much of a mandate, to win government by losing votes. Here's hoping if they break their promise on income tax they'll be tossed soon enough.
> Here's hoping if they break their promise on income tax they'll be tossed soon enough.
The economic realities suggest this promise should be dropped. This does not hurt Labor's voters terribly, and does not impact the more left-leaning voters much at all. I expect this will be dropped and this will not hurt Labor at all, but will build them a reputation as economic pragmatists.
Personally I will be impacted by a "Stage 3" cut and yet I hope they are dropped. Even in this political climate, and with a mortgage to pay, I don't really see that this tax cut will help me more than a functioning public health system. Or help the country, as a whole, better than an actual welfare system.
Here's hoping the Coalition will continue their rightward march and another, actually conservative, party will grow from the wreck of the Teals and blue-ribbon seats they Libs lost.