Sir Spot of Borg wrote on Aug 25^th, 2013 at 8:21am:



Good point, Borg. We progressives need to become more offended. Only by being more offended can the utopia be realised.

In the house of reps, the preferences only come into play if no candidate gets 50% + 1 vote purely on primary votes (ie first votes).

Then the 2nd preferences are looked at and if 50% is still not reached by any candidate they look at 3rd preferences, etc, until a majority 50% +1 vote is reached.

The senate preferences are almost always counted because you usually have lots of candidates fighting for a few senate seats in order to represent their state.

So in Victoria for example, there are about 97 senate candidates fighting for about 10 seats, in a half senate election.

Usually about 12% of the vote will get a candidate a senate seat. Wikileaks had 3 candidates listed which is the minimum number of candidates needed to be classed as a political party.

Personally I prefer the proportional representation system which effectively means that a party that gets 5% of the vote for example gets 5% of the say in parliament. It can lead to instabilities in political process, but its far more democratic and reflective of society's wishes.

As it stands we have a clown puppet circus act that has two major party actors who represent the same corporate interests.

Since the 1960s the ALP and the Liberal/National coalition have voted together on about 95% of bills and legislation to have been presented in the senate.

Never vote for any of the 2 major political parties, in elections if you want genuine change to occur.

Speak with the many independents that are running in your seats or with smaller issue parties, and make an informed casting of your vote.

Maybe if the two major parties continue to fail on receiving majority control of parliament and need to form agreements with minor parties or independents they may start listening to their constituencies rather than bank CEOs, corporate puppets, mining magnates and media moguls etc.


Cheers