This is about finding new ways to enforce a law that can’t be enforced effectively at the moment. But if you listen to Rees, you’d think it was for The Kids. Rees pointedly referred to the Board of Studies as one of the agencies that would be compulsorily providing personal information to the Electoral Commission. It’s characteristic of this shabby government that it would use an educational body as a means of law enforcement.

It’s disappointing to see the allegedly progressive GetUp mob not merely endorsing this shameful encroachment on basic rights but calling for it to be universal. Director Simon Sheik wants it to be applied at the Commonwealth level. “Australia has a proud tradition of compulsory voting and citizens have a responsibility as well as a right to vote to make sure that our parliaments are truly representative.”

Rubbish. Compulsory voting is a blatant encroachment on basic rights and the Rees government is now using its citizens’ private information, never intended for the purpose, to enforce it.

Nicht so schnell, responds Peter Brent at Mumble:

At the last federal election, some 340,000 people unsuccessfully attempted a declaration vote for the House of Representatives. Most failed because their enrolment details were not up to date or they had dropped off the roll. An unknown number of others would have simply turned around and walked out upon discovering they were not on the roll for their electorate. Many people (particularly young ‘uns) believe “the government” already automatically updates their enrolment. Read for example this amusing letter an elector fired off to the Australian Electoral Commission after receiving an enrolment form. Keane writes, chillingly, that “Citizens wouldn’t be given any say in this use of their confidential data. There’ll be no opting out. You may think you’re just paying your car rego but in fact you’ll be handing information to the Electoral Commission. You will have no choice.” Stock up on the ammo and canned food!

But Big Brother is already here. The AEC (which currently maintains the electoral rolls for federal and state elections) has been getting this info from government agencies for almost a decade.

Indeed, the Sydney Morning Herald reports that “the idea for automatic enrolment should be credited to the academic and blogger Peter Brent, who raised the reform last year in a discussion paper for the Democratic Audit of Australia”. Here’s what I said about the matter a few days ago, which I buried in an already overlong post:

The New South Wales government has introduced an interesting piece of legislation into the upper house entitled the Parliamentary Electorates and Elections Amendment (Automatic Enrolment) Bill. Some highlights:

• Information provided by government agencies will be used to automatically enrol voters and update enrolment details. The Electoral Commissioner will be empowered to demand information from public servants, universities, police officers, local councils and water and electricity providers. Drivers licence details are likely to provide rich pickings, while the Board of Studies will be able to ensure high school students are on the roll before they turn 18. Prospective enrollees will be contacted (perhaps only by email or SMS) and given seven days to provide a reason why they shouldn’t be enrolled. The government has good reason to believe reluctant voters lean to the left, but one wonders how popular the measure will make it among those who preferred to remain off the roll. Arguing that all participation is good participation, GetUp! wants the federal government to follow suit, while VexNews reckons it’s “a trend likely to catch on with Labor governments in other states”. Indeed, its operation exclusive to New South Wales would create difficulties: federal enrolment and roll-keeping would have to be decoupled, and voters would still have to enrol federally in the traditional fashion. Bernard Keane at Crikey calls the measure a “shameful encroachment on basic rights”, and it is indeed striking how often the bill thumbs its nose at the Privacy and Personal Information Protection Act. David Walsh in comments correctly observes that automatic enrolment is a logical corollary to compulsory voting: personally, I’m in favour of neither.

• It is proposed that registered parties and independent MPs be provided on request with “the names and the addresses of electors who voted (other than silent electors and itinerant electors), whether they voted personally or by post and, if they voted at a polling place for the district for which the electors were enrolled, the location of that polling place”. This puts into the shade the South Australian government’s recent effort to allow access to voters’ date-of-birth details, which they were unable to get through the upper house.

• Besides that, the bill contains some commendable measures, in particular allowing voters to enrol and cast provisional votes on polling day.

Plenty happening on the electoral front, not least the finalisation of the federal redistribution for Queensland. This offers a few surprises, and may be a rare occasion where a major party’s submission has actually had an effect. Two changes in particular were broadly in line with the wishes of the Liberal National Party, which marshalled a considerable weight of media commentary to argue that the Coalition had been hard done by. As always, Antony Green has crunched the numbers: all estimated margins quoted herein are his.

• Most interestingly, the changes to Dickson that sent Peter Dutton scurrying for refuge have been partly reversed. As the LNP submission requested, the electorate has recovered the rural area along Dayboro Road and Woodford Road that it was set to lose to Longman. However, only a small concession was made to the LNP’s request that the troublesome Kallangur area be kept out of the electorate. The electoral impact is accordingly slight, clipping the notional Labor margin from 1.3 per cent to 1.0 per cent. Peter Dutton is nonetheless sufficiently encouraged that he’s indicating he might yet stand and fight – or less charitably, he’s found a pretext to get out of the corner he had backed himself into. Labor has received a corresponding boost in its marginal seat of Longman, where Jon Sullivan’s margin has been cut from 3.6 per cent at the election to 1.7 per cent, instead of the originally proposed 1.4 per cent.

• Major changes to Petrie and Wayne Swan’s seat of Lilley have largely been reversed. It had been proposed to eliminate Petrie’s southern dog-leg by adding coastal areas from Shorncliffe and Deagon north to Brighton from Lilley, which would be compensated with Petrie’s southern leg of suburbs from Carseldine south to Stafford Heights. The revised boundaries have eliminated the former transfer and limited the latter to south of Bridgeman Downs. Where the original proposal gave Labor equally comfortable margins in both, the revision gives Wayne Swan 8.8 per cent while reducing Yvette D’Ath to an uncomfortable 4.2 per cent. Retaining Shorncliffe, Deagon and Brighton in Lilley had been advocated in the LNP submission. Almost-local observer Possum concurs, saying the revised boundaries better serve local communities of interest.

• South of Brisbane and inland of the Gold Coast, changes have been made to the boundary between Forde and the new electorate of Wright, with a view to consolidating the rural identity of the latter. Forde gains suburban Boronia Heights and loses an area of hinterland further south, extending from suburban Logan Village to rural Jimboomba. Labor’s margin in Forde has increased from 2.4 per cent to 3.4 per cent, and the Coalition’s in Wright is up from 3.8 per cent to 4.8 per cent.

• Little remains of a proposed northward shift of the boundary between Kennedy and Leichhardt from the Mitchell River to the limits of Tablelands Regional council. Kennedy will now only gain an area around Mount Molloy, 150 kilometres north-west of Cairns. Its boundary with Dawson has also been tidied through the expansion of a transfer from Dawson south of Townsville, aligning it with the Burdekin River. None of the three seats’ margins has changed.

• Moreton gains a park and golf course from Oxley in the west and loses part of Underwood to Rankin in the south-east, with negligible impact on their margins.

• Maranoa has gained the area around Wandoan from Flynn, making the boundary conform with Western Downs Regional Council. This boosts Labor’s margin in Flynn from 2.0 per cent to 2.3 per cent, compared with 0.2 per cent at the election.

• Three minor adjustments have been made to the boundary between the safe Liberal Sunshine Coast seats of Fisher and Fairfax, allowing the entirety of Montville to remain in Fisher.

• Ryan has taken a sliver of inner city Toowong from Brisbane.

Other news:

• The Financial Review’s Mark Skulley reported on Wednesday that the federal government was moving quickly to get its electoral reform package into shape. Labor is said to be offering a deal: if the Liberals drop their opposition to slashing the threshold for public disclosure of donations (which the Coalition and Steve Fielding voted down in March), the government will include union affiliation fees in a ban on donations from corporations, third parties and associated entities. Phillip Coorey of the Sydney Morning Herald says the New South Wales branch of the ALP alone receives $1.3 million in revenue a year from the fees, which unions must pay to send delegates to party conferences. According to Skulley, many union leaders fear a Rudd plot to “Blairise” the party by weakening union ties, with Coorey naming the ACTU and Victorian unions as “most hostile”. It is further reported that the parties propose to cover the foregone revenue by hiking the rate of public funding. VexNews “understands” that an increase from $2.24 per vote to $10 is on the cards, potentially increasing the total payout from $49 million to $200 million. The site says Westpac currently has a formal claim over Labor’s public funding payout after the next election, as the party is currently $8 million in debt. The Liberals are said to be keen because they’re having understandable trouble raising funds at the moment. A further amendment proposes to restrict political advertising by third parties. As well as being stimulating politically, some of these moves might be difficult constitutionally.

• A proposed referendum on reform to the South Australian Legislative Council has been voted down in said chamber. The referendum would have been an all-or-nothing vote to change terms from a staggered eight years to an unstaggered four, reduce its membership from 22 to 16, allow a deliberative rather than a casting vote for the President and establish a double dissolution mechanism to resolve deadlocks. Another bill amending the Electoral Act has been passed, although it will not take effect until after the March election. A number of its measures bring the state act into line with the Commonwealth Electoral Act: party names like “Liberals for Forests” have been banned, provisions have been made for enrolment of homeless voters, and MPs will be able to access constituents’ dates of birth on the electoral roll (brace yourselves for presumptuous birthday greetings in the mail). The number of members required of a registered party has been increased from 150 to 200: if you’re wondering why they bothered, the idea was to hike it to 500 to make life difficult for the putative Save the Royal Adelaide Hospital party, but the government agreed to a half-measure that wouldn’t threaten the Nationals. Misleading advertising has also been introduced as grounds for declaring a result void if on the balance of probabilities it affected the result. The Council voted down attempts to ban “corflute” advertising on road sides and overturn the state’s unique requirement that how-to-vote cards be displayed in each polling compartment.

• Deborah Morris of the Hastings Leader reports Helen Constas, chief executive of the Peninsula Community Legal Centre, has been preselected as Labor’s candidate for the south-eastern Melbourne federal seat of Dunkley, where Liberal member Bruce Billson’s margin was cut from 9.3 per cent to 4.0 per cent at the 2007 election. Constas was said to have had “a convincing win in the local ballot”. UPDATE: Andrew Crook of Crikey details Constas’s preselection as a win for the left born of disunity between the Bill Shorten and Stephen Conroy forces of the Right; Right faction sources respond at VexNews.

• The ABC reports that Nationals members in the state electorate of Dubbo have voted not to abandon their preselection privileges by being the guinea pig in the state party’s proposed open primary experiment. There is reportedly a more welcoming mood in Port Macquarie, which like Dubbo is a former Nationals seat that has now had consecutive independent members.

• Consideration is given to all the usual suggestions for reform to the voting systems, such as optional preferential voting in its various manifestations and a threshold of support for representation in the Senate. Also covered are things we can safely rule out happening, such as proportional representation in the lower house, single-member constituencies in the upper and a return to first-past-the-post.

• It is suggested redistribution processes might be reformed so they are held more frequently and to a set timetable.

• Headline-grabber number one: resigning MPs might suffer financial penalty for causing a by-election (don’t hold your breath).

• Headline-grabber number two: serious discussion is given to granting the vote to sixteen-year-olds.

• Some reforms of the relatively recent past are raised for re-consideration. Example one: the removal of the requirement that those filling casual Senate vacancies contest their seats at the subsequent half-Senate election even if their term isn’t expiring, as was the case before 1977. It is further suggested that a Tasmanian-style recount procedure replace the current situation where the choice is effectively made by the party of the vacating member.

• Example two: as the Joint Standing Committee on Electoral Matters had done in its report on the 2007 election, it is suggested we might return to allowing voters to use the same number more than once on their ballots in order to reduce the number of informal votes, and to reinstate the prohibition on advocating that voters do this on purpose. This was knocked on the head in 1998 following the infamous Albert Langer episode.

• Automatic enrolment processes, whereby personal details provided to other government agencies are used to place people on the electoral roll, are suggested as a remedy to the problem where the Australian Electoral Commission does well at removing wrongly enrolled voters from the roll but less well at getting unenrolled voters on there in the first place. It is noted that the NSW government is examining such a mechanism for its “Smart Roll” project, utilising high school students’ details from the NSW Board of Studies.

• The Howard government’s more stringent requirements for proof of identity look very likely to be weakened, although the paper has good things to say about allowing enrolment for those who provide a driver’s licence without also requiring them to present the signature of a witness.

• The Howard government’s indefensible move to close the electoral roll almost immediately after the issue of the writs is set to be at the very least reversed. There is discussion of pushing the closure even later into the campaign, which technological developments have made easier to achieve, and even of allowing registration on election day, as occurs in Canada and some places in the United States.

There’s further stuff I haven’t read yet on the campaign, polling, scrutiny of ballots, dispute resolution and compliance and enforcement; I might add further to this post when I do. Somewhere in all that is discussion of electronic and internet voting, which Robert Merkel discusses at Larvatus Prodeo.

Further afield:

• Courtesy of comprehensive coverage at Andrew Landeryou’s VexNews we learn the Liberal preselection vote to succeed David Hawker in Wannon has been won by Daniel Tehan, deputy director of the Victorian Liberal Party and son of the late Kennett government minister Marie Tehan. The other candidate who made it through to the final round was Stephen Mitchell, founder of natural gas explorer Molopo Australia. David Clark, Elizabeth Matuschka, Hugh Koch and Katrina Rainsford were eliminated after the first round, followed by Simon Price and Rod Nockles, then Louise Staley, then Matt Makin.

• Labor veteran Duncan Kerr has announced he will not contest his Hobart seat of Denison at the next federal election. Misha Schubert of The Age reports this has come as a surprise, such that “when news broke yesterday, there was no obvious successor staking a public claim”. It is widely noted that Kerr leaves his seat with a margin of 15.6 per cent after gaining it from the Liberals in 1987, though it probably wouldn’t do to put this entirely down to candidate factors. Early preselection contenders identified by Michael Stedman of The Mercury are George Williams, constitutional lawyer and “Kerr associate”, Jonathan Jackson, son of former state attorney-general Judy Jackson, and Rebecca White, staffer to Kerr and a state candidate for Lyons. However, state secretary John Dowling sounds confident none of the 27 state election candidates will be contesting preselection.

• With Peter Dutton confirming his intention to jump ship from notionally Labor Dickson in northern Brisbane to safe Liberal McPherson on the Gold Coast, Labor’s narrowly unsuccessful candidate for Dickson in 2007, Fiona McNamara, has signalled her intention to again seek preselection.

• Paige Taylor of The Australian reports former WA Premier Alan Carpenter is “preparing to leave parliament”, and “could quit his seat of Willagee before the next state election, due in 2012”. Although a neighbour of the seat of Fremantle which gave the Greens their breakthrough lower house win in May, Willagee is genuinely unloseable for Labor. The front-runner to succeed Carpenter would appear to be Dave Kelly, state secretary of the Left faction Liquor, Hospitality and Miscellaneous Workers Union, who wisely held back when Fremantle became available.

• The bill for a referendum to amend South Australia’s Constitution discussed in the previous post passed the House of Assembly on the second try, after embarrassing failure on the first. However, Attorney-General Michael Atkinson openly admits he does not expect it to be passed in the upper house. The Liberals have spoken in favour of four-year Council terms and a double dissolution mechanism, but against cutting Council numbers, giving the Council President a deliberative vote, and in particular the plan to combine the measures into a single referendum question. The Legislative Council is also debating the Electoral (Miscellaneous) Amendment Bill, which proposes to ban registered political parties using the name of “a prominent public body” (plainly aimed at the Save the Royal Adelaide Hospital Group), increase fines for electoral offences by as much as 400 per cent, require that redistributions commence 24 months after an election as opposed to the current three, increase the number of members required of a registered political party from 150 to 500 (in line with most other states), introduce compulsory enrolment (surprised they didn’t have this already) and ban third parties from producing how-to-vote cards.

• Former NSW Rural Fire Services chief Phil Koperberg, who replaced Bob Debus as Labor member for Blue Mountains at the 2007 state election, is making noises which are generally being interpreted as meaning he will quit politics, either at or before the next election. According to the ABC, Koperberg says he is “not cut out for the nature of partisan or party politics and I find myself doing and saying things I would rather not do, which my conscience would have me to otherwise”, and that he is considering his future in the “medium to long-term”. Andrew Clennell of the Sydney Morning Herald reports Koperberg “has told journalists, colleagues and even Coalition MPs several times in the past two years that he was thinking of quitting before the next election”.

• Via Democratic Audit, the House Standing Committee on Legal and Constitutional Affairs Committee is conducting an inquiry into the effectiveness of the Referendum (Machinery Provisions) Act 1984.

UPDATE: The weekly Essential Research has Labor down a little after last week’s spike, from 61-39 to 59-41. Not sure why, but the usual suite of further questions is not included this time.

Closer to home, a bill for a referendum to “reform” the South Australian Legislative Council is currently before the chamber itself. As Dean Jaensch writes in The Advertiser, the referendum would offer four proposals: changing Council terms from a staggered eight years to an unstaggered four; a double dissolution mechanism to resolve legislative deadlocks; cutting Council numbers from 22 to 16; and a deliberative rather than casting vote for the President. However, it proposes to offer them on an all-or-nothing basis, which would certainly be a recipe for defeat at a federal referendum. The first and third would be popular enough in their own right, although a term reduction would mean a lower quota for election and an entree to micro-parties, and 16 members would make it impossible to sustain a satisfactory committee system. In any event, the bill will first have to negotiate the Council itself, which is unlikely to be accommodating. The cut in numbers offers nothing to the minor parties, which stand to win fewer seats, or to the Liberals, who would be more likely to face a Labor-Greens majority.

What is not proposed is that the Council be abolished, which has long been advocated by The Advertiser. The paper’s editorial yesterday begrudgingly acknowledged the upper house’s value as “the primary, although not exclusive, means by which minor parties and independents have had a democratic voice”, which it said might be accommodated by changes to the lower house electoral system. Presumably such changes would have to be minor: in 2005 the paper argued that advocates of “checks and balances, particularly in the form of minor parties and independents” were suffering a “fundamental misunderstanding of the strength of our democratic system” (i.e. the staging of regular elections, which in South Australia as in New South Wales are held at fixed four-year intervals). That would leave some kind of mixed system, perhaps along the lines proposed in New Zealand.

UPDATE: Embarrassment for the Rann government as its upper house reform bill fails to pass the lower house. As a constitutional amendment, the bill requires the support of an absolute majority of all sitting members, and the conjunction of a parliamentary wine club meeting and an apparent error by the Speaker in neglecting to call for the bill to be read a second time meant it could only muster 23. Significantly, Karlene Maywald (Nationals member for Chaffey and Rann cabinet member) and Rory McEwen (independent member for Mount Gambier and former Rann cabinet member) both voted against. The Opposition reportedly says the bill cannot be reintroduced before the next election, though I can’t imagine why that might be. The government insists it will be passed through the house in very short order.

• Phillip Coorey of the Sydney Morning Herald reports on the state of play after the redistribution proposal abolishing Laurie Ferguson’s Sydney seat of Reid:

There was a rumour he was eyeing Parramatta under a plan which would see the incumbent in that seat, Julie Owens, move to Greenway, a Liberal seat which is assuredly Labor thanks to the redistribution. For various reasons, that scenario is not going to fly. More solid is a plan, backed by Ferguson and his support group in the Left, for him to move to the western suburbs seat of Fowler. It is held by Julia Irwin but it is anticipated she will retire at the election. Irwin belongs to the Right but the Left controls the branches in Fowler and wants the seat back. Ferguson, however, faces resistance to getting any seat at all, and that includes from elements of his own faction. “How do you think we would look in terms of renewal?” said one powerbroker. Left kingmakers are leaning towards the Liverpool Mayor, Wendy Waller, for Fowler. The Right is pushing Ed Husic, who ran for Greenway in 2004 but was the victim of a race-hate letterbox campaign … Ultimately Rudd has the final say, a power the Opposition Leader, Malcolm Turnbull, could only dream of given the looming preselection fights among NSW Liberals. But it is a power that needs to be used wisely, sparingly and sensitively. “Kevin should not be unfavourable to Laurie,” warned a Ferguson friend, claiming Ferguson had helped Rudd win the leadership.

• Very soon after the previous report appeared, it emerged the NSW Liberal Party was changing its rules to allow, as Imre Salusinszky of The Australian describes it, a three-quarter majority of the state executive to “rapidly endorse a candidate on the recommendation of the state director and with the go-ahead of the state president and the party’s state and federal parliamentary leaders”. The rules are ostensibly designed for by-elections or snap double dissolutions, but can essentially be used at the leaders’ pleasure. This places the party on a similar footing to Labor, whose national executive granted sweeping federal preselection powers to Kevin Rudd and five party powerbrokers earlier this year. The most obvious interpretation of the Liberal move is that it’s an attempt to stymie the influence of the hard right in party branches, and Salusinszky indeed reports the reform is expected to be opposed by “a large part of the Right faction”. However, the Labor parallel demonstrates it can equally be seen as part of a broader trend to centralisation necessitated by the ongoing decline in membership and resulting opportunities for branch-stacking.

• From the previously cited Phillip Coorey article, Nathan Rees’s chief-of-staff Graeme Wedderburn is said to be assured of a winnable position on the Senate ticket at the next election: second if Steve Hutchins retires, third at the expense of incumbent Michael Forshaw if he doesn’t. “Unless, of course, he can be persuaded to enter state politics, which is another option being floated.”

• Phillip Coorey of the Sydney Morning Herald (again) notes that South Australian Senator Cory Bernardi is causing angst by agreeing to appear at a hard-right fundraiser in Cook, where federal member Scott Morrison continues to battle the forces that initially delivered preselection to factional operative Michael Towke before the 2007 election.

• The ABC reports that Tony Crook, Goldfields pastoralist and candidate for Kalgoorlie at the 2008 state election, has been “recruited” to stand as Nationals candidate against Wilson Tuckey in O’Connor. In response to a reader’s email, I recently had occasion to transpose the state election booth results on the new federal boundaries. In O’Connor, the Nationals would have polled 38.0 per cent to the Liberals’ 25.3 per cent and Labor’s 20.7 per cent. In Durack (successor to Barry Haase’s seat of Kalgoorlie), it was Labor 29.2 per cent, Liberal 29.7 per cent and Nationals 28.5 per cent. It should be noted that these numbers are heavily distorted by the presence of sitting Nationals members at state level, as well as the impact of state issues like Royalties for Regions and one-vote, one-value. The Nationals’ federal campaign in Western Australia will be bankrolled by litigious Queensland mining billionaire Clive Palmer, with the stated objective of gaining a Senate seat.

• There is increasing talk that former NSW Opposition Leader Peter Debnam will vacate his seat of Vaucluse at the next election. He faces multiple preselection challenges in any case, the apparent front-runner being University of NSW deputy chancellor Gabrielle Upton. Local paper the Wentworth Courier has taken aim at Debnam with an article and accompanying vox pop on his parliamentary inactivity during the current term.

• Sonia Byrnes of the Cooma-Monaro Express reports that Queanbeyan councillor John Barilaro will nominate for Nationals preselection in the state seat of Monaro, which the party has won the right to contest without challenge from the Liberals. Labor’s Steve Whan holds the seat by 6.3 per cent.

• Commenter Hamish Coffee relates that a local newspaper has Clover Moore dismissing rumours she won’t seek another term as state member for Sydney.

• Ben Raue at The Tally Room reports that the South Australian Greens are conducting their preselection for the Legislative Council ticket at next year’s state election. The candidates are Carol Vincent, who as SA Farmers Federation chief executive offers an unusual pedigree for a Greens candidate; Tammy Jennings, one-time Democrat and current convenor of the state party; former convenor and unsuccessful 1997 lead candidate Paul Petit; and the apparently little-known Mark Andrew. At stake is a very likely seat for the first candidate, and an outside chance for the second.

• The Sydney Morning Herald has carried a piece from NSW Liberal leader Barry O’Farrell outlining the party’s position on campaign finance reform: caps on spending extending to third parties, caps on donations and bans on donations from other than individual citizens, tighter regulation of lobbyists and extension of Independent Commission Against Corruption powers to cover the nexus between donations and government decisions.

• Mumble man Peter Brent gives the once-over to the recent Essential Research survey on which leader is best equipped to handle “issues of national importance”, noting how much these questions are influenced by incumbency.

Courtesy of the latest Democratic Audit of Australia update:

• Last month’s Audit seminar on campaign finance, Dollars and Democracy: How Best to Regulate Money in Australian Politics, will be the subject of tonight’s episode of The National Interest on Radio National from 6pm. A fortnight ago, Electoral Commissioner Ed Killesteyn appeared on the program discussing enrolment procedures and electoral boundaries.

• The Audit’s submission to the Victorian Electoral Matters Committee inquiry into the Kororoit by-election gets it right on proposals to tighten laws on misleading campaign advertising, namely that the cure would be worse than the disease.

• Brian Costar discusses campaign finance reform on Meet the Press.

• The Queensland Government has published its green paper on “a range of topics including political donations and fundraising, lobbying, whistleblowing and pecuniary interest registers”.

• Norm Kelly argues the merits of a ban on overseas donations in Australian Policy Online.

UPDATE: The Australian reports Malcolm Turnbull’s preferred prime minister rating has hit a new low of 16 per cent (down three), to Kevin Rudd’s 66 per cent (up two). Also featured is a question on the timing of an emissions trading scheme which finds 45 per cent believe the government should delay its legislation until “learning what other countries commit to at the Copenhagen climate conference in December”, compared with 41 per cent who believe legislation should proceed now. The Australian argues that the latter measure amounts to a 20 per cent drop in support for unilateral action since last September. However, the alternative answer in the earlier poll proposed that the scheme should proceed “only if other countries also introduce such schemes”, suggesting a longer delay than the less-than-five-months proposed by its counterpart in the current poll, and placing greater weight on the possibility a scheme might not proceed at all.

UPDATE 2: Peter Brent at Mumble has complete responses on the ETS questions.

Elsewhere:

• The latest weekly Essential Research survey has Labor’s lead up from 56-44 to 57-43. Also featured are questions on which party is better for handling various issues, which finds the Liberals have gone backwards since June 1; the government’s handling of relations with various countries; how safe respondents would feel visiting various countries; and Australia’s top security threat. More from Possum.

• The normally arcane topic of electoral reform has gone mainstream over the course of the past day’s news cycle, albeit in the questionable guise of optional voting rights for 16-year-olds. Special Minister of State Joe Ludwig has said the issue will be raised in the second of the government’s two green papers on electoral reform due later this year, the first of which dealt with campaign funding and expenditure issues and was published last December. The Greens are understandably enthusiastic, the Liberals equally understandably less so. Ben Raue spoke in favour on ABC News Radio earlier today, and further comments at The Tally Room.

• Advocates for retaining the existing Royal Adelaide Hospital site are rumoured to be seeking the requisite number of signatures (only 150 under the relatively lax provisions of the South Australian Electoral Act) to register their own political party in time for next year’s state election. Labor might like to recall that the two surprise defeats that cost their Western Australian counterparts government last year, Mount Lawley and Morley, were respectively in close and reasonably close proximity of Royal Perth Hospital, where a similar controversy was unfolding. Equivalent electorates in South Australia might be Adelaide (margin 10.2 per cent, but traditionally a swinging seat) and Norwood (4.2 per cent).

• AAP reports that Labor is seeking a candidate with “green credentials” – a “Kerryn Phelps-style figure”, to be precise – to take on Malcolm Turnbull in Wentworth.

• After being cleared last week on a rape charge, Victorian Northern Metropolitan Labor MLC Theo Theophanous has made life easier for his party by announcing he will quit politics at next year’s election.

• The Geelong Advertiser reports that two candidates have emerged for Liberal preselection in South Barwon, which Labor’s Michael Crutchfield gained in the 2002 landslide and retained by 2.4 per cent in 2006, despite hostile press from the aforementioned Advertiser. The candidates are Ron Humphrey, who lost his Surf Coast Shire Council seat at last year’s elections and was an unsuccessful contestant for preselection in 2006, and Andrew Katos, who represents Deakin ward on Greater Geelong City Council.

• The Victorian Parliament’s Electoral Matters Committee is conducting an inquiry into last year’s Kororoit by-election, after the Electoral Commission’s report expressed concern that no action could be taken against an ALP pamphlet which claimed a vote for independent candidate Les Twentyman was “a vote for the Liberals”. For what it’s worth, I have my doubts as to whether it’s feasible or desirable to regulate election rhetoric in the manner proposed.

• The Launceston Examiner reports that school teacher Rob Soward has lost Labor’s game of musical chairs in Bass, where seven candidates were chasing six positions on the ticket for next year’s state election. The lucky winners were incumbent Michelle O’Byrne, former member Kathryn Hay, Beaconsfield mine disaster survivor Brant Webb, Winnaleah District High School principal Brian Wightman, CFMEU forests division secretary Scott McLean and North Tasmanian Development consultant Michelle Cripps.

• Legendary Clerk of the Senate Harry Evans, retiring after 40 years, reviews the evolution of parliament during his tenure in an article for Crikey.

• A self-explanatory new book entitled Australia: The State of Democracy, edited by Marian Sawer, Norman Abjorensen and Phil Larkin for the Democratic Audit of Australia, is now available through Federation Press. The introduction can be read here.

• Arriving a day earlier than usual, Newspoll shows that the Coalition recovery detected a fortnight ago has come to a sudden end, with Labor’s lead back out from 53-47 to 56-44. The parties have also exchanged three points on the primary vote, Labor up to 44 per cent and the Coalition down to 37 per cent. However, the real shock is that Turnbull’s personal ratings have suffered what Shanahan calls “the single biggest fall in the survey’s 25-year history”: his approval rating has plunged from 44 per cent to 25 per cent, while his disapproval is up from 37 per cent to 58 per cent. Fifty-two per cent do not believe that John Grant received preferential treatment from the Prime Minister against only 24 per cent who do. Kevin Rudd’s lead as preferred prime minister is up from 57-25 to 65-18.

• ACNielsen, which is hopefully back to monthly polling as we enter the second half of the term, has Labor’s two-party lead up from 53-47 to 58-42. Labor’s primary vote is up two points to 46 per cent while the Coalition’s is down six to 37 per cent. Fifty-three per cent say the OzCar affair has left them with a less favourable impression of Malcolm Turnbull, whose approval is down 11 points to 32 per cent with his disapproval has shot up 13 points to 60 per cent. Turnbull comes third as preferred Liberal leader with 18 per cent, behind Peter Costello on 37 per cent and Joe Hockey on 21 per cent. Rudd’s lead as preferred prime minister is up from 64-28 to 66-25, and his approval rating is up three points to 67 per cent.

• Galaxy has Labor’s primary vote up a point to 44 per cent and the Coalition’s down two to 30 per cent. Sixty-one per cent believe Kevin Rudd has been open and honest about the OzCar affair, while 51 per cent “believed Mr Turnbull had been dishonest or somewhat deceitful”.

Once again, Victoria dominates the latest round of electoral news:

• The Joint Standing Committee on Electoral Matters has tabled two major reports which I haven’t got round to sinking my teeth into: the regular conduct of the federal election report, and that into the Commwealth Electoral (Above-the-Line Voting) Amendment Bill 2008.

• Rick Wallace of The Australian reports that complicated quarreling in the Victorian ALP has thrown up “rogue challengers” against at least ten state MPs. Keilor MP George Seitz, who faces enforced retirement in the wake of the Victorian Ombudsman’s report into Brimbank City Council, is said to be largely reponsible: Andrew Landeryou at VexNews identifies his state nominees as Tomislav Tomic (against Bundoora MP Colin Brooks), Seeralan Arumugam Gunaratnam (Carrum MP Jenny Lindell), Raymond Congreve (Lara MP John Eren), Rosa Mitrevski (Mill Park MP Lily D’Ambrosio), Philip Cassar (Mordialloc MP Janice Munt), Teodoro Tuason (Narre Warren North MP Luke Donnellan), Teresa Kiselis and Mate Barun (both taking on Northcote MP Fiona Richardson), Josefina Agustin (Prahran MP Tony Lupton), and Blagoja Bozinovski (Thomastown MP Peter Batchelor). For good measure, Seitz candidate Manfred Kriechbaum is taking on federal MP Maria Vamvakinou in Calwell. Other challengers are explained by Wallace in terms the “stability pact” forged between the Left and the Right forces associated with Bill Shorten and Steven Conroy, and counter-moves by rival Right unions seeking to forge ties with some of the more militant unions of the Left. This presumably accounts for Australian Manufacturing Workers Union candidate Andrew Richards joining the aforementioned Kriechbaum in a three-horse race against Vamvakinou in Calwell, Lisa Zanatta of the Construction Mining Forestry and Energy Union challenging Lynne Kosky in Altona, and Kathleen Matthews-Ward of the Shop Distributive and Allied Employees Association joining the Seitz challengers to Fiona Richardson in Northcote. The option of referring preselections to the party’s national executive remains available to John Brumby, who must be sorely tempted.

• Other challenges appear more obscure. A third Labor Unity candidate, Rick Garotti, is listed as a nominee against incumbent Craig Langdon in Ivanoe, in addition to the previously discussed Anthony Carbines. In Preston, Labor Unity MP Robin Scott is being challenged by Moreland councillor Anthony Helou (once of the Socialist Left, but more recently of Labor Unity) and Tamer Kairouz, said by Landeryou to be backed by upper house MP Nazih Elasmar, a principal of a Right sub-faction also linked with Theo Theophanous (not sure if any relation to Kororoit MP Marlene Kairouz). Two Socialist Left members are under challenge from factional colleagues, which Andrew Landeryou suggests can be put down to dealings between the Construction Forestry Mining and Energy Union and unions on the Right: Yuroke MP Liz Beattie faces a challenge from Colleen Gibbs, an official with the Australian Manufacturing Workers Union, while Darebin councillor Timothy Laurence has nominated against Steve Herbert in Eltham. Andrew Lappos, who in the past has been associated with the Left, is listed as a challenger to the Right’s Telmo Languiller in Derrimut, but it was reported last week that Languiller’s preselection had been secured by the national executive.

• The preselection contest for Brunswick has taken on new significance with the news that Phil Cleary will contest the seat as an independent. Cleary defeated the Labor candidate in the federal seat of Wills in the 1992 by-election that followed Bob Hawke’s retirement and was narrowly re-elected in 1993, before losing to Labor’s Kelvin Thomson in 1996. He has more recently worked for the Electrical Trades Union, which under the leadership of Dean Mighell has disaffiliated with the ALP and given support to the Greens. Three candidates are listed for Labor preselection, each a colleague of outgoing member Carlo Carli in the Socialist Left: Jane Garrett, Slater and Gordon lawyer and former adviser to Steve Bracks; Enver Erdogan, 23-year-old Moreland councillor and staffer to House of Represenatatives Speaker Harry Jenkins, said to be aligned with the Kim Carr sub-faction; and Alice Pryor, also a Moreland councillor, aligned with the rival Left sub-faction associated with federal Bruce MP Alan Griffin. Former party state secretary Eric Locke has proved a non-starter; Andrew Landeryou reports he has withdrawn in favour of Garrett, who would appear to be the front-runner. According to David Rood of The Age, Garrett also has the backing of John Brumby.

• Andrew Landeryou further reports that National Union of Workers state secretary Antony Thow has been “elected unopposed” for the third position on Labor’s Victorian Senate ticket. If that means what it appears to, it’s a significant story the mainstream media appears to have ignored, as Labor would seem very likely on current form to repeat its 2007 election feat of winning a third seat.

• The Moonee Valley Community News reports it is “not expected” that Victorian Planning Minister Justin Madden will be opposed in the Labor preselection for Essendon, to which the party has assigned him so sitting member South Eastern Metropolitan MLC Bob Smith can be given a safer seat in Western Metropolitan. Mark Kennedy, a former mayor of Moonee Valley, was earlier reported to have ambitions to replace the retiring Judy Maddigan.

• Federal Liberal MP Chris Pearce has announced he will not seek re-election in his Melbourne seat of Aston. Pearce gave his party a morale-boosting by-election win in the seat in July 2001, limiting the Labor swing to 3.7 per cent – which has since stood as exhibit A in the case that the Howard government’s re-election the following November could not entirely be put down to the subsequent Tampa episode and September 11. He was closely associated throughout his time in politics with Peter Costello, and the fact and timing of his departure have inevitably been linked to Costello’s shock announcement early last week. No discussion yet that I’m aware of as to who might replace him. Dennis Shanahan of The Australian reports that “another swathe of resignations” from federal Liberals is expected when New South Wales and Queensland redistributions are finalised early next year, although no names are named.

• The ABC reports that three Western Australian state Labor MPs, headed by the factionally unaligned Alannah MacTiernan, have moved at state conference for preselection reforms allowing “compulsory secret ballots for preselections, with delegates completing their own papers”.

• The Launceston Examiner reports that Brigadier Andrew Nikolic, veteran of numerous overseas postings and until recently the Australian Defence Force’s director-general of public affairs, has “confirmed that he is interested” in Liberal preselection for the federal seat of Bass. Also said to have his eye on the preselection is Senator Guy Barnett, who will otherwise have to settle for the slighly less appealing prospect of number three on the Liberal ticket.

• Michelle Grattan reports on a “glowing reference” for Kooyong preselection aspirant Josh Frydenberg from John Howard. Another of Frydenberg’s backers is Andrew Peacock. His principal rival, industrial relations lawyer John Pesutto, is supported by Institute of Public Affairs executive director John Roskam, who was himself sniffing the breeze before deciding not to proceed. Former Liberal president and Fraser government minister Tony Staley has given his seal of approval to Peter Jonson, a 62-year-old former Reserve Bank official known to the web at large as Henry Thornton.

• The Townsville Bulletin reports there are rumours that prodigious McDonald’s franchiser George Colbran again hopes to run for Labor in Herbert, where he narrowly failed to unseat Peter Lindsay in 2007. Colbran reportedly says he “won’t commit either way”.

• David Rood of The Age reports that John Brumby has “cleared the way” for Keilor MP George Seitz to be dumped at the next election, amid the fallout from the Ombudsman’s recent report into Brimbank City Council. The party’s administrative committee will decide this evening whether to take preselections for western suburbs seats out of the hands of local branches, in which Seitz and others remain powerful. Also affected will be Kororoit MP Marlene Kairouz, whose preselection ahead of last year’s by-election formed the backdrop of much of the shenanigans investigated by the Ombudsman, and Derrimut MP Telmo Languiller. Labor sources quoted in the article wonder why both Languiller and Western Metropolitan MLC Theo Theophanous aren’t equally being targeted along with Seitz, so it evidently should not be taken for granted that either Languiller or Kairouz are endangered.

• Taking his cue from Manmohan Singh’s assumption of the Indian prime ministership from the upper house, Malcolm Mackerras argues for an end to the convention that Australia’s party leaders must sit in the lower house, which he relates to the anachronistic presumption that it is the more democratic chamber.

• Final score from the Fremantle by-election: Carles 10,664, Tagliaferri 9,100. Margin: 3.96 per cent. I expected Labor would rein it in a little on late counting, but no.

• With the whiff of a dying government in the air, talk of electoral reform is very much in vogue in London this season, just as was when the scandal-ridden Major government was breathing its last. Conservative leader David Cameron opposes proportional representation but promises to “look seriously” at fixed terms. Health Secretary Alan Johnson – “still the favourite to lead Labour if Gordon Brown is removed from the top job“ – has suggested the government at last look seriously at the “Alternative Vote Plus” model which has been floating around since the 1998 report of the Jenkins commission, which was set up when Tony Blair came to power. It proposes a slightly watered down version of German/NZ style MMP, combining constituency members with party list members to produce a proportional result. Unlike Germany and NZ however, there would be a cap on the number of party list members which might make results less than fully proportional. The “Alternative Vote” part of the title refers to Australian-style preferential voting for the constituency seats, which the Jenkins commission appeared to be taken with as it had just helped defeat Pauline Hanson. From the Jenkins commission report, a “note of reservation by Lord Alexander”:

My colleagues also think that AV will contribute to a less confrontational style of politics because candidates will be inhibited from attacking rivals too strongly as they wish to gain their second votes. I do not see it as particularly desirable that candidates from different parties, who are different precisely because they do not agree on all issues, should be pulling their punches in order to seek approval from voters who support other parties. In any event, from my observation of Australia, which is the only single large country to use AV, their politicians tend to be, if anything, more blunt and outspoken than our own.

However, the phone poll has Labor’s two-party lead at a more modest 54.5-45.5, from primary votes of 45 per cent Labor, 40.5 per cent Coalition and 7.5 per cent Greens. At present, a dedicated page for the phone poll result tells us only that Kevin Rudd leads Malcolm Turnbull as preferred prime minister 60.5 per cent to 26.5 per cent; that Rudd’s approval rating is 57.5 per cent; and that Turnbull’s approval rating is 43 per cent. Perhaps it will be fleshed out with more information at a later time.

Two other pieces of news:

• It seems Andrew Wilkie will run as an independent candidate for Denison at next year’s Tasmanian state election. Wilkie is the former Office of National Assessments analyst who quit over the Howard government’s actions before the Iraq war, and subsequently ran as a Greens candidate against John Howard in Bennelong in 2004 and as Bob Brown’s Tasmanian Senate running mate in 2007.

• A beleagured British Labour Party is considering sweeping electoral reforms, including an elected upper house. House of Commons reforms might presumably include some kind of preferential voting, which Britain’s three-plus party system badly needs, or more radically proportional representation, with which Britons have become familiar through elections for the Scottish and Welsh parliaments, its members of European Parliament, and local government.