Victorian Greens choose candidate in Richmond

The Victorian Greens on Friday announced their first candidate for a winnable seat for the November 2010 state election. The Greens will be running Kathleen Maltzahn for the inner Melbourne seat of Richmond at the state election. Maltzahn is a former City of Yarra councillor...

Martin Hamilton-Smith clings on

SA Liberal leader called a sudden leadership spill today in order to resolve the leadership issues over the 'dodgy documents' affair earlier this year and the loss of frontbencher Mitch Williams last week. Instead, the spill appears to have made Hamilton-Smith's position untenable, as...

Gender balance in NSW Parliament

I was looking the boundaries of the federal seat of Grayndler earlier today when I noticed that all five state electorates that overlap with Grayndler are held by female MPs, along with a number of other neighbouring seats. I thought it would be interesting...

Random election stat

I've been looking over the Senate results in the NSW seat of Grayndler at the last federal election, and I found this interesting information. This is the list of the top 10 polling individual candidates in terms of below-the-line votes. Kerry Nettle (GRN) - 1691...

Death by a thousand polls

Well, three polls, at least. In a moment of synchronicity, three of Australia's four pollsters have released federal voting intention polls, all clearly showing a collapse in support for the Coalition and possibly spelling the end of Malcolm Turnbull's leadership. As for the details of each...

Latest NSW Newspoll hits hard

The latest Newspoll has reversed the small gains made by Nathan Rees in the previous Newspoll, with the Coalition polling 41%, the ALP 31% and the Greens 14%. The two-party-preferred figure put the Coalition on 55%, however, as many have pointed out, two-party-preferred figures...

NSW Greens choose Lee Rhiannon for Senate

In breaking news, the NSW Greens conducted their preselection ballot count yesterday, with Lee Rhiannon winning comfortably to be chosen for the first position on the ticket. The second position went to Executive Director of the Nature Conservation Council of NSW, Cate Faehrmann, with...

5 things not to do when you’re trying to rig an election.

5. Rig an election where 80% of people turned out to vote The turn out at the recent election in Iran was the largest in the country’s history. This shows that the people were very committed to this particular election – and since the...

Europe 2009 – summary

The overall results for the European Parliament were: EPP-ED - 264 PES - 161 ALDE - 83 G/EFA - 53 EUL-NGL - 33 I/D - 18 UEN - 14 Other - 110 While all of the groups except the Greens lost seats, due to the reduction in size of the Parliament, these were...

Guest post at FairVote Blog

I've been taking a break post-EU but will be back to usual transmissions soon, with a final concluding post on the EU and a couple of other posts. However, you may satisfy yourself in the meantime by reading a guest post I wrote for...