AusCelebs Forums

I havent voted for either of the two big political parties ever since john hewson got shown the dooor. Coming from a labor family me voting for a liberal was a sign of just how disgusted i was [and lots other labor voters too I might add] with the way they [labor] were playing the race card.

Ever since hewson I've voted either greeen or independants because basically when one votes for lib/lab your voting for world government socialist/communist atheistic style or hard christian fascist/capitalist style.

I'd love to know who votes for what on auscelebs???

Unfortunately, you did still vote for either Labor or Liberal, even if you put them in the last two boxes. Your vote just kept getting recounted until they got down to your preference between the two. That's what's wrong with it. Each vote should only be counted once & thrown away...

First past the post voting also has some major problems Skaven, and other systems require run off elections that can mean people having to vote in several elections within a short time.

The preferential system certainly has its faults, and we have several different versions running in Australia, but with compulsory voting it's better than most systems out there. The big problem is that the two major parties can stack the odds against smaller parties and that's exactly what they do.

As to voting. Now days you are just making a choice between two conservative parties that occasionally fluctuate between extremes as Howard did and Abbott's Melbourne speech proves he will. A vote for an independent can also mean a vote for one of the major parties as most are aligned to them as are the minors like Fielding.

The answer. Don't vote for a party, vote for a local member and ignore their party allegiance. Voting along ideological lines and sprouting ideology makes as much sense as barracking for a TV station, yet that's exactly what many do.

I agree, Moe. I always vote for the independents (depending on what they believe of course). I just think that someone who was prepared to make a stand for something they believe in & because they want to change something in their community is worth ten of someone who just went into politics to join some major party gravy train. Who will then just spend his whole political career sitting on the back bench agreeing with whatever the front bench says & spends his whole life being one of their political mouth pieces.

The problem with a lot of the major party members is that they don't seem to believe it's their role to represent their community to parliament but rather to represent their party to their constituency (which is pretty fuct up if you ask me).

And it does them the world of good to have a few flies in the ointment (like Xenophon) who aren't just their to make up the numbers & do whatever their party leader says. You don't always have to agree with what they say, but it's good to have someone represent a different point of view...

Exactly Skaven. As left leaning as those online tests say I am and though I'm more for the social than the individual. I vote for a local Liberal member because she is by far the best local Federal member I have ever had. She often stood up against Howard to the point that in 11½ years he only visited our area once, and that was only after a lot of lobbying by our local member and the hard core conservatives in our area.

In the last area I lived in my local was Peter Reith, who I never voted for. He was widely talked about as being one of the worst local members even by the core conservatives in that area, and it was a very conservative area. Yet these people still kept overwhelmingly voting for him, not because he was a good local member, which he wasn't by a long shot, but only because he was a Liberal. They could have put Krusty the Clown as the candidate for the area and as long as he was a member of the Liberal party they would have voted him in even as he turned their area into a wasteland and did nothing for them, only for himself.

That's the stupidity of voting along ideological lines. I guess the only time you could really vote ideologically is if you had candidates of almost equally good stature working for your local area, but I've never come across that in my life. The norm more often than not is to have several bad or terrible candidates to chose from and you can only pick the lesser of two evils, which really stinks.

Simple majority (first past the post) has big problems if there are more than 2 candidates. If there are 3 candidates and one gets 40% of the vote and the other two get 30% each, how is it fair that somebody gets elected when 60% of the voters voted for somebody else?

It is even more farcical in the UK where you have simple majority combined with optional voting. Some MPs are elected on less than 10% of the vote.

Take for example the recent Bradfield by-election (Brendan Nelson's old seat) where there were 22 candidates. If we had simple majority voting then, theoretically, somebody could have won that seat with a little over 4.5% of the vote.

This is why we have preferential voting. Your vote isn't recounted. What happens is after the first count, the candidate with the lowest number of votes is eliminated and their second preferences are distributed. Then the next lowest candidate's preferences are distributed and so on until somebody has more than 50% of the vote. This is not the same as a recount.

Yeah but that's just splitting hairs. If people's first choice went to the candidate with the poorest vote, they look at their second choice which is still a form of "recounting". I mean, you can say that isn't the right word for it but that's just semantics really.

Personally, I still think each vote should only get counted once (even if it means someone only winning for 30-40% of the total vote). It's better than then recounting people votes to their fifth or sixth choice. Clearly, if someone has put someone that far down the ballot paper, they're not "voting" for them so it's a farce that their vote should go toward them.

If you ask me, the preferential system was devised purely to protect the interests of the major parties to ensure that they don't have to have to share the pie with too many others.

I'm not in favour of compulsory voting either. I agree that, in a democracy, everyone should have their say. But I don't think it's very democratic to force someone to have their say & punish them if they choose not to do do. If people don't like who they've got & they didn't exercise their right to vote then they've only got to blame.

Giving people a choice of whether or not to vote means that people will be voting because they have an opinion & want to have their say, instead of the masses of politically apathetic voters who couldn't give a shit voters & only turned up because they don't want to get fined. The ones who think it's just about choosing between Labor or Liberal, have no idea about any of the alternative candidates & only vote for a party because their parents did. It's those habitual voters who constitute a large part of the vote toward the major parties (which is why the major parties like compulsory voting). Just let them continue to wallow in their own ignorance if that's what they really want to do...

Non-compulsory voting helps one party more than any other and that's conservative parties, which is why they are the loudest and most insistent on trying to get compulsory voting overturned and voluntary voting introduced.

One of Australia's successes as a fairly stable democracy is in being a rare country that has compulsory voting.

And Skaven first past the post introduces a whole bunch of problems, one of which you alluded to in parties having to form non-binding coalitions for the term of the government. These coalitions have rarely turned out to be harmonious in the countries that use them, and sometimes they allow extreme right wing nationalistic minor parties to have influence in government policy because a party sells its soul to them to win an election.

The other way to overcome the failings of first past the post is to have run off elections, which if you think about it is a convoluted and more expensive way of having preferential voting, or really closer to our Senate voting system.

For all its shortcomings, the worst being the advantage it gives to a major party, preferential voting has some advantages worth holding onto.

No it's not recounting, it's distributing preferences. Each preference is only counted once and then only until one candidate has a majority. If a candidate has a majority on the primary vote alone, there is no need to distribute preferences.


It is.


Wrong. Preferential voting existed before the current two major parties existed.

Preferential voting more accurately reflects the overall will of the voters than first past the post, but not quite as much as single transferrable vote (as used for Senate elections).

In fact it is first past the post voting which entrenches a 2 party system, given enough time. This most fundamental criticism of first past the post is that a large majority of votes may play no part in determining the outcome. In the UK 2005 general election, the Labour Party got 35% of the vote and 55% of the seats while the Lib-Dems got 25% of the vote but only 10% of the seats.

But the fact still remains that if you're someone who chose someone who polled a small minority on you're first choice, your ballot paper is counted again picking your second choice, & possibly again for your third choice & so on. If you'd preferred I used the term "preferential voting" to "recounting", fine, but that just sounds pedantic to me. I'd rather not pontificate as to whether or not I used the correct the terminology, my comment was about the procedure itself.

As far as I'm concerned, if they count down to one of my last two or three preferences, then clearly that is not someone who I wanted my vote to count towards so, as far as I'm concerned, that means it is being used to count toward someone whom I didn't want. You may think that's a good thing, I do not.

Yes. I understand how the preferential voting system works. It's not rocket surgery. I know each preference only gets counted once, but most of the ballot papers get counted several times until they all get counted to either of the two strongest polling candidates. So, even if someone doesn't tick one of the two highest polling until the second to last box, their vote goes toward that candidate just because we have a system that declares that that means they're are voting for them? Why? Because they detest the idea of that person being their local member slightly less than they do the other one?

Regardless of whomever the voter actually wants their vote to count toward, it always goes to one of the major party members. I think it's manipulative & it does not an honest representation of the true opinion of the constituency.

Instead of making voters choose each one in order of preference, why not give them a choice? Why not let them tick one box above the line & all of the boxes in order below (like they have to do for the senate) or, if we must have a preferential system, let them choose themselves how many they want to number in order of preference & ignore the ones they don't want (leave them blank) instead of making them number every single one of them?

I know the system has been around longer than the current two parties, but I think the preferential system still benefits major parties because the independents are rarely the same & smaller parties come & go, but Labor & Liberal have a candidate in every single constituency in every election so everyone who votes has to tick Labor & Liberal candidate. The only choice they have is which one to put before the other.

I always put Labor & Liberal in the last two boxes because I don't agree with the system & do it as a action of spite. The thing that I find wrong is the fact that, no matter how far down I put the Labor or Liberal candidate, my vote will always end up counting toward one of them which I think is bullshit!

Obviously you disagree & like the system so we're going to have to agree to disagree...