Comments on: Green growths

By: Paul Nash

Paul Nash — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 01:45:41 +0000

Ultimately the Greens will go the same way as the Democrats and The DLP and disappear forever on the Australian political landscape. Afterall not everyone can have jobs in Eco-Tourism their policies are just so way out and would see this country need up like an African basketcase.

By: Adam in Canberra

Adam in Canberra — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 04:31:41 +0000

Candidates are excluded in order of their vote, starting with the lowest total. In what other way could they be excluded?

By: democracy@work

democracy@work — Sat, 01 Nov 2008 02:43:02 +0000

The Greens were unfairly denied a senate seat in Queensland because of the distortion built in to the system and the way/order in which votes from excluded candidates are distributed.

If you count the 2007 Queensland senate vote as though there were only seven candidates standing (3 ALP, 3 Liberal and 1 Green) the Greens win the six seat by a margin of 50,000 votes.

The Australian Electoral Commission has adopted a policy of “Ignorance is bliss” relying on an assessment paper dating back to 1986 when changes to the Senate counting system where first proposed. Back then votes were counted manually and the system currently in place was designed as a trade off to facilitate a manual count. With the advent of computer based technology a the fallacious argument relied on by the Australian Election Commotion no longer applies.

Australia was the first country to adopt a preferential voting system for National elections. Now is the time to once again be a leader in electoral reform by adopting a reiterative computer based counting system to correct the error and distortion in the current method of counting the results of the election.

The AEC is of the view that the public trust the current system to elect their State representatives. That can only be said because most people are not aware of the distortion in the way the vote is counted. If you inform them of the facts that the election results did not reflect the voters intentions then Australians would begin to support change. Change that counts.

By: democracy@work

democracy@work — Sat, 01 Nov 2008 02:23:08 +0000

William.

You might like to start a Melbourne City Council thread now that the draw of the ballot has been finalised. Monday is the closing date for the registered Group preferences and final negotions take place for poll position in Melbourne’s Closing event for the Spring Carnival.

The Greens are expected to come on fourth and possible give the election to Catherine Ng. It is early days but the Melbourne City Council will play a role in the Greens fortunes and may be a precurser to the state election results in 2010.

http://melbournecitycouncil.blogspot.com

By: qarak46

qarak46 — Sat, 25 Oct 2008 09:51:36 +0000

I’m not a Greens voter but that is great news.
No way did the Liberal Party deserve to maintain their number of seats at 7 in the Assembly given their performance over the last four years.
This year has been solid enough, but they deserved a hit after the turmoil in the Party – where most of the members cannot stand each other.
Also, because of the 9% swing against Labor, it has almost been forgotten that the Liberal vote fell by over 3% as well – a really poor result because they picked up absolutely none of the lost Labor vote. Appalling.

By: ltep

ltep — Sat, 25 Oct 2008 09:30:27 +0000

Congratulations to the Greens.

By: vortex

vortex — Sat, 25 Oct 2008 09:23:47 +0000

http://www.elections.act.gov.au/
Greens took a second seat in Molonglo, giving them 4 at close of counting.
ALP 7 Lib 6 Grn 4.

By: Wakefield

Wakefield — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 08:52:53 +0000

All minor parties appeal to a range of people. All parties have core supporters who are small numbers compared with actual votes received. Eg ALP membership nationally might be 60,000 but votes might be 6m. Greens membership nationally might be 10,000 but votes are 1m. Many voters choose the party they are nearest to without endorsing all their policies. Plenty of Green voters don’t have tertiary education or no religeon. Plenty of Green voters would of support some Green policies – they just don’t like other parties policies more.
The potential vote for Greens currently is around 20% which can be gauged from scrutiny of votes at elections. Greens get say 10% first votes but get a similar number of voters who consciously give Greens a second or near second preference. About 70% of these voters are from ALP or other left of centre and other 1/3 are from Lib, FF or other right of centre.
These figures of course are not fixed – every day issues arise which challenge people’s views. Parties don’t own their voters. Votes in Melbourne last election – if Senate votes had been replicated in Reps for Melbourne, Greens would have been elected comfortably. Labor will need to carefully consider whether they can avoid to risk losing Tanner.

By: Andrew Bartlett

Andrew Bartlett — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 01:57:20 +0000

Boerwar @ 170
There’s nothing wrong or inherently damaging with ‘getting your hands dirty’. What can be damaging is if you won’t admit to others that that’s what your doing (or even worse don’t admit it to yourself). In my view, compromise in politics is fine, as long as it is ‘compromise’ in the sense of getting something less than ideal, but still moving in the right direction (as opposed to ‘compromise’ meaning betraying your fundamental ideals because you think it will win you votes or is a clever strategy).

My reference to the ‘loss of honesty’ regarding the Dems was to do with about the GST debacle.

StewartJ @ 174

“there is a place for a ‘centre’ party in Australian politics, but the Democrats weren’t it when trying to straddle both left and centre. It would have required an even more pragmatic approach – and I don’t think either their membership or some of the MP’s (Andrew being one of them!) would have stomached that.”

I appreciate that perception is reality in politics, but your view about my view (and about the views of the majority of the Democrats’ former members too) is wrong. “Pragmatism” is another of those words in politics which means different things to different people (a bit like “compromise”), but not only am I supportive of a pragmatic approach, I don’t see much point even getting involved in electoral and parliamentary politics if you aren’t prepared to be pragmatic.

But as I said above, you should be clear and honest about what you are doing and why, not try to spin your way through difficult decisions or situations. I appreciate we have a political and media culture which has contempt for intellectual honesty, or acknowledging differences of views within a party or admitting your position is not 100% perfect in every way on every occasion, but if people don’t make an effort to change that, then it won’t.

Possibility this was a bigger issue for the Democrats than anybody else, given that honesty – a la keping the bastards honest and all that – was the central thing most in the general public identified with the Democrats, so it caused greater damage when this core value was so brazenly betrayed. But idealism and being seen as different to the big major parties is one thing that draws many people to smaller parties, so its not helpful for any of them to let that get debased, at least in the eyes of their supporters.

Being pragmatic, making compromises, etc is not automatically contrary to being idealistic (at least in how I define ‘idealism’. It is harder to do both and more of a hassle, but if you’re trying to build up something that is substantively different to the major parties, rather than just a smaller less influential version of them, I think its necessary.

By: Oz

Oz — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 01:16:11 +0000

What this means for the left of the Greens is another question…

Interesting question. There is a tension in the party between those who strongly believe in all progressive values like social justice, equality etc etc and those who argue that compromising ‘left’ policies would lead to greater representation and thus allowing the party who introduce its ‘core policies’ – presumably the environment.

Since the party is relatively undisciplined and there is no party machine, the tension will be played out between individual members at state and national conferences and it will be interesting to see how it gets resolved, if it gets resolved.