>Bill, thanks for posting this article:
>
>>http://theage.com.au/articles/2004/10/10/1097406425742.html
>>How party preferences picked Family First
>>By Tim Colebatch
>>October 11, 2004
>>Only one in 10 of these voters actually voted for Family First. But
>>the other parties voted for it, and that - and above all, Labor's
>>choice - decided the seat.
>
>It seems to me, though, that the problem above is caused not by
>party lists but by the Labor Party's stupid choice. If the Labor
>Party preferred the Green Party to Family First, the election of
>Steve Fielding wouldn't have come about.
It was a tactical decision by Labor, they did a deal with Family First, to exchange preferences. If you study the numbers you will see that, with just a few more first preferences, Labor could have used FF (and other) preferences to edge the Greens out. Labor would have expected FF to have been excluded from the count much earlier so that it would have got the benefit of FF preferences, instead of the other way around. If that had happened, Labor would have won the last Senate spot.
It was only the fact that FF managed to get so many other minor parties to give it their preferences that prevented this. Including also the unexpected total collapse of the Australian Democrats. By staying in the race longer than all the other micro parties and independents, even the Democrats (who also expected to be the beneficiary of FF prefs rather than the other way around), FF stayed in long enough to snatch victory.
But my point is that these sort of deals should not be allowed. It is absurd to allow political parties to, in effect, trade the votes they receive amongst themselves. So, sure, it was a result of a miscalculation by Labor and the Aust Democrats and lots of other parties. But it could never have happened without a system that allows the political parties to horse trade such large blocs of votes. If the preferences had flowed according to the individual choices of millions of individual voters, it would have been impossible for FF to have collected anywhere near enough preferences to get elected. No-one had even heard of them, they would have got bugger all preferences from the public.
By contrast, in Tasmania, which has had proportional representation for over a hundred years, a very large number of voters still ignore the new simple party vote option and allocate preferences themselves. At state elections, under Hare-Clarke, the political parties are not even permitted to give out How-To-Vote card at election booths. Political parties cannot control who people vote for, they even have to endorse about twice as many candidates for each electorate as they can hope will be elected. Thus allowing voters to pick and choose among the offered candidates from the party they want to vote for. Often tossing out sitting candidates from their party and putting in a new one.
As a Tasmanian, the intricacies of proportional representation is in my genes, I have seen all sorts of things and got a feel for it. So _really_ you have to believe me when I say that party lists are a modern perversion of proportional representation. The original PR invented by Hare and Clark in the 19th century gave no quarter whatsoever to political parties, except perhaps for allowing candidates to be "grouped" conveniently on the ballot paper according to party affiliation. (even that might have been a 20th century compromise with the reality of political parties.) Other than that they had to stand on their own feet. This is the one and only "pure" proportional representation system. "party lists, or any system which allows political parties to determine or influence the order in which candidates get preferences is a vile plot by political parties.
In fact, under the Hare Clarke system, the parties are not even permitted to list candidates in their "Group" in the order they want voters to elect them. Every candidates order in the list is rotated under the Robson Rotational Ballot amendment, in order to thwart parties even being able to indicate to voters which candidate(s) are the first second etc choice the party (as they do in the Australian Senate). Let alone allowing the party to actually make the decision for the voter directly as in a party list election.
>"Under the preferential selection rules, voters also have the option
>of voting for a single party and letting that party allocate their
>preferences. The Green Party has pledged its preferences to the
>Labor Party" (Richard C. Paddock, "In Australia, Ranking Process Is
>Key in a Tight Race," October 7, 2004,
><http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-aussies7oct07,1,5324864.story?coll=la-headlines-world>).
>
>Considering that the Green Party pledged its preferences to the
>Labor Party, I wonder why the Labor Party didn't return the favor.
>Is that some kind of sectarianism?
The Greens allocated preferences to labor on the straight-forward basis that they preferred Labor. Certainly they would have preferred Labor to the Coalition, or the FF. (Though I expect that Green preferences would have gone to the Democrats before Labor, but this didn't make any difference because the Dems got excluded from the count before the Greens.
Bill Bartlett Bracknell Tas