The Senate results are finally in, and one thing’s abundantly clear – Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull’s decision to take Australia to a double dissolution election instead of just calling a standard election has backfired big time. Roll back the clocks to March this year, and unable to convince the Senate that they should pass his ABCC legislation, Turnbull threatened Senators with a double
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If you look back at the last thirty Australian Federal Elections, the Australian Labor and Liberal National Parties have won the countrywide two-party preferred vote exactly fifteen times each. If our electoral system were accurately translating Australian voters’ wishes into election outcomes – as Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull said in February that it should – then this would mean that the ALP would have
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Are you a Politician who can’t get his own way? Have you put forward perfectly reasonable policies to the people of your country – only to hear the whiny cries of your ungrateful constituents? Are you trying to get some legislation through parliament, but find that those unreasonable Politicians in opposition won’t play ball? Are you sick of people ignoring your
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You wouldn’t know there was an election coming where I live. There’s no posters on poles, no pollies hanging around on the streets, no letterbox drops, no text messages and no robocalls. If you didn’t follow the news, you wouldn’t even know there was an election on. This is in stark contrast to the New England electorate – home to Deputy PM Bananaby Joyce
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Over thirty-three millions Brits exercised their democratic right to have a say in whether Britain should remain in the EU or leave last Thursday. But did they? Was the Brexit vote democracy in action – or politics at its worst? Democracy is a serious business Democracy is a serious business – as the people of the UK were reminded last week. About eight
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You don’t hear much about the election for the ‘other House’ in our Federal Parliament – the Senate. There’s no polls predicting who will win. Parties don’t do a special launch of their State/Territory Senate candidates. You don’t get letterbox drops or see State Senate candidates plastered on our local electricity poles. And yet the outcome of the Senate election will have a huge
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Imagine a world where our politicians suffered real consequences when they mislead the public with a lie. A world where politicians had to work together like civil adults – instead of tearing each other apart like badly behaved toddlers. In other words – imagine a world where politicians had to live by the same standards that we do. For too long
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As the campaign for a Australia’s Federal election on July 2nd kicked off in earnest this week, we’ve been hearing two key messages from the LNP: Message one: We need to save the Construction sector Message two: Leave the Banking and Financial Services sector alone Both these messages are unpopular with around two thirds of Australians – making them strange choices to open a
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While the government scrambles to look for ways to increase revenue and cut spending, one group of sacred cows who seem largely unperturbed by these ongoing discussions are Australia’s largest companies. That might be because around one in three of them pays no tax at all. And for those that do pay tax, there is talk of cutting the corporate tax rate in the future. It
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“The operation of any electoral system, any voting system, should be to clearly and transparently translate the wish of the voter into a parliamentary result.” .. .so said Malcolm Turnbull yesterday as he introduced legislation into parliament aimed at curtailing the potential of independent or micro-party senators to achieve election by stealth – solely through the distribution of preferences. Nick Xenophon – one
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