Pirate Party Australia
pirateparty.org.au
pirateparty.org.au
But you wouldn't read it in the papers, which have performed the most amazing political smiling assassination.
I have no faith in Australian politics anymore, every campaign seems to be entirely focused around mud slinging and fear mongering.
Based on coverage, there are three major parties. The only microparty that gets any coverage is the Australian Sex Party and that's only because of the undergraduate boorishness of their name.
Katter and Palmer will get coverage this time in the "lighter side" columns and then we'll go back to having the majors take turns at the Treasury benches while the Greens get to pretend they are a genuine alternative because nobody actually reads their policies.
I miss the Democrats. They were boring centrists and it was wonderful.
In terms of coverage, Family First gets more than the Sex party, as does One Nation.
Family First gets coverage because they are very good at faking noise and movement. They learnt well from previous generations of protest movement. The body of media hadn't yet innoculated themselves against it in the way they have against weekly the National Days of Action and Marches Against Whatever that take place in Sydney and Melbourne CBDs every 20 minutes.
All I'm saying is, keep your head up: things can still change over time!
What I would LOVE to see is a viable third party. Unfortunately, the Greens are not it.
Maybe Palmer's party? GAG VOMIT
And it's not just a small amount more in the way of new bills, it's close to 40% more than the last term of the opposition in power. Even if it's inflated, it's still indicative that they're able to do stuff. Cut the number of bills passed in half and you still have a number competitive with any other modern government.
I mean really, are you saying moves like curtailing middle-class welfare are meaningless legislation? I'm not saying that this government is particularly awesome, but I am saying that the picture painted of them by the media is remarkably off-kilter.
Worrying about passing lots of bills or few bills is really silly because, as you pointed out, almost everything goes through on the nod anyhow. The amount of legislation that is genuinely rejected by Parliaments is miniscule. The government is able to command a majority of one vote: that's all it ever needs, especially with fellow-believers in Magic Pudding economics having the balance up in the Senate.
I care less about the amount of activity and more about the quality. I don't think this has been a good government. I didn't think much of the previous one or the one before that. Hawke/Keating and the first 2 terms of Howard/Costello were about as good as this country's had so far.
I also note that whatever their position in Parliament, the government is perfectly able to paralyse themselves quite without the help of the independents.
As for meaningless metric, what other metrics do we have? Is not the quality of legislation a measure built almost entirely of opinion?
I guess my problem is that the focus has almost wholly been on the soap opera of politics rather than the pointy end that actually affects the country. Only the barest mention of policy is required to try to explain the bad polling, which will then set off the next week's round of "the polls are bad because the polls are bad". There's also been a surprising amount of misogyny and general lack of respect throughout - which is another argument - but I note that I've never seen another PM referenced by first name so much. Hrm. Perhaps Gough, though I was in nappies when he was also run out of office :)
When the cabinet spends more time phoning each other to check numbers than acting in their roles as Ministers of the Crown, that's bad for business. Compare and contrast the dying days of Howard, when for several months Hamlet of Higgins hovered with a knife.
> As for meaningless metric, what other metrics do we have?
Process metrics aren't output metrics.
More generally, I don't like a lot of the policy settings, so understandably I'm agin' it.
I agree that the media of person and personality has crowded out everything else, including the discussion of whether the bills being presented advance the national interest. I think Gillard is quite sincere about the NDIS and Gonski and it's a pity that neither policy has received more than a fairly surface level consideration.
I'm sure that an element of the bile directed towards Gillard is misogyny, but a lot of it is plain old politician-hate. I can't think of a single PM who hasn't been honest-to-god hated by at least 30% of the electorate.
But what is particularly unique in the Australian context is our party discipline. It is probably the most rigid in the world. There's a lot less horse-trading. Our current Parliament is only the second in history where it has been at all necessary for the major parties to negotiate with independents to obtain "confidence and supply" -- ie to form a government.
The Pirate Party are interesting, but I don't see them having enough of an impact here, what with the Greens and Independents usually taking the "third way" spot.
Still great to see, though :)
They thrived when they were genuinely centrist: neither left nor right.
The Democrats used to win Senate votes approximately equally from both Labor and Liberal supporters. When Meg Lees negotiated to introduce the GST, Stott-Despoja deposed her and yanked the party towards the left.
In doing so she alienated all of the Liberal voters who'd previously given about half of the party's vote. The Democrats kept trying to lurch further left to shore up the votes that were left, but ran smack into the Greens, who had already hoovered all those votes up. Then they died.
The Liberal centrist vote, incidentally, has nowhere left to go. So the coalition has outperformed all the others in the Senate -- that's how Howard wound up with a Senate majority in the first place.
If Stott-Despoja had stuck to the Democrat formula, there's a reasonable chance they'd still be around.
Ahhh, Ms Star-Destroyer.
Unfortunately people in Australia don't seem to get the idea of LibDem parties and it is unlikely we will see one with decent leadership or candidates any time soon unless someone as high profile as Chipp leaves a major. I thought it might have been Turnbull but he doesn't seem interested and is so discredited by his record on the NBN I don't think he has much of a future.
If you vote "below the line", you must number every candidate in order of your preference.
Every. Single. Box.
In some states there are hundreds of candidates. One NSW ballot paper was nicknamed "the tablecloth".
If you vote "above the line", you are required only to tick or mark one box. That box delegates your voting preference to a party, who have registered a preset order of preference with the Australian Electoral Commission. Your vote will be counted according to that party's scheme.
Almost everyone votes above the line in the Senate, so the arrangement of preferences by different parties can have surprising effects on the final composition of the Senate. As you can imagine, this leads to a lot of horse-trading, known as "preference deals".
I vote below the line because I like to work backwards in order of craziness.
On the face of it, it would then seem that the system is rigged to reduce the honest preferences of the more informed or politically engaged portion of the population through technicalia (forgot a box, wrote same number twice, etc.).
What we in Australia call "exhaustive preferential voting" is sometimes called "instant runoff voting" elsewhere. Having to number every box is a feature, not a bug. If you don't have an exhaustive ballot, then in practice political parties will encourage voters to "just vote 1" -- to mark only one box.
And then you've arrived at a first-past-the-post system, which is what IRV is trying to get away from in the first place.
In the House of Reps, few candidates turn out because it's very difficult for a non-major party candidate to win. It happens, but only rarely. So in any given seat it would be unusual to find more than 5 or 6 candidates -- 2 majors, a green, whatever microparty is currently making a push and perhaps the local village idiot or somebody who doesn't realise that running as an independent is a mug's game.
But the Senate is different. The Senate is based on proportional representation. Each State elects 6 senators, and the Senate seats are effectively allocated to parties according to the final distribution of votes. In a recursive process, the candidate with the fewest votes is eliminated and their votes redistributed according to the voter preferences, up and up until there are 6 people with a full "quota" of votes.
The thing about the Senate is that the final Senate seat in any given state is usually in play. The top 4 seats are almost always won equally by the majors; the 5th usually won by a major or the Greens. But the 6th seats can and frequently do wind up in the hands of the most unlikely people because of the complicated preference deals I described above.
Because there is a chance for a microparty candidate to wind up in the Senate, lots of people run. Being a Senator is a pretty sweet deal. Good pay, your own offices and staff, travel entitlements and the like. And if you luck into holding the balance of power in the Senate, you've just become a very powerful individual.