At 12:38 27/04/99 +0800, Brian Jenkins wrote:
>The 'above the line' voting which was devised to make nonconformist votes
>trickle back to Labor and Liberal has backfired, enabling the election of
>candidates with almost no primary votes. There also seems to have been
>further use of the ticket-vote system to 'disfranchise' voters for the
>One Nation group whose 6.2% was thus effective in securing only one seat
>(though Oldfield was third to be elected after the No 1 candidates of
>Liberal and Labor).
See, I don't have a problem with this, because it's the way the parties -
all of them - chose to arrange their preferences. I voted below the line -
it's not hard when you only have to select 15 people. Just like I didn't
preference the ALP , Liberals or Nationals, I didn't preference One Nation
or the CEC.
>This suggests that 'dummy' candidates can in future be used to counter
>preference gang-bangs, as well as their traditional use to harvest
>'protest vote' preferences for major-party candidates.
In this case, however, the thing that worried me was the outright lying of
the front parties. There was a "Women's Pary/Save the Forests" who were
preferencing a party that supports 4WDs and motorbikes in national parks.
I don't think that's particularly democratic (and no, it's no more
democratic if the majors do it).
>It is generally pleasing to see that 7 of the 21 seats were won by
>'alternative' groups, and that these seem genuinely representative of
>community viewpoints, notwithstanding the attack on PHON voters.
Well, at least five of them seem to be genuinely interested.
Alister
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