A political primer

Tweet

I intend this Interest to iclude all things Aussie, and that means politics among many others. I gather that many of the non-Australians in Mylot don't know a lot about us, so here we go, a thumbnail sketch. Our system is based on Britain's. The Australian electoral system has evolved over the last 150 years of democratic government, with the Australian Parliament established by 1901. The present day federal parliament has a number of distinctive features including compulsory voting, with full-preference instant-runoff voting in single-member seats to elect the lower house, the Australian House of Representatives. The senate is a multi-member proportional voting system where 6 senators in each state face election each time it comes round (there is an exception to this, of more later). This means that each candidate, to get elected, must gain one seventh of the primary votes (a quota) on the first count; any additional votes for such a candidate are then passed down to the next preferred candidate on the ballot paper until five candidates have gained their quota. This gives us a unique parliament because "third" parties and independents, who in other voting systems would never get into parliament, have a very good chance of so doing, and the current Senate has 9 Green POarty senators and one independent. This means that it is rare these days for one of the major parties to hold an absolute majority in the senate, whose role it is primarily to assess and either pass or block the legislation passed in the House of Representatives. The Third parties hold the balance of power, and in the Aussie vernacular, "keep the bast*rds honest". On rare occasions a government might call a "double dissolution", throwing the whole parliament onto the voters' mercy, usually done because they think they are popular enough to maybe gain control of both houses. The senate quotas then become one eleventh of the primary vote. The state parliament in Tasmania is wholly elected on the Hare-Clark version of this election process, and the Greens have won enough seats there to have actually formed a coalition government with the Labor Party at one point. The other point I will make in this discussion is the ideological makeup of the parties. What we call the Liberal Party is in a long-term coalition with the National (formerly Country) Party. It used to actually be a liberal party along the lines of Britain's liberals and America's Democrats, but for at least 25 years now has actually been in the control of the conservative lement within the party, and now far more closely resembles the British Tory Party or America's Republicans. The Labor Party grew from Australia's extraordinarily strong Union movement from the late 1800's, but it too, in the last 25 years, has moved to the right, and is now more or less a slightly left liberal party. Both Labour and the Lib/Nats work under some difficulty, since there are still many died-in-the-wool left wing or "liberal" members within the respective groups, which causes a lot of internal bickering and political assassinations. The Greens are the truly "liberal" party, and have grown far beyond a merely environmental movement, espousing many radical social welfare stances and a strong anti-Globalisation economic platform. Enough of the lecture. Any questions? Lash