The Beginner’s Guide to the Election #1 // VOID-STAR.NET

Okay, listen up Aussie readers. As I’m sure you’re all aware by now, we’ve got a federal election coming up in a month or so. It occurs to me that not all of you may be down with the Australian party political system, which would put you squarely in the company of the majority of the country. But — whether you know how the government works or not — voting here is compulsory. Well okay, that’s not strictly true; more correctly, getting up fuck-awful early on a Saturday and taking yourself down to your local High School and getting your name ticked off is compulsory. What you do after that is totally up to you; most people vote (since you’re there anyway), but you can also simply go home or, if you’re feeling very aggrieved, grab a ballot paper and a pencil and write rude notes to the AEC. That’s democracy for you. If you don’t like it, go move to Burma.

The Beginner’s Guide to the House of Reps

Australia inherited our government structure from Britain, so we use a type of parliamentary democracy known as the Westminster system. This is probably the world’s most common type of democracy, with variations used just about everywhere except for the United States. It’s bicameral, which means we have two houses of parliament; the House of Representatives (that’s the green room) and the Senate (the red room). At election time, the house everyone gets excited over is the House of Reps, because the party that holds the most seats (read: has the most people in) in the Reps forms the government.

I should note at this point that this is purely convention. Back when Australia’s parliament was being set up, people didn’t trust political parties (they were considered to be for communists) and everyone in parliament was an independent member. There was no ‘government’ and ‘opposition’ as such, and certainly no Prime Minister; everyone kinda just did what they thought was right. I’m not entirely sure when this fell out of fashion, but as they years progressed, political parties came back. The way things work now is that the party with the most members in the Reps is considered to be the ‘government’ since they by default hold the majority vote¹ and can therefore pass all their own bills. The Prime Minister and Leader of the Opposition are ceremonial titles applied to the leaders of the party that’s in government and the (major) party that isn’t respectively; these aren’t official offices, and aren’t mentioned in the Constitution. The power of the Prime Minister simply comes from him being the party-nominated head of his political party, rather than someone elected by the population to ‘rule’ the country. This, incidentally, is one of the many reasons why the role isn’t analogous to a president.

What this means is that — despite how the parties like to run their media campaigns nowadays — you don’t actually vote for the Prime Minister. In the House, there’s only one person you vote for and that is your local sitting member; the person who represents your electorate. Now, I suspect a lot of people don’t know what their electorate is, so the AEC has helpfully provided us with this handy form. I’m in the electorate of Canberra, for example, which means that my current sitting member is Labor’s Annette Ellis, who has held the seat since 1998. Canberra is what’s known as a “safe Labor seat”, held by a margin of 9.9%. Aunty has a helpful interactive map which you can use to find out the margin in your electorate, and this is useful because here is where the process gets a bit complicated.

See, the people don’t elect the Prime Minister. But they do determine who gets what seats. The thing is, a lot of seats are ‘safe’, such as Canberra. The ALP could probably run a donkey in Canberra and it would still get elected to parliament on account of it not belonging to the Liberal party. Same goes with O’Connor (WA, 20.4% Liberal), Maranoa (QLD, 21% National) and a whole bunch of other places. People who live in those electorates have pretty much made up their political minds. The game is all about the marginal seats; seats that are held by one party on a small majority (usually less than about 5%). Politicians are always out in the marginals, trawling for votes and indulging in pork barrelling. No-one ever tries to pork barrel Canberra, but everyone and their dog is out promising more funding for, say, Eden-Monaro.

The somewhat uncomfortable corollary to this is that if you live in a safe seat with a sitting member from a party you don’t actually like… yeah, good luck with that.

Voting in the House

The House uses a system known as preferential voting to elect its members. In a nutshell, if you have seven candidates on a ballot, you write the number 1 next to your favourite candidate, 2 next to your second favourite and so on right down to number 7; the person you’d rather die than see elected. Position on the ballot is randomly determined, and as you can probably imagine slot #1 is highly prized. This is where you get the break-down between what is known as the ‘primary vote’ and what is known as the ‘two party preferred’ vote. The system is kind of complex but, in a nutshell, the person who is the most highly ranked on average wins, even if they are not the majority of people’s number 1. This is where your preferences come into play, especially if your #1 goes to a minor party. Chances are that party is never going to win the seat in the first count. In fact, chances are no-one is going to get a majority in the seat after a first count. So, the bottom ranked candidate is struck out and all the people who voted for them have their votes recounted and added onto the tallies for their #2 candidates. This goes on for as many iterations are required until someone gets 51% or more of the vote.

So what does this mean for you? Well, it depends a lot on if your seat is marginal or not.

If you seat is marginal, it’s probably a good idea to vote #1 against your favourite major party candidate. If you like the incumbent, vote for them. If you don’t, vote for either the Labor or Liberal/National candidate as appropriate. This gives that candidate the best chance of winning in the first round of counting. But more importantly (because, at the end of the day, 51% is 51% of the vote no matter how the preferences fall) it sends a political message to the parties, and that’s what living in a marginal seat is all about, like it or not. Of course, if you really don’t care then you really don’t care, but the realities of the Australia political system are that your seat is likely to be won by someone from either Labor or the Coalition at the end of the day, and if you have a preference you want to help your chosen party by giving them the biggest margin possible right off the block (or closing their opponent’s margin, as appropriate).

If your seat isn’t marginal — or you’d simply rather gouge your own eyes out than vote for a major party — then you might like to consider making a minor party vote. Minor parties range from long-standing Senate groups like the Greens and Democrats, to single-issue parties like the Shooter’s Party, fringe religious groups like the Christian Democratic Party, satirical parties and independent candidates. Giving your primary vote to a minor party is usually seen as a protest against the major parties; they’re probably going to get in anyway, but your dissatisfaction with them has been registered, and the minor party you vote for is likely to influence which major party you are considered to be complaining about. However if you do this, you absolutely must watch where your preferences are going for reasons mentioned above. So by all means, vote for the HEMP Party if you want to, but watch that you’re not giving your first major party preference to someone you really don’t like.

And there, more or less, you have it. Of course, we haven’t touched on the Senate much here, but I think that will be a good subject to leave for another time. So until then, happy democracy everyone.

1. Unlike the States, party members here rarely vote along against the party line. When they do it’s generally called “a conscience vote” (when it’s ‘allowed’ by the party leaders) and “crossing the floor” (when it’s not). These occasions are almost always a Big Deal, and are usually reserved for controversial issues like abortion and, more recently, immigration policy. ^