The debate over the internet filter has demonstrated that an expertise in technology and social media doesn’t necessarily translate into political smarts.
Stilgherrian ripped apart those who seriously believed that Julia Gillard would replace Communications Minister Stephen Conroy with Senator Kate Lundy, a senator with so little factional support that she has been constantly under threat of losing preselection for her ACT Senate seat.
Many tweeters, including prominent anti-censorship activists, seem astounded that the Greens would make a preference arrangement with the ALP, unaware of any other issue on which the Greens might find Tony Abbott more objectionable than the Government’s censorship policies.
The worst example, however, has to be the campaign to get Victorian voters to vote below the line and put Stephen Conroy last on their ballots.
It is astounding that people would organise such an idiotic strategy, that is clearly doomed to failure. Among other reasons:
- No-one is going to know if anyone puts Stephen Conroy last. No “last preference” votes are counted, so we will have no idea if a large number of people will put Conroy last.
- It couldn’t possibly work. Conroy will be first on the Senate ticket for the ALP. So to stop him from winning you need to reduce the ALP above-the-line vote to below 14%, probably below 10% to be practical. Considering that the ALP vote in Victoria should be at least 40%, you would need 30% of Victorians to follow your advice.
- There’s a high barrier of entry. It’s actually quite difficult to vote below-the-line. You won’t get many people to do so.
- You’re ignoring all the other pro-filter Senators. You’re asking people to put Conroy lower on their ballot than Steven Fielding, the senator who has pushed an authoritarian and simplisticly conservative agenda during his time in the Senate and likely was the inspiration for the filter.
- It’s the party, not the minister. The ALP’s agenda is driven by the central party machine, not by ministers acting independently. There is no evidence that removing Conroy from his ministry, let alone Parliament, will have any impact on the ALP’s policies. In the process of saying “put Conroy last”, you are saying it’s fine for voters to vote for the other Labor candidates, those ones that may actually require those votes to win their seats.
If you actually want to change the policy agenda, you need to vote for a party that actually doesn’t support the policy. Campaigns against a single politician distract voters from the way politics actually works by personalising policy when it really is about greater forces. If you were somehow successful in knocking off Conroy (which is entirely impossible without the complete destruction of the ALP) it would not change the direction of the government.
I’m coming dangerously close here to advocating a vote for the Greens, but my point isn’t that people should vote Green, but if you don’t support a party’s policy, and that’s what you care about it, then you vote for a party with the policy you support. Idiotic campaigns to get people to give a last preference to a candidate for whom it doesn’t matter won’t help a jot.
Could you explain how “voting above / below the line” works?
But if people feel so strongly about Conroy that you want to vote below-the-line and put him last – go right ahead. The Senate voting system offers you that option of below-the-line voting so you can rank all the candidates individually in your order of preference.
Such a campaign misses the point, won’t work, and won’t be noticed since even the party scrutineers won’t be taking note of who has been put last, but I can understand the dilemma that some campaigners on this issue may feel they are in if they are wanting to run a campaign that stays independent and doesn’t endorse any specific parties or candidates, which is often important to some campaigns who want to try and remain non-aligned in the hopes of maintaining a broader supporter base and keeping the focus on their issue of concern.
As someone previously involved in similar issues-based campaigns around elections which aimed to remain non-partisan in order to focus on the issue and remain independent, I can fully appreciate where they may be coming from. Although I would point out personally targeting Conroy really misses the point.
I think the purpose of knocking Conroy off wasn’t necessarily to kill the policy immediately, but to remove him from cabinet. In this way, the ALP would be forced to replace him, hopefully with someone more receptive to expert industry advice.
But I agree, forcing people to vote under the line is a waste of time when a simpler measure is to simply vote for a party that is anti-censorship
Harry,
I assume you understand the basics of Single Transferable Vote.
Each party has a ticket of candidates (max. 6) which are grouped into a column for each party.
The ballot is organised with each party’s candidates grouped into a column with a box for the party as a whole above a big black line. The ballot looks like this:
http://www.aec.gov.au/Voting/How_to_vote/Voting_Senate.htm/
If you vote ‘above the line’, you simply put a ‘1’ in the box of a party and preference no further. Your preferences then follow a ticket lodged by that party.
If you vote ‘below the line’, you must number the box of every individual candidate.
BTL voting allows you to have complete control of your preferences, but requires a lot of effort and is hard to do formally. You also don’t know who a lot of the candidates are.
ATL voting is very easy, but it gives tremendous powers to party hacks to make decisions and allows them to shift preferences around en masse. In the House of Reps you can advise people to preference in a certain way, but not actually decide their preferences. Usually major party voters follow the HTV card, but if they made really nutty suggestions people would notice.
In 2004, the ALP preferenced Family First ahead of the Greens as part of a deal which helped them win Senate seats in NSW and SA, but it saw Steven Fielding win a seat ahead of the Greens in Victoria and almost saw FF’s Jacquie Petrusma almost beat Christine Milne in Tasmania.
And on another topic from the campaign trail today….
There are Labor candidates going around complaining about people not being able to get enrolled, and blaming the Coalition for introducing that change and opposing it’s repeal, but hold on please, if Labor was so concerned about giving people enough time to enrol, why didn’t they allow a greater time period between calling the election and issuing the writs? Sure, they didn’t want a longer campaign, but if you’re really that concerned about young people getting on the roll, you could’ve given them more time instead of just taking the easy option and blaming the Coalition.
Given that the filter has been put on ice for 12 months, the new Senate will have just convened (on 1 July 2011) when it’s next being considered. Which means that the Greens will be able to block it – if the Coalition agree, anyway.
For the people who are prepared to vote below the line: It is possible to get in touch with the electoral office for a print out of the candidates, prior to the election. Perhaps this form will be available on line?
This enables people to have a hassle-free vote. It’s easy to screw it up when one sees the list of candidates, the sun is shining, and there are a hundred thousand cross people dying to get in so they can get out again.
NICK C: Don’t forget the amount of time needed for the electoral office to find out who the candidates are, print the forms, organise the voting halls (usually occupied by many different people, schools being a popular destination). Time to print out the leaflets for the various political parties, which, in turn have to be distributed.
Ads for TV have to be prepared and politicians enticed into appearing on selected TV stations, Radio stations, whatever.
But as for blaming the Coalition, why not? They blame everyone else. Just take the time to watch a few QandA programs featuring Julie Bishop. The only people she doesn’t blame for losing the last election are her dog or cat.
A note that the thing about Petrusma almost beating Milne in 2004 for Tassie Senate is a bit of an urban myth. On election night it looked like it would be very close and the Greens’ victory celebration was clearly premature, but then changes in vote standings based on postal votes improved Milne’s position hugely, so by the time the button was pushed Milne had obviously won. Indeed in the end it wasn’t necessary to distribute all preferences, but had that been done Milne would have won by around 6000 (on the election-night figures it would have been 1000).
There were closer final Senate seat results for Tassie in 1990 (Robert Bell (Dem) winning by about 3000), 1996 (Bob Brown beating Bell by around 2200) and 1998 (Louise Crossley (Green) losing a three-cornered contest to Harradine and Labor by effectively about 4000). I scrutineered for Bell in the first one and it was very exciting because the local media had totally written him off but I gavce him an 85% chance of getting up based on on-the-night figures, and he did.
As for the Conroy thing, I do think his own views have a little more to do with the persistent pushing of an obviously dud policy than just a simple matter of him doing what the party wants him to. But I totally agree with Ben that a call to put Conroy last shows complete ignorance of how the Senate system works. It is a futile gesture that carries a risk of voting informal.
I suspect there will be many parties one can vote for that do not support the filter.
On the issue of the internet filter, the interesting point to note is that only the Greens and National Party have adopted explicit policies opposing the mandatory ISP filtering proposal.
Care to alter your BS story ben ?
Senate papers have been released, Conroy is *SECOND* on the paper, so that argument is out the window.
Egg on the face ?
It doesn’t change my point, Brian.
There is still zero chance that the campaign will have any impact, either in terms of actually changing policy, preventing Conroy from being re-elected, or anyone even knowing that you’ve done it.
It’s still a completely stupid campaign strategy.
Brian:
If Labor doesn’t make two quotas in Victoria (28.4%) it would be such a massive shift in our political environment that the filter would be one of the last things we’d be talking about.
In fact, with that sort of swing, Labor would be reduced to a few dozen in the house, and it wouldn’t matter whether Conroy was in the Senate or not, because the Liberals would be in government, and would probably control the senate anyway.
This is a very insightful and well argued piece but I have to say that I disagree with Ben about whether removing Conroy would have no impact on the filter.
True, this filter is ALP policy. However, the problem from the beginning has been the pigheaded refusal to acknowledge alternative views on this issue. That is all Conroy. With a more flexible Minister, the policy might not (he wrote, bracing himself for criticism) have been THAT bad.
On the point of putting Conroy last, it’s true that it is unlikely to have much of an impact and many, many, many, many Victorians would have to do this. But by voting BTL, the Labor ticket would be split and the votes can be allocated to individual Labor Senators. In that way, votes could be taken away from Conroy specifically.
The fact that it’s unlikely and it’s difficult to achieve something is not really an excuse not to try. A Greens candidate should recognise this.
Rob, it’s not “unlikely” and “difficult”. It’s completely impossible, and will have zero impact on the debate, because no-one will know if anyone has done it.
I’m not saying “don’t try”. I’m saying, do something that actually has the potential to have an impact. Clearly campaigning has had an impact, with the Liberals now coming out against the filter and the numbers in the Senate clearly lacking with Liberal and Greens against the filter. But this is a really dumb strategy that just diverts energy from other causes.
One could vote for another party *and* put Conroy last…
It isn’t about ‘it won’t work’. That’s tantamount to saying that one vote in twenty million is insignificant. (I’m not stupid. I know my vote, in itself, isn’t going to affect the outcome at all)
This is the only time we get to exercise any semblance of democracy, so make it count for what *you* want. I, for one, don’t mind taking the time to go below the line to do so.
To follow this up, the the last preference votes are counted, this practice was started in the 2007 federal election.
The results of this are here:
http://pento.net/2010/09/21/conroy-and-fielding-the-battle-for-last-place/
The summary is, a significant proportion of people who voted below the line, voted Conroy last or second last. Certainly not enough to remove Conroy from office (he was assured a place based on above the line votes alone), but I’d hardly call the movement unsuccessful in at least voicing their message.
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