Policies – no party is 100% perfect.

Do you agree with all of Labor's policies?  How about all of the Liberal's policies?

No?

Interesting, because roughly nine times out of ten people have voted for one of those two parties, despite not believing in every policy they have.

I bring this up because it’s the biggest reason I’m given not to vote Green.  “I could never vote Green – I don’t agree with their policy on free tooth extraction of rotten molars in the under 50s*…” you know, that sort of thing.  People are hung up on some small time policy that they’ve been scaremongered into believing will cause the downfall of all society as we know it.

The thing is that I doubt anyone believes in all the policies of any one party.  I’m pretty sure Penny Wong isn’t completely down with Labor’s stance on same-sex marriage, and I sure as hell know Malcolm Turnbull isn’t down with the Liberal’s lack of “real action” on climate change.  If even the party faithful aren’t true believers, then it’s going to be pretty rare for the average punter to find a party with a 100% policy match.  That is of course, if you could figure out exactly what each party’s policies actually are – and if you could find points of difference between the Lib-Labs.

I repeat what I’ve said before – I saw more policy on The Age’s “vote-a-matic” than in any other piece of campaign paraphernalia.  The Age didn’t oversimplify, and it let us play “three party preferred” games.  Instead of giving a red or blue answer, it showed us a breakdown of how our ideals matched those of the three major parties.

81.3% - on most tests that would be an "A."

This was a little revolutionary – choosing a party based on policies!  I had friends emailing me to reveal their results and their resulting confusion.  People who’d always voted Labor who now found they were actually in more agreement with the Libs.  Liberals who were actually Green at heart.  People who were split in perfect thirds.  Just like politics, voters are complicated.

All relationships, even those between voters and political parties, come with deal breakers.  Dr Phil and Oprah would be proud of me for internalising this.  You have to decide what your deal breakers are first, and if your party isn’t giving you what you need, you have to “kick them to the kerb.”  Maybe you don’t agree 100% with the exact boundaries of the Green’s marine parks, but as a lesbian fisherwoman in Bob Katter’s electorate, can you really vote for the man who doesn’t believe there are any homosexuals in North Queensland?  Maybe you’re a unionised teacher from inner Sydney who doesn’t agree with the Greens acceptance of refugees who come by boat, but did you really agree with Labor’s myschool website?  Maybe you’re a selfish merchant banker who’s rich uncle is about to die, and the Green’s death duty tax might shave a bit off your preposterously large inheritance, but you’re making your own fortune trading renewable energy and carbon offsetting shares… so do you really want to keep voting for the Liberal’s lack of action?

Find your dealbreakers.  Analyse the policies.  Kick someone to the kerb.  I thought I was a Labor voter, but it turned out 80% of me wanted the Greens – how red or blue were you?

*As far as I’m aware, not an actual or specific Green policy.  But it does sound like a good idea to me.

$2.6 million of votes for sale

Of course now that we can see the sheer size of the donkey vote, now we know that roughly one in twenty people don’t care at all.  Which makes me wonder what kind of commodity donkey voters will become.  Will the major parties try to buy these votes with actual money next time around? 

Maybe websites will spring up where disillusioned voters register their trip to the ballot for sale.   They could sell their [1] on ebay amidst furious bidding from J.Gill and T.Abb, and turn a tidy profit on their complete disinterest.  After all, if voters are already “being bought” by election promises, does it really matter if politicians switch to direct marketing?  I’d warrant $5 in the pocket would be more motivation for a lot of people than any of the millions of dollars of televised nonsense we’ve just been privy to.  

I’ve had a hard time tracking down the cost of the Lib-Labs campaigns, but I’d be really interested to see what they spent per head of the voting population.  For some people, voting is such a chore that if a Lib-Lab stepped up and volunteered to take the trip to the polling booth for them, I’m pretty sure they’d say yes.  We all know it’s not hard to front up at multiple booths and vote multiple times, either under the same name or different ones.  I’m actually wondering at what stage of our non-result election we’ll get around to uncovering the extent of this years rorting.

Rorting and ebay aside, we do know is how much each vote would have been worth.  The Australian Electoral Commission gives funding to parties based on their number of first preferences.  This year each [1] was worth close enough to $2.31.  So if you voted Greens, they got your $2.31 to help fund their campaign next time.  If you voted for them in the House of Reps and the Senate, they received $4.62 – essentially a gift from you to them.  So I headed over to the  AEC Virtual Tally Room to find out just how much all this donkeying was costing.

According to their results, 507 481 Senate votes and 654 981 House Of Reps votes were informal, bringing us to a grand total of 1 162 462 informal votes.  That's over one million votes that didn’t get across the line.  If we cost these at the $2.31 funding rate for a proper vote, we get the staggering figure of $2 685 287.22.  While I consider the 22c important, it’s the $2.6 million that really gets me.  So much money that should have been reinvested in the Lab-Libs, the Greens, the Socialist Alliance, the Hunters and Fishers or the Sex Party, and now it’s just sitting around earning interest for the AEC.  Do you reckon they’ll be having a donkey themed xmas party this year?

There is a price on everything, on everyone and every vote.  I know we all struggled finding interested buyers, but the real question is did we sell ourselves too cheaply this year?

PS.

People definitely tried to sell their 2007 votes. So why haven’t we hear about it this year?

Ebay - 2007 votes for sale

Swinging - that's not my team

It’s been funny watching people get worked up about “idiot swinging voters.”  It seems that the concept that our democracy is based on has been evading them.  If a core group of swinging voters didn’t exist, the result of every single election would be the same.  If voters hadn’t have swung from Labor to Liberal in 1996, John Howard wouldn’t have been our PM.  If voters hadn’t swung from Liberal to Labor in 07 we wouldn’t have had Kevin.  We only really have elections to see which way the population has swung.

I guess what was different this year was that they swing wasn’t just between red and blue.  Lets not kid ourselves, there was still movement between the Lib-Labs, and probably more people changed sides than the “net” swings will ever show us.  But this year the movement favoured the Greens and the Donkeys.  This upset the status quo and has now left both red and blue scratching their heads.

To explore this idea further, we’d best have a look at why the concept of “swinging” is so strange to so many.  A lot of voters probably have a footy team and see their politics as an extension of this.  There are those people who exist under the umbrella of a certain socio-economic lifestyle, and see their vote as reflecting that.  There are people in dangerous jobs who are paid up unionists and use this to determine their allegiance.  But no one factor ever pins an individual to a team.  We all have to make trade offs of conscience and consequence to decide who is really better for us on the day.

Going into the election there were electorates where it is reported that 40% of voters remained undecided.  Apparently how-to-vote cards have been shown to significantly increase primary votes – if you have a representative at the booth you’ll gain ground.  Just a simple smile at a lost punter can make the difference.  So while those of us who’ve been loyal to one party for years might like to think it’s clear cut, for a lot of our fellow voters it isn’t.

So keeping in mind the results only represent the overall swings, and don’t show us exactly how many people fled screaming from somewhere to somewhere else, how did we end up?

Well Labor was down 5.4%, the informal votes were up 1.7%, Liberals were up 1.9% and the Greens win the most improved player award for an increase of 3.7%.  I don’t know how we read the fact that the increases add up to 7.3% and the loss from Labor is only 5.4%.  I consider it a mystery of politics.  (All numbers from ABC and correct on day of reading.)

At the end of the day I guess it’s safe to say people change.  Not only that, but parties change too.  Hopefully the way government runs will change.  And all this change will be good for Australia.  Because we may have gone off swinging this election, but our hearts still lie with Oz.

the lesser of two evils

So now the fallout has started with Labor voters blaming the Greensliders for their failure to form government it’s worth looking at this concept.  A few people have even said to me that my vote didn’t count, that the only way it would have counted is if I used it to vote for “the lesser of two evils.”  I don’t know if the irony has dawned on them yet that they consider their party evil.  A “lesser evil” to be sure, but still evil.

Apart from the year I voted Democrat because I thought they were absolutely brilliant, I’ve previously always voted Labor.  Do you know why?  I was a Labor voter because I hate Liberals.  Not on a personal level, I have a number of friends who will have voted for Tony Abbott whether I let them or not.  But on a policy level I hate Liberals.  Snide rich getting richer, big business in their pockets, poor get poorer, if you can’t afford it sucks to be you policies.  Policies that reinforce the class divides that only those enrolled in private schools before birth can imagine as a good thing.

So I clearly knew who I didn’t want to vote for.  Labor seemed the natural enemy of the Liberals, so it followed that the enemy of my enemy must be my friend.  Originally they didn’t seem to be screwing anything up, no doubt because they were constantly in opposition to a Howard government, so they maintained a sense of hope.  They probably wouldn’t have been perfect, but they certainly always seemed “the lesser of two evils.”  The day K.Rudd came to power was the sweetest election result I’d ever had.  Finally my guys were in and things were going to get better.

Only they didn’t.

Well some things got better.  I mean Howard went away somewhere, and that was great, and for a while Malcolm was in opposition, and he actually seems like a pretty good guy with some sound ideas – not enough to make me vote Lib, but he kept the Labs on their toes.  He respected climate change science, which is no doubt why the Libs did away with him and let Boatphoney Tony have a go.  But Kevin Rudd was a great speaker, he seemed to have a vision, but things didn’t really happen.  Not the things I was really interested in.

Enter this election where I really couldn’t tell the two parties apart.  Both would stop boats, prevent same-sex marriage, do something with the economy and refuse to tackle climate change in the way it needs to be done.  The only difference anyone could see was that one was a male “wingnut” and the other was a female “ranga.”  A lot of people shrugged and did what they always do, and voted “for the lesser of two evils.”  They were both evil people!  Surely there is more to life than electing E1 or E2 to government every three years?

That’s the mindframe I was in when I discovered the Green option.  I read their policies.  Humane, progressive, ethical, environmental with a nice serving of good old common sense.  The Greens weren’t the lesser of the evils, they were actually on the side of GOOD!  You can make all the jokes you want about how I’ve “swallowed the Coolaid” but I’m happy in the knowledge that my first preference went to the party I think is best for Australia.  Maybe my vote didn’t elect the government, but I’d rather be a loser on the side of good than a winner on the side of evil, be it the greater or lesser evil of the two.

A large chunk of Labor voters gave their first preference to the party they thought would screw them over slightly less.  In my best John Jarrat Wolf Creek voice "winnaaah."

Friends don't let friends vote for Tony Abbott. Or do they?

For those of us who followed the election campaign with a handy serving of “wtf” on facebook, this page was one of our great hopes.  I don’t know who created the page, but it got some pretty cool media coverage and ended up with over 110000 “likes.”  Of course we all got schooled in the fact that clicking “like” is nothing like true democracy.  And for those of you still commiserating on the page, NO the AEC won’t pay any attention to the fact that FDLFVFTA has so many “likes” because they did a more extensive survey on the “likes” of the Australian people on Saturday.  They even asked the people who don’t have facebook.

We did all get kind of cocky about how many hits this site had, and the fact that Tony’s own facebook was lagging so far behind with only around 10 000 “likes.”  Julia ended up with 60 000 or so, and neither of them bothered to update their pages for pretty much the whole campaign.  Actually, that’s not entirely true, Julia did put up a plea for Twibbons on election day, but of course by then we were all wearing “This Saturday, I’m voting Greens.”  When I say “all,” I mean those of us who’d chosen to flee the major parties sinking ships with our dignity intact.  Not those who presumably wanted to vote for Labor.  For some reason a lot of Labor voters chose a picture of Tony to profile.  I thought this was a little “wtf” quite frankly, and I do mean “why THAT face?”

He doesn't look that bad...

I still swear a Liberal troll planted that red, white and blue “NOPE” image of Tony on FDLFVFTA.  Patriotic colours, fairly flattering shot, and everytime it thumbnailed the “NOPE” disappeared completely.  All these rabid anti-Tony folk were left with profile pictures that may as well have come from Liberal HQ.  Ditto all the poorly thought out profile photos of Tony looking silly, or faintly crossed out.  All anyone saw was Tony, Tony, Tony.  And much as I hate to admit it, passionately hating one candidate is not actually a valid reason to vote for someone else.  I think this has all become rather apparent from the result of the negatively run election campaign.  Policies may have helped us tell them apart.

If you didn’t want Tony in power what you really needed to do was propose your alternative and give valid reasons why they were better.  For sure, democracy is based on a secret ballot, and if you don’t ever want to tell anyone that is your right.  But if you really want someone running the country, it might help if you tell your “friends” who you’re voting for.  This is where the Greens kicked arse.  The Australian Greens facebook was on the cause early with the tiny green triangle Twibbon.  As the polls kept flip-flopping and the Green vibe increased they brought out the “This Saturday, I’m voting Green.”  It was big, it was bold and it made it really hard for us to tell our posts apart.  But it got the point across.  There were people out there voting Green.  We were visible.

Those of us who’d made the decision to swing could feel it was going to be big.  We plugged GetUp and AYCC endlessly.  We discussed how we felt about the issues and watched The Chaser and Gruen Nation like hawks.  I flogged The Age’s vote-a-matic like a dead horse, because even if people didn’t lean Green, I wanted them to vote on something resembling policy.  Ironic that the most policy we saw this election was embedded in an online quiz.

Of course as it gained momentum, FDLFVFTA became more and more Labor dominated.  Red team supporters spent a lot of time whinging about the Greens, thus dividing any united front the page may have originally had.  There are still some doing it there now, playing the blame game with the Greens.  At the end of the day I didn’t see much support for Labor on facebook.  All I saw was Labor voters whinging about Tony, and Liberal trolls returning equally stupid fire about Julia.  Not one person on my friends list changed their photo or status to show support for either Labor or the Liberals.  Two friends went all out with “This Saturday, I’m voting Greens” and probably about five others posted their intentions to vote Green and encouraged their friends to do the same.  As I pointed out to mine, I thought it was important to tell people what was going down, because otherwise they’d feel like they’d missed the invite to the party.  Still more of my friends are coming out about their Green vote after the fact, no doubt thankful they’ve dodged the Lib-Lab bullet, more or less.

So I guess the morals of this story is that “Most Friends on Facebook Don’t Actually Care Who Their Friends Vote For” and they’d rather click “like” than have a political discussion.  It’s also now apparent that facebook users would rather post their Farmville cows than their political ideals.  “I don’t care about your farm*, your fish or your mafia” but strangely, I do care who gets to run our country and why.

*I do care if you have an actual real life farm, especially if it’s located in the electorate of Bob Katter, Tony Windsor or Rob Oakeshot.

Bob Katter for PM

Lets face it, if we can’t have Bob Brown as our Prime Minister this time around, we may as well get things over and done with and let Bob Katter have a shot.  Sure, he has a healthy dose of the “drunk uncles” going on, but he also has a hell of a lot going for him.  Lets start with the fact that he’s running our country, and currently looks like he might be able to represent all of Australia in a more balanced way than Julia or Tony combined.

Bob Katter was elected to represent one of those country seats that the major parties were clearly screwing over.  Both major parties.  You might be all holier than though about his ad on the telly, you might think his bush poetry was dated or even slightly hick, but then it’s time to face another Bob Katter fact.  He ran ads that showed he actually understood the needs, hopes and fears of his electorate.  And because he was a far better option than the Lib-Labs, he’s not only won his seat, but the country as well.  Both the Lab-Libs are desperately courting Katter and the other two confirmed independents, so we may as well take a look at what he’s told us about himself so far.  It’s tempting to put his opinions into columns, but Katter is a complex man and I think that would be disrespecting his individuality.  This is what we know so far:

1.    He really hates Barnaby Joyce.

2.    He loves farmers of all types, but is especially outspoken about sugar and dairy.

3.    He’s really pissed off about deregulation of sugar and dairy: Lib-Labs, I’m pretty sure that means you.

4.    He doesn’t like farmers committing suicide, but then who does?

5.    He thinks North Queensland needs more people.

6.    He has a scheme whereby he’ll take 7% of NQs water, and 2% of its land and install HYDRO to power the ENTIRE COUNTRY.

7.    He can make enough power with this HYDRO for 60 million people.

8.    60 million people?  Does that count as big or medium Australia?

9.    If you ask him a question you’ll get an answer.  I’m pretty sure he wouldn’t chicken out of a debate on anything.

10.   Health and telecommunications are on his big list.

11. He says he’s keen for Australia, and he’s not convinced about the Lib-Labs.

See what I mean – Bob Katter has no party lines and he says what he reckons.  He seems to be pro-alternative energy, pro health, pro bush, pro farmer and completely and utterly pro screwing around with the major’s leaders.  There is no way he can be pinned to a side and I don’t know if there is any reason he should.

So it’s totally time for him to step up and take the Prime Ministership.  Because at least then we’ll have someone to meet Obama, and his fellow independent will get the telecommunications he deserves and be able to appear on Q&A without his phone line and satellite link up cutting out.

PS.

“A voice in Canberra that stands up for what’s right, Bob’s on the job all day and all night.”

Bob's on the Job

Never ignore the elephants.

A lot of people are scratching their heads wondering what happened in the Australian 2010 Federal Election.  Some of them are even asking “wtf?”  But it’s really not that hard, it went down something like this.

An elephant was sent to tell Labor that they weren't listening to their voters. Julia laughed and said "always nice to meet an elephant.”  The elephant went to see Tony, but he wouldn’t listen to it either.  Everyone on telly kept asking Julia about the elephant, but she didn’t seem too concerned.  No one was super interested in what Tony had to say, because everyone knows he thinks elephants are “absolute crap.”  There were a lot of other things people were worried about, like equal rights for same sex marriage, healthcare, education and the environment.  These were all raised clearly, but Labor shrugged and said they might be red team, but they wanted the blue voters.

Then there were an awful lot of particularly stupid ads on telly.  The best of them had a catchy jingle and featured people “getting whacked” by an imaginary object that was never ever seen.  Ironically, this was not made by either party.  Red team had broadband, but blue team would stop the boats.  Not to be outdone, Julia said she’d stop the boats too.  She said she’d “move forward” for red and Tony said he’d get “real action” for blue.  But under no circumstances would either of them allow a man to marry a man, or a woman to marry a woman.  Especially not on a boat.

So in the murky purple that followed, everyone got so confused they couldn't remember which party was Labor, Liberal, in power, in opposition, lesser of two evils, or in fact, red or blue. A lot of people didn't understand how the voting and preferencing system worked, and a whole bunch of idiots listened to Mark when he said "donkey vote."

The monkeys locked away in the big room are still counting, and they may have to decide the winner based on who was placed last the least, but that would all come down to preferences, which no-one bothered to learn about.  It would be done quicker, but the monkeys keep getting distracted trying to figure out if a vote should go on the "donkey" or "horse" pile.

"Your vote is a valuable thing."

So thus far the result for red and blue: DEAD HEAT.

I think this means slightly more people "hate boats" than "love broadband," but it depends which channel you were watching or what time you last checked the web.

The people that didn't get get so confused, didn't like the colour purple and wanted good things for Australia like country services, dental in medicare, no bank fees, ... (there is a big list) swung to the Greens or voted in independents. 

As a result of that, one of the two major parties is gonna have to give in to all the Greens and Independents wildest dreams, or be unable to govern.  

And all of them have enormous herds of elephants that need to be fed.


Pre-PS.
Seeings as Hitler is down, maybe you'd like to meet the AYCC Climate Change Elephant.  As occasionally seen in budgie smugglers.
Never doubt that a small, thoughtful, committed elephant can change the world.


PS.
I was particularly surprised at Hitler's response to the election outcome.  The sad thing is that I might have preferenced him over Labor if he'd been running - he seemed to have a good idea as to how the campaign should have been run:
Hitler responds - "it's a colossal farce." - I hope you saw it while you could, it was brilliant, and now:
"This video is no longer available due to a copyright claim by Constantin Film."