Journal imroy's Journal: Woo, election time! 4
Well here we go again. Australia goes to the polls on saturday in a federal election.
While everyone's been focused on the US election (including us), this Australian election is almost as important. It certainly is for us. Prime Minister Howard has been very pro-US and is very buddy-buddy with US president Bush. In his 8-year term he's also copied many US-styled policies, like privatizing almost everything the government once owned and controlled. He's shifted funding from public schools to private schools, then wondered in public recently why everyone's taking their kids out of the under-funded public schools and enrolling them in private schools. Apparently it's because public schools "don't teach values". Yeah right, dipshit. As you can probably tell, I don't like him.
On the other "side" we have Mark Latham and the Labour party. He's no messiah either, but definitely better in my view. He did let the recent US-AUS free trade agreement pass with only minimal change. So we may end up with more restrictive US-style copyright laws in the near future, among other goodies. Interesting to see the Greens get behind Labour in a major way. Bob Brown has been heaping praise on Mark Latham in interviews. If anything, I respect Brown more than Latham. He's older and more experienced, and just strikes me as being very un-polititan-like. When GWB visited and spoke in the parliament, Brown stood up and abused him about the treatment of prisoners in Guantanamo bay Cuba.
It has recently been pointed out to me that there is a possible failing in the preferential voting system. I used to put the Greens and Australian Democrats infront of Labour on my ballot. I was confident that I wasn't throwing my vote away like the silly americans do. Since the Greens and Democrats only rarely get enough votes, then my lower preference for Labour would kick in and my preferred major party would get in, right? If evalencia1 is right, then the Libs or Nationals could get the majority vote and win. My prerences wouldn't even be looked at. But is he right? I mean, a majority is 50% + 1 vote. As several pointed out, if a party has that many votes on first preferences then they've won no matter what. All the other parties together wouldn't have enough votes to beat that. I'm not sure what to think.
Also on this weekend is the Bathurst 1000 race on Mount Panorama, Bathurst. The race has been going on every year for a few decades now. I remember when it was the James Hardie 1000, then the Toohies 1000, then simply the Bathurst 1000 (kind of a generic name). The latest sponser appears to be Bob Jane T-marts. You can check out a few photos of Bathurst and Kelso (amongst others) in my panoramas gallery (coralized link to save the familys' ADSL link).
Technical Evaluation of Election Methods (Score:1)
How exactly does your system work? Are you voting for seats in parliament, or for presidency?
Re:Technical Evaluation of Election Methods (Score:2)
It's a federal election, so we're voting for both our local federal MP's in the House of Representatives [aec.gov.au] (lower house) and for the Senate [aec.gov.au] (upper house). I'm not even sure who/what the candidates are since I just moved back home last year. I know we've had an independant for a number of years, a local ex-TV presenter who seems to be doing a good job. He mails out a little newsletter a few times a year and the issues he brings up are things I agree with. I'm not sure what other parties have candidates though
Re:Technical Evaluation of Election Methods (Score:2)
That's the thing. IRV is basically the same broken system they use in the US, only more complicated. The problem is really in winner-take-all. Especially in a parliamentary democracy like Australia apparently is, proportional representation makes much more sense. Simply divide the number of votes a party gets by the number of votes per seat, and that's how many seats the pa
Re:Technical Evaluation of Election Methods (Score:2)
Democracy is useless without an intelligent and informed population of voters. It's sad to see the polititians pandering to the lowest-common-denominator and whipping everyone up into a frenzy over nothing. You see it everywhere whenever crime is involved. Polititians often fall back onto the "tough on crime" motif during election campaigns. It's the classic divisive tactic: everyone likes to think they're innocent and criminals are treated almost as an alien species seperate from the human race. But when