I think I have to accept I will never fully understand the Australian Electoral System

[sqbr]

pedanther linked this article by Antony Green(*) about some changes to how voting works in Western Australia and I just...I mean I understand some of it.

(*)A respected Australian political analyst

Like, they're getting rid of the system where remote areas with a low population got extra votes. I get why the currently ruling Labor party would do that (those people don't generally vote for Labor), and why it's arguably more democratic. He doesn't go into it, but I've heard rural voters say the old system was necessary for practical reasons, because a sufficiently large region will overwhelm any one politician by it's sheer size, regardless of how few people live there. Unless...that's a different issue I'm conflating /o\

Also I understand that they're making it a little harder to register as a party to help avoid overfilling the METRE WIDE voting forms.

But they're also getting rid of "group voting tickets" (???) to avoid Weird Preference Stuff that (somehow??) leads to very minor parties getting in as a result of backroom deals, but this will add names.

He thinks we risk voting forms that look like this (from an East Coast election):


But the rest is all an applied game theory headache I just DO NOT GET. I clicked some links to further explanation and just got more confused /o\ And I mean I think some of this is a result of Antony Green using his blog to let his full election nerd flag fly and assuming any reader is at least a little bit of an election nerd too. Which is totally legit, but confusing for a new non-election-nerd reader like me.

All I really need to understand is the basic way preferential voting works, and what I think of the various parties. At the very least, I need to know which party I like most overall, and which I prefer of the main two parties. And I have that covered!

But it's still a bit embarrassing to be an adult Australian with a lot of strong political opinions who is so frequently confused by or vague about so many basic aspects of our political system. Like, I can't remember who the opposition leaders are off the top of my head on a state or federal level (I do remember which party is in power of each! And who the Prime Minister is! Yay me!). I have trouble remembering the difference between the upper and lower house. I'm fuzzy on which electoral district I'm in and always have to remind myself when elections come around, though in my defence the boundaries did change at one point. Also I recognised Antony Green in that photo more easily than I would the Premier (though I do know his name! Hi Mark!) I absolutely cannot consistently remember how many states and/or territories there are, though I can find all the bigger ones on a map.

Anyway! No very deep point, just felt like talking about my Feelings and thought other people in a similar boat might find it relatable. And if it's not relatable you get to feel superior ;P

Ok before I post I'll look some stuff up, maybe myself temporarily less ignorant.

Federal opposition leader: Anthony Albanese. He's been in the role since 2019 and I have ZERO opinion on the guy except that I should have an opinion on him beyond the name ringing a bell /o\

Western Australian opposition leader: Mia Davies A WOMAN??? From the NATIONALS?? I HAD NO IDEA. She's a year older than me and went to the highschool down the road from mine I wonder if we ever met. Anyway, the WA Coalition is in a shambles barely holding onto what little power they have by the skin of their teeth, so it's probably not surprising that their leader is a total nonentity to me.

And this is my best attempt to understand the lower vs upper house:

Federal Lower House/House of Representatives: In some ways the 'main' government. Members of Parliament/MPs in charge of representing a specific region of their state, with the numbers per state roughly proportional to state population. Makes laws. The party with a majority of Lower House seats after a Federal election gains power, and chooses the Prime Minister from one of their MPs.

Federal Upper House/The Senate: A separate group which is supposed to act as a 'check' on the Lower House. 12 senators per state regardless of relative population. Can amend and block laws. Apparently based on a mix of the English House of Lords and US Senate. So now I kinda know what the US Senate is, I guess(**)! Hooray for learning!

Both are voted for at Federal elections, but state senators serve six year terms and any given state senator's position is only up for a vote every second election. (It's different for the territories, just to make things fun, but I live in a state)

And then in WA we have the Legislative Assembly (lower house) and the Legislative Council (upper house) which afaict work in a similar way. These are voted for in state elections.

Wikipedia only says what happens in WA and Queensland even though I am pretty sure the other states and territories have their own governments. I've seen them on TV!

I could remind myself of all the states and territories again but eh, I'll just forget again. At least I remember which of New South Wales and Victoria is the cold/southern one, that was my issue all through primary school.

(**)I already had some sense of the House of Lords because any time I am reminded of it's existence I have an intense, and thus memorable, reaction of "Wait they get to vote on laws etc and it's HEREDITARY?? WTF??" This makes the House of Lords vs MPs distinction clear in my mind in a way "elected politicians who decide on laws vs different elected politicians who decide on laws etc in a slightly different way" does not.

Comments

[lilacsigil]

I am an election nerd! Yes, the rest is all his suggestions for other things they might have tried and why/why not they might work, and how this might work. You seem to be pretty solid on preferential voting which is really the most complicated and difficult part.

The rural voters (hi, it's me!) get annoyed because the Australian population is so heavily weighted towards a few very large cities that rural issues get mostly ignored at a state level - e.g. so much money goes into roadworks in Melbourne that very little gets done on roads out here, even major roads, despite the need for good roads for all the trucks related to primary industry. But if you go too far the other way you get Joh Bjelke-Petersen's horribly gerrymandered Queensland, where a relatively small number of rural voters in geographically large areas overrule the majority of city dwellers (and this was the case in WA's current Legislative Council).

[sqbr]

Right that's another reason I forgot to mention.

And preferential voting is mathematically elegant with a simple algorithm! If only the rest of politics was so comprehensible!

[izzet_bedtime_yet]

Re: the representation or lack thereof of rural interests, I have Opinions that may have no bearing whatsoever on your context 'cause Australian politics are not something I know much about, but that might still be of interest.

See, I'm a Californian, like about 1/8 of the population of the US is, and so I have strong feelings about the disproportionate weight given to smaller states — we have more than 68 times as many people as Wyoming, but get the same two senators! Of course, the US's system was built to protect slaveowners' interests, which explains part of why it's so messed up, and long before state populations were anything like as disparate as they are now, but there's no reforms possible in the system because the small states aren't going to be moved by the appeal to fairness when it costs their own electoral power.

(The twisted thing about California's situation that I see does not apply in your case is that the rural populations within California are actually the hardest-hit by this situation. The only place California Republicans have any power is in the US House of Representatives, where they can form common cause with Republicans from elsewhere in the country, because California is so strongly Democratic that the state government has had a Democratic supermajority for years. Good for my queer progressive self living here, but not really selling the whole protecting-the-needs-of-the-rural-populations bit.)

I've also lived, however briefly, in Scotland, where the main complaint is that the UK's political decisions are chiefly made in London and its environs. North of England is probably angrier about that than Scotland, since Scotland has some autonomy when it comes to decisions that apply only to Scotland, but things like Brexit really grate on the Scots.

I think I broadly fall on the side of... individual rights are more important than regional rights (see: slave states, using the rights of the state to justify denying the rights of the actual people being actually enslaved.) That means you need protections and ways to avoid the majority hurting the minority — but giving the minority more votes isn't really the answer, and urban/rural is hardly the best way to figure out whose interests are vulnerable to that in any case.

[lilacsigil]

so I have strong feelings about the disproportionate weight given to smaller states

We do in fact have this system in our federal Senate, but the population difference is not so extreme - the Northern Territory and the ACT each have 2 senators despite small populations, and each of the states have 12 senators, meaning a Tasmanian vote is more powerful than a Victorian vote. (Other, smaller territories get to vote either with NT or ACT, depending on their geographic location.)

[izzet_bedtime_yet]

This has led me to do a comparison and determine that yep, Australia as a whole actually has fewer people than the state of California. Or Texas. So the scale question's really hard to compare, heh.

[sqbr]

Yeah everything here is on a different scale. The population of Western Australia in particular is only 2.8 million, but we have a size of 2.6 million kilometres squared (about a million square miles) ...wow that's an average of about one person per kilometre squared o.O. Meanwhile Texas, the US state we're most often compared to, has a population of 29.7 million and an area of only 268,581 square miles. So it's less than a third of the size with ten times the population.

[sqbr]

Yeah the situation in the US is a bit different and afaict much more undemocratically skewed. Here it's like...what we have now leaves everyone about equally unsatisfied. As someone who lives in the most densely populated part of the least densely populated state, I'm on different sides of the high population/low population divide on the state and federal level respectively, and have felt the advantages and disadvantages of both. And people on the other sides from me feel about as equally hard done by afaict. Like lilacsigil, who afaict lives in a low population part of a high population state, which has it's own advantages and disadvantages.

That means you need protections and ways to avoid the majority hurting the minority — but giving the minority more votes isn't really the answer, and urban/rural is hardly the best way to figure out whose interests are vulnerable to that in any case.

Yeah, I'm not sure what the best solution is, but extra votes does not seem to be it.