Swagman wrote on Oct 20
th, 2014 at 11:39am:
John Smith wrote on Oct 20
th, 2014 at 10:40am:
Swagman wrote on Oct 20
th, 2014 at 10:39am:
John Smith wrote on Oct 20
th, 2014 at 10:25am:
We are in Australia .. Australia does not, nor has it ever, used a primary voting system
What's that got to do with it? Do you think that make it more democratic?
more than any alternative system you can name, yes.
How about
"one vote, one value" ?
Quote:In Australia, one vote, one value is a democratic principle widely valued in Australia and applied in electoral laws governing redistributions of electoral divisions of the House of Representatives whereby the divisions have the same number of enrolled voters, within a specified percentage of variance. The electoral laws of the Commonwealth for the House of Representatives and all states follows the principle with some exceptions.
House of Representatives.
Quote:As opposed to
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_Senate Quote:Each state elects the same number of senators, meaning there is equal representation for each of the Australian states, regardless of population, so the Senate, like many upper houses, does not adhere to the principle of "one vote one value".
Tasmania, with a population of around 500,000, elects the same number of senators as New South Wales, which has a population of over 7 million.
Because of this imbalance, governments favoured by the more populous states are occasionally frustrated by the extra power the smaller states have in the Senate, to the degree that
former Prime Minister Paul Keating famously referred to the Senate's members as "unrepresentative swill" Listen to your God Smithy. The Grim Reaper has spoken....
The Australian Senate is loosely modelled on the US Senate - where each state has equal voting power in one house of the Parliament.
It is a much better system than the House of Lords, where the MPs there are mostly hereditary peers, and British Prime Ministers have been known to flood the house with peers who vote a certain way just to get legislation passed.
Or we had systems in the past where people had to have wealth over a certain level (the discredited "property qualifications" system). An extreme example of this was the pre-Reform British House of Commons where some MPs were elected from towns with
seven voters and some large towns with tens of thousands of people had no representation at all.
Now THAT is unrepresentative swill.
You're only complaining because the Senate are blocking some of the Coalition's sillier policies.
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