The Oz show

David Warren:

Complicating this, and slowing that electorate, is an Australian electoral process designed for soi-disant “fairness” by rocket scientists of the usual progressive sort. Australia no longer has “first past the post” federal elections, as Canada still has. Instead, there is an incredibly abstruse system of voter preferences, such that, for instance, an Independent running in the riding of Denison, in Tasmania, who finished third in the direct poll with 21 per cent of the vote, has emerged as the winner after the “preferential” hocus-pocus.

He in turn is one of four Independents who now choose the new government in a hung Parliament, where Labour and the (conservative) Liberal/National Coalition are in a dead draw, even though the latter won the popular vote by a six-point margin.

Moreover, such is the complexity of the system that it will take more days to determine the precise result, which cannot be confirmed until October.

Needless to say, progressives in Canada, and every other country with a direct voting system that everyone understands, long to introduce similar hocus-pocus systems. They offer a way to get Greens and other crackpot Left parties into Parliament, and to prevent conservatives from governing until they have won by huge landslides.

But that is an unrelated issue. Even with hocus-pocus, plus recent redistricting, it appears that Australian Labour have gone down, and it may actually be worse for them if they succeed in buying off enough Independents to remain nominally in power.

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