Liberal leadership declared vacant.

[Tannin]

[stui magpie]

Voters and Intelligent aren't usually 2 words that go together.

[Tannin]

Standing there in the Liberal-voting line, I can understand how you could believe that.

[stui magpie]

When were you standing in the Liberal voting line? Did you get a frying pan to the head on elections eve?

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[Wokko]

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It seems the Abbott/Turnbull/Morrison LibGnats have been hiding / covering up the fact that they paid double what they should have for arms purchases from the French.

It just goes from bad to worse FFS

https://amp.theguardian.com/australia-news/2018/oct/22/coalition-suppressed-auditors-finding-that-13bn-thales-arms-deal-could-have-cost-half-with-us

What a miserable lot. The Lib / Gnats are involved in a huge coverup over a wait for it: $1.3 billion deal. They could have paid half.

The Auditor General has revealed this but the Government have hidden it with the Arms dealer wanting censorship of the details.

They don�t deserve to be in Government.

[Tannin]

1.3 billion for a small factory in Bendigo exporting nothing and employing 400? Tick!

Less than half that much for the car manufacturing industry exporting lots and employing tens of thousands? Nope.

And they tout themselves as "good economic managers".

[David]

[David]

[Skids]

Our electoral system is pretty strange isn't it.

The Sharma Bloke gets 32,000 votes and is beaten by the crazy old lady who gets 21,000.

Crazy one would say and then I read, a bloke got into parliament with only 19 votes

Funny how all the lefties on here were carrying on about Trump getting in with less than the majority vote... but it's ok this time round

https://www.news.com.au/national/politics/19-people-got-this-bloke-a-200k-job/news-story/f8d8aaa83f0c2bcab53626455a3698d6

[David]

Actually, our system is not all that dissimilar to the one that allowed Trump to become president with fewer votes; in 1998, the Liberal Party was re-elected despite receiving fewer votes overall than Labor as a simple result of electoral divisions. That's a controversial system here too, but it makes a lot more sense in the Australian context because ours is a true two-stage process: that is to say, we're electing actual individual representatives who will sit in parliament, vote on policy (in theory) as individuals and, in turn, form government.

In the US electoral college system, on the other hand, electors are nothing more than powerless middle-men acting as nothing more than conduits for the election of a single leader, summoned into existence on election day and subsequently sent home to continue their lives as irrelevant nobodies (yes, they can choose to be 'faithless electors' and ignore the will of voters, but even that provision is just another weird and undemocratic quirk of a weird and undemocratic system). Nobody is actually voting for these people; they're just like couriers conveying a message from point A to point B.

In that context, it doesn't make a great deal of sense why a US president should be elected with a minority of the popular vote. But that's their system, and it's one that can in theory benefit either side (Republican gerrymandering aside); I don't necessarily see it as an issue that clearly requires reform, and in the case of Australia I'd probably support the status quo being maintained.

What you're talking about is completely different, though; this is simply preferential voting in action. While Sharma has received a much higher primary vote than Phelps, it's equally true that the majority of the Wentworth electorate preferred her to him once all of the other candidates had been eliminated. To me, that's a much more sophisticated system than a first-past-the-post arrangement like the one that is, again, in place in US elections: what we see there is an ongoing freezing out of minor parties and independents, as any vote for a candidate who aligns with your values risks splitting the vote and handing power to the major party candidate that you most detest. Maybe you'd prefer that system if you hate non-establishment figures and feel like only the major parties are properly qualified to govern, but it seems like a pretty terrible system to me.

(The dog's breakfast that used to be Senate voting was an altogether different matter, but I do think that the abolition of group tickets has had a generally positive impact. In Anning's case, the 19 votes are a bit of a red herring ��the real reason for his election was that his then-party, One Nation, received enough votes to gain more than two quotas in Queensland and were thus entitled to two Senators, one of whom was booted for being ineligible and replaced by Anning. It's far from uncommon for down-ticket candidates to receive a tiny share of the overall vote, as people generally follow their preferred party's how-to-vote card. So, long story short, no, it's not particularly weird or undemocratic that Anning is sitting in parliament, as weird and undemocratic as his own views seem to be!)

[Tannin]

Excellent reply, David, but what to?

(Well, clearly to a pretty brain-dead claim by someone or other, but I don't see anything on this page that fits the bill.)

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