Provocative headline which hides a real conversation about preference voting. Optional preferential is one idea that the Lib/Nat side have toyed with. I think their hope is that it would permit more wins for them.
Yeah, there's a real bit of sleight of hand stage magic and so to a glass and a half of milk is called gerrymandering [1] going on toward the close.
By resisting electoral change, these parties are engaged in the political manipulation of electoral district boundaries with the intent to create undue advantage. This is called gerrymandering.
ie. What was once moving boundaries to create an advantage (classic gerrymandering) has become resisting our great new ideas (no boundaries and|or multiple members per division).
We'll call this "gerrymandering" now 'cause it's a well known term that everybody knows is wrong.
The primary votes are just an artifact of Lib/Nat being further right than Labour is left due to the existence of the very left Greens. That and a low number of preferences from Independents picking up center right votes from people disillusioned by Lib/Nat blatant inability to smoothly handle any major event.
I didn't interpret their nitpick as saying anything about the spelling of the word in general – also "British spelling" is the usual term, I've never heard anyone call it "English spelling" before. In Australia, we use British spelling for most things, including the word "labour" in most contexts, but the party name is intentionally spelled the American way, due to US influence in its early history. The initial capital is a sign they were talking about the party name as opposed to the common noun
All voting systems are subject to gaming. Preferential systems are primarily subject to "Least Favourite Candidate Loses". The Labor party may have lost votes but they were preferred over the Coalition by a considerable margin.
> Here's hoping if they break their promise on income tax they'll be tossed soon enough.
The economic realities suggest this promise should be dropped. This does not hurt Labor's voters terribly, and does not impact the more left-leaning voters much at all. I expect this will be dropped and this will not hurt Labor at all, but will build them a reputation as economic pragmatists.
Personally I will be impacted by a "Stage 3" cut and yet I hope they are dropped. Even in this political climate, and with a mortgage to pay, I don't really see that this tax cut will help me more than a functioning public health system. Or help the country, as a whole, better than an actual welfare system.
Here's hoping the Coalition will continue their rightward march and another, actually conservative, party will grow from the wreck of the Teals and blue-ribbon seats they Libs lost.
So having a non-political organisation drawing electoral maps with near to identical numbers of people within these zones who vote preferentially sp that their least popular candidate loses is gerrymandering?
No it isn't according to the definition everyone else uses for "gerrymandering" (drawing specific electorate boundaries with partisan goals).
What he's complaining about (that the system of one representative from each electorate biases against candidates who could never win in one electorate but have a modest amount of support in the entire population) is worth contemplating, but isn't gerrymandering. New Zealand addresses this problem by giving everyone two votes, an electorate vote and a party vote, and members are chosen from electorates and party lists. New Zealand only has one chamber. Australia has two. Australia's Upper House is elected at a state level with multiple members from each state, so this is where minor party candidates get elected.
It also bears mentioning that in the election, the Liberals (Australian right wing for anyone watching US politics) lost Wentworth. To give an idea about how right-wing Wentworth, is, that a was the seat of a recent Liberal prime minister. Lost Kooyong, seat of a prospective candidate for Liberal leadership. Lost a bunch of other seats that broadly support right-wing policy.
There is a revolt underway on the right of Australian politics as various factions battle to decide what exactly the right wing is going to stand for. That contributed a lot more to their election defeat than the concerns this gentleman raises. There were significant swings against both major parties, although the Labor party just lost a few votes while the Liberals were eviscerated.
That isn't gerrymandering, that is losing lots of votes leading to the loss of an election.
I think his argument is that it is "gerrymandering" in the sense that the system is maintained the way it is, because that serves the political self-interest of the major parties. The boundaries themselves aren't gerrymandered, but the system according to which they exist is.
By that definition, one might say that Australia has a single layer of gerrymandering – gerrymandered at the systemic level but not at the district level – while the US has two layers of gerrymandering – gerrymandered districts in a gerrymandered system.
> How does preferential voting favor bigger parties? It does the opposite.
It depends on what you are comparing it to. Preferential voting (aka ranked choice or alternative voting) is less favourable to bigger parties than first past-the-post is. But it is more favourable to bigger parties than other systems such as single transferrable vote (STV) or mixed member. The biggest reason why Australia hasn't moved to STV or mixed member for the House of Representatives, is that doing so would benefit smaller parties at the cost of the bigger ones.
> Use of the word gerrymander in this way ("having boundaries at all is gerrymander") is meaningless.
An STV or mixed member system would still have boundaries, but would be less advantageous to the bigger parties. Why isn't choosing a system which is intentionally more advantageous to the bigger parties a "gerrymander"?
> The biggest reason why Australia hasn't moved to STV or mixed member for the House of Representatives, is that doing so would benefit smaller parties at the cost of the bigger ones.
Where the evidence for that claim? More likely is that there's no impetus for change, at the least, and quite possibly no interest in it given people's feelings about how the Senate is voted and the proliferation of smaller parties there.
The current system was adopted for clearly political reasons - due to the outcome of the 1918 Swan by-election, which the ALP won because the conservative vote was split between the Nationalist and Country parties. The Nationalists were the direct ancestors of the current Liberal Party. If the system was invented to serve the needs of (one of) the major parties, who really believes that its survival isn’t because it serves the needs of both of them (or should I say, all 2.5 of them)
What you're describing is smaller parties benefiting from PV. You haven't addressed your claim. Labor is the big party and the smaller conservative parties are benefiting.
In the Australian context, the big parties are Labor and the Coalition. The Coalition is formally an alliance of two parties, but in many situations they act like a single one–indeed, in Queensland they actually merged into one (the LNP), and effectively they are a merged party in the NT as well (the CLP), although that technically was never a "merger" as such. The Nationalists and Country party in 1918 were the historical predecessors of the current Coalition. The "small parties" are the minor parties which are neither Labor nor the Coalition, but still manage to win some seats in Parliament–nowadays primarily the Greens on the left, One Nation on the right, and a random mishmash in the middle–although as we go back through the decades, other players have risen to prominence only to subsequently fade away (most notably the Democrats and before that the DLP). And then you have the "micro parties" which run candidates but never win any seats, or one or two of them might strike it lucky on very rare occasions (like the now-defunct Motoring Enthusiasts Party did in 2013).
This guy claims that proportional representation is undemocratic and uses primary votes (first past the post, a truly undemocratic system that favors bigger parties) to prove his point. He then calls it gerrymandering against all known definitions of the word (boundaries are set by an independent commission).
He goes on to say an unconventional approach (no electoral boundaries) is better and the politicians are guilty of not adopting it out of self interest, even though no one has seriously proposed or considered it, and in Australia this would have essentially no support in the electorate (Australians having no problem with their system).
Anyone can make outrageous claims to promote their blog, why is this getting any attention.
24 comments
[ 5.3 ms ] story [ 60.2 ms ] threadWe'll call this "gerrymandering" now 'cause it's a well known term that everybody knows is wrong.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PwBceIbh5qc
Not much of a mandate, to win government by losing votes. Here's hoping if they break their promise on income tax they'll be tossed soon enough.
> Here's hoping if they break their promise on income tax they'll be tossed soon enough.
The economic realities suggest this promise should be dropped. This does not hurt Labor's voters terribly, and does not impact the more left-leaning voters much at all. I expect this will be dropped and this will not hurt Labor at all, but will build them a reputation as economic pragmatists.
Personally I will be impacted by a "Stage 3" cut and yet I hope they are dropped. Even in this political climate, and with a mortgage to pay, I don't really see that this tax cut will help me more than a functioning public health system. Or help the country, as a whole, better than an actual welfare system.
Here's hoping the Coalition will continue their rightward march and another, actually conservative, party will grow from the wreck of the Teals and blue-ribbon seats they Libs lost.
What he's complaining about (that the system of one representative from each electorate biases against candidates who could never win in one electorate but have a modest amount of support in the entire population) is worth contemplating, but isn't gerrymandering. New Zealand addresses this problem by giving everyone two votes, an electorate vote and a party vote, and members are chosen from electorates and party lists. New Zealand only has one chamber. Australia has two. Australia's Upper House is elected at a state level with multiple members from each state, so this is where minor party candidates get elected.
There is a revolt underway on the right of Australian politics as various factions battle to decide what exactly the right wing is going to stand for. That contributed a lot more to their election defeat than the concerns this gentleman raises. There were significant swings against both major parties, although the Labor party just lost a few votes while the Liberals were eviscerated.
That isn't gerrymandering, that is losing lots of votes leading to the loss of an election.
By that definition, one might say that Australia has a single layer of gerrymandering – gerrymandered at the systemic level but not at the district level – while the US has two layers of gerrymandering – gerrymandered districts in a gerrymandered system.
Use of the word gerrymander in this way ("having boundaries at all is gerrymander") is meaningless.
It depends on what you are comparing it to. Preferential voting (aka ranked choice or alternative voting) is less favourable to bigger parties than first past-the-post is. But it is more favourable to bigger parties than other systems such as single transferrable vote (STV) or mixed member. The biggest reason why Australia hasn't moved to STV or mixed member for the House of Representatives, is that doing so would benefit smaller parties at the cost of the bigger ones.
> Use of the word gerrymander in this way ("having boundaries at all is gerrymander") is meaningless.
An STV or mixed member system would still have boundaries, but would be less advantageous to the bigger parties. Why isn't choosing a system which is intentionally more advantageous to the bigger parties a "gerrymander"?
Where the evidence for that claim? More likely is that there's no impetus for change, at the least, and quite possibly no interest in it given people's feelings about how the Senate is voted and the proliferation of smaller parties there.
He goes on to say an unconventional approach (no electoral boundaries) is better and the politicians are guilty of not adopting it out of self interest, even though no one has seriously proposed or considered it, and in Australia this would have essentially no support in the electorate (Australians having no problem with their system).
Anyone can make outrageous claims to promote their blog, why is this getting any attention.