Up for discussion – will add more today
For those overseas not familiar with quirks of politics downunder –
Australian Labor Party – similar to British Labour party or left wing of USA Democrats.
“Coalition” refers to a right of centre grouping of the Liberal and National Parties and all their divers variations. The Nationals have their origins in an earlier Country Party.
Greens I think all should understand – usually to the left of Labor in the political spectrum and Labor and the Greens have a policy of exchanging preference votes.
The Democrats were a centrist group of voters who could not decide between the two major parties.
Some comments – the dying of the Democrats corresponds to some extent with the rise of the Greens – so it is possible that the peak Green vote in recent years around 2010 was inflated by some of these centrist people who might have departed the Greens in 2013.
Labors decline from 2007 to 2010 might have been partly due to their left wing turning to the Greens. However it is not so easy to speculate on what has happened in the 2013 Election on 7 September 2013 as both the Green and Labor votes are down by a similar amount.
So we are forced to conclude that about ~3 per 100 voters left the greens for Labor – while at the same time ~6 per 100 voters left Labor for other berths to the right of Labor.
The 2013 election has seen the rise of the centrist to right of centre Palmer United Party with 5.6% of primary votes which could give them a couple of Lower House seats as well as two Senate seats – in Australia close contests often take two weeks to resolve due to the 13 day wait for postal and absentee votes to trickle in and for preferences to be distributed.
The big question – “what is so wrong with Labor that their vote is in such decline?”
IMHO the answer is in these areas –
Trade Unions finance the Labor Party and expect huge influence in return.
This leads to strong Union influence over all candidate preselections – which means most Labor MP’s are either ex Union officials or Labor/Union lawyers. To win back more primary votes Labor needs to reform in a direction away from Unions – IMHO.
There have been some odd features of the 2013 Federal election – not the least has been the Greens preference deals with Palmer United Party – Clive Palmer getting his wealth through his ownership of coal mines. Work that one out.
Just to give a taste of the variety of Senate candidates and the problems of working out where your vote might end up under various preference deals – this useful article tries to explain. – Why you should take time and vote below the line. Of course voting below the line on the NSW Senate papers requires you to fill in 110 preferences in order, with v few errors.
So to some extent Australian electoral procedures have got near the crazy stage.
No wonder that in NSW a Senator has been assisted into the Senate by the famous “Donkey Vote” which comes about by some voters just putting a 1 in the first space.
I like the sense of humour from Tim Blair – EVERYBODY WINS A PRIZE
By the time the reality of load shedding v paying super premiums for interstate power finally registers to the un-employed manufacturing voters of South Australia, the Greens will be a “whatever were we thinking” embarrassment.
Perhaps the coming summer will be just in time to drive it home for a double dissolution.
Re the Greens preference deal with Palmer.
They may be of the left but that does not stop them from making deals with the right. From a Greens strategy paper.
“The strategy of the Greens Party in 2004 (and in 2007 and 2010) was to:
“out-poll the Liberals. Since we had to rely on the expected high flow of Liberal preferences to win, our broad goal was to attack the ALP vote and allow the Liberal vote to be preserved.”
Its interesting to combine the swings in 2010 and 2013 at the National and State levels as this shows the net result of 6 years of Labor rule.
At the National level there was a combined swing 9.6% against Labor. At the State level it was quite consistent, ranging between 7% and 9% with Queensland (Rudd’s State) as the outlier at 12.7%!