One Nation on the rise / WA State Election thread

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[HAL]

Why now? To me too.

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[Pies4shaw]

[Pies4shaw]

WA Labor is now expected to secure 41 of the 59 Lower House seats. One Nation is set to secure 0.

Some electoral reform in the Upper House is on the cards. With a bit of luck, they'll abolish electoral provinces and just establish proportional representation across the State as a whole. That's not a bad way of excluding the gibbering idiots who get elected with a "quota" of votes in some ratbag area, even though they have a trivial and irrelevant constituency on a statewide basis. On current voting results, eg, it appears that the Nats will get twice as many Council members as PHONy, despite getting a bit more than half of PHONy's vote. Meanwhile, PHONy will probably only have the same number of Councillors as the Shooting and Fishing folk - but with nearly 4 times their vote.

On this approach, the ALP and the Greens would still not (quite) have a majority, so the ALP still need to gain support from elsewhere to get legislation through the Upper House. It would, however, only need to engage the vote of one group of nutters (or the Libs) on each issue.

[partypie]

With 48 candidates on the upper house ballot sheet, voting below the line meant the nut job parties started attracting votes at about 20. Sure to get a preference at some stage. None of the parties how to vote cards specified how their preferences would flow.
Royalties for Regions has been great for the rural areas, for example professional fishermen and tour boat operators now have a marina where I live, and as a result the industry is developing and more people are getting jobs. There's talk of it being a federal scheme.
My local seat has been through a number of boundary changes and what was once a Liberal stronghold now held by the Nats, with the Labor candidate coming in second.
After the shabby treatment of the Nationals by the Liberals, I would not be surprised if the Nate vote with labor in the upper house when it suits them, which would negate the necessity of dealing with ONP and SFF.

[Skids]

[David]

[Pies4shaw]

^^^^ I don't understand why you'd bother responding - it's just a party political broadcast. We all have our own views but it sometimes looks like some of these posts are just direct dissemination of party information.

[David]

They're certainly doing their best to follow the Putin/Trump model of putting their propaganda out as a viable alternative to actual journalism: i.e. "here's what the mainstream media won't tell you". It's a move that's both strategically clever and absolutely shameless: in the past, inconvenient facts could present a political problem; now, they can just be waved away as "fake news". The question, I guess, is whether countering that propaganda is a) necessary or b) only granting it further legitimacy.

[Pies4shaw]

^^^ Don't play in their sandpit. The really interesting question for PHONy is how there was a 16% swing against the Libs in the lower house and they picked up less than 1 in three of those votes, with about two of every three going to the ALP. The combined Libs/Nats/PHONy vote in the lower house is under 41% at this election, so it looks to sane people who can count like the people who voted for PHONy are just rusted on conservatives who bled from the Libs/Nats. Thus, PHONy are the 5th party by votes in the lower house, after the ALP, the Libs, the Greens and the Nats (in that order). In the upper house, it looks like the Nats' primary vote has completely collapsed (under 4.5% of the vote statewide) - in fact, if you look at the combined Libs/Nats/PHONy vote in the upper house, it is only about 40%.

So, if PHONy has had any less failure in the upper house than in the lower house, it's only been by ripping seats from the Libs and Nats. The Libs and Nats between them lost 7 (net) upper house seats at this election - 4 of those went to the ALP and the rest, unsurprisingly, have been split between minor conservative parties (likely 2 to PHONy and 1 to the Liberal Democrats).

Picking up seats in the Council is for spoilers, not rulers. Theirs is the politics of whining about other parties' decisions.

[Pies4shaw]

The wind, it appears, is being taken out of the sails of despicable racists in many places:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/mar/16/europes-governments-signal-relief-as-dutch-election-defeats-far-right

[Pies4shaw]

It is probably time for the ALP to try to fix the unfair voting arrangements in this State - if I were a resident of Perth, I would be very troubled that an upper house vote in each of the three "metropolitan" electorates is worth a tiny fraction of the value of a vote in "Mining and Pastoral" region. So, there are about 45,000 votes counted in Mining and Pastoral thus far, compared to almost 320,000 votes counted in Southern Metropolitan. A proper proportional representation system would see the 3 "metropolitan" electorates (about 1,000,000 voters) elect the vast majority of the upper house rather than the present position, where they elect half.

To put this in precise context, the total PHONy vote in Southern Metropolitan (a little over 21,000) is 3 and a half times the total PHONy vote in Mining and Pastoral (6,000), yet the Mining and Pastoral vote will return one PHONy member and the Southern Metropolitan vote will return none.

And, no, this isn't a party-political broadcast - it appears that Mining and Pastoral will return 3 ALP members to the upper house, just like Southern Metropolitan will. It just strikes me from this distance as a ridiculously anti-democratic imbalance.

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[David]