An Onymous Lefty

Some defenders of the public purse.

These Coalition politicians are more like “born to rule” types who’ve got their hands back in the till.

As for their cheerleaders – please could someone link me to where all the “let’s stop the waste” right-wingers are damning the frontbench Liberal/National politicians who’ve been caught out charging the taxpayers obscene amounts for their social jaunts? As for Barnaby Joyce’s “study” trip to Malaysia (and the ridiculously expensive flight back) with those laughable “insights” he may as well have pulled off Wikipedia – could there be a more blatant example of snouts in the trough? Where have the great defenders of taxpayers’ money gone? Where’s Catallaxy? Where’s the Daily Telegraph?

Imagine the front pages if this had been anyone in Parliament not from the Coalition.

PS: Yes, I’m calling hypocrite first.

UPDATE: LEAVE TONY ALONE!!11!!

Now remember, fellow lefties, when somebody becomes PM they deserve respect and for the other parties to support their legislation even if they told their voters they’d oppose it.

It’s time to show the conservatives the respect for their electoral victory they showed us over the last six years when the situation was reversed.

Just like conservatism was banished from the land in 2007, now they get to enjoy a land free of lefties, and we must respect that a few percent of voters, those most disengaged from politics, temporarily switched to the Coalition, which means we must give up on everything we believe and be silent henceforth.

So the Coalition’s big pitch over the last three years is that Labor’s wasted BILLIONS AND BILLIONS OF DOLLARS and only the Liberals and Nationals will STOP THE WASTE.

And yet, when it comes down to it, when they finally shamefully slide the costings across the table at the end of the night and run off, the only way they can manage to eke out a miserable $1 billion improvement in the bottom line is by cutting $4.5 billion from foreign aid.

(And before you say, well, let’s look after our poor people first – just how much of that $4.5 billion do you think is going to improve conditions for the poor in Australia? In round figures? THE ROUNDEST FIGURE.)

$1 billion improvement in bottom line by cutting $4.5 billion from foreign aid.

So – up until that massive whack against the world’s poorest, the LNP are actually $3 billion behind Labor in managing our money.

So much for “Labor mismanagement” – the Coalition couldn’t get over the line without slashing foreign aid. And every railway program they could get their hands on. And superannuation for those on low incomes.

Did a railway once run over Tony Abbott’s dog or something?

The numbers speak for themselves – the Liberals are not the party of managing your money better, just the party of redirecting it from rail to roads, from the poorest to the wealthiest, from small business to big business.

And of course they quite cynically waited until Thursday afternoon to actually release their list, ill-defined though it is. (Which specific parts of the “Nation Building Program”, which involves things like black spot upgrades and boom gates for level crossings, are they cutting? Just what kind of “streaming” of the Family Court do they think is going to save them $30 million? What the hell does “redirect portrayal of senior Australians in the media” involve, and why will taxpayers spend $1 million on it?)

Why did they do that, if they thought you would like their plans? If, with only the day or so they’re giving you, you think you might actually like their plans, then what is it that they didn’t want you to see?

There’s no answer except that they feared that you wouldn’t like their policies if you had more time to look into them, and they’re hoping that your vote is so locked in that you’ll give them the benefit of the doubt even when they’re clearly trying to pull a fast one.

Are you really set on voting Liberal no matter what they do?

Because your power bills are up? Only a very tiny percentage of that has anything to do with the so-called “carbon tax” – 90% of it is because the states run by Tony Abbott’s party have let the power producers increase all their other charges. Because you really, really despise refugees and you really, really believe that TPVs are the magic solution that will make people give up and stay in Indonesian camps? (Or at least you don’t mind that their cunning plan if they can’t “stop the boats” is just to stop you hearing about it.) Because you have bought the line that Labor is wasting huge amounts of money – so huge that the Liberals can’t actually improve the bottom line without dipping into the small amount, compared with the size of our economy, that we spend – spent – on foreign aid?

Maybe Tony’s creepy offering of his daughters for votes appeals? Or his last minute attempt to sneak out an internet filter? (Now they’ve been caught at it the policy has quickly been deleted from their page and replaced with this.)

Look, I agree that the ALP have been a disappointing government, blowing in the wind and fighting with each other. But that’s still better than having completely insane priorities, punishing the poor and small business, and trying to trick voters like you because the Liberals don’t trust that if you found out about it you’d actually think what they’re planning to do is an improvement.

If you actually do care about public services like public transport, or seriously tackling climate change (hey, how awesome was that warmest winter on record, eh?), or treating refugees with compassion and common sense (because locking them up on remote islands is both cruel AND expensive) – then a vote for the Greens is the strongest way to use your vote to achieve that. If you want to pull Labor back from the brink of just aping the Coalition on almost everything important, only voting Green will make that clear.

But if you insist on teaching Kevin Rudd and the ALP a lesson, by voting for the Coalition in the lower house, please at least use your Senate vote for a party that will hold their excesses to account. If Abbott deserved to have a free run through the parliament, he’d have come clean about his plans well before today’s blackout. He didn’t, and he doesn’t.

Have you seen this year’s Senate ballots?

A metre long? Are you kidding?

And why? Who are all these micro parties that you’ve never heard of that appear to stand for the same thing as existing parties (“No Carbon Tax”, “Stop The Greens”)? Why would anyone vote for them? What possible purpose do they serve?

Well, because being up at the front of the ballot is worth a few percent, and if you just run one party then, because the AEC selects the order randomly, you only have a one in however-many-candidates chance of getting up the top. For every dummy feeder candidate you run, you increase your shots of being up the front that many times.

So if you’re an unscrupulous big party, why not run some dummy preference farming candidates? Because you’re concerned about the effect on poor old voters having to deal with a metre-long ballot?

Yeah, like you care about inconveniencing voters. The longer the ballot, the more it forces all but the supremely bloody-minded into just numbering one box above the line, and thereby giving you more power in directing their preferences. Remember – if you stuff up numbering the 110 boxes in the NSW Senate paper, your entire vote is discarded. So if you’re not going to put 1 above the line and leave your preferences in the hand of a “faceless man” (who might transfer your vote to a fringe religious nutcase like Fielding, for example), you’d better put aside some time to make sure you don’t make any mistakes. (In 2010, around half the informal votes were caused by numbering errors.) Most voters who want to be sure their first preference vote isn’t ignored because of a minor error, or who look at the idea of trying to choose between a dozen or so micro parties they’ve never heard of as a ludicrous waste of their time, simply vote 1 above the line. And hope their preferences aren’t sent somewhere bizarre.

We could let voters preference above the line – so they’re ordering the parties, just like in the House of Representatives, but don’t have to go to the detail of numbering each indvidual candidate within.

But we don’t.

So we get ever-increasing numbers of micro parties that don’t stand for anything but preference feeding to the majors, and voting becomes more of a hassle citizens resent, encouraging them to further tune out etc.

Four solutions that don’t involve increasing the barriers for new parties but do involve decreasing the reward for big parties to abuse the system

1. Above the line preferencing;
2. Optional preferences, where the voters can exhaust their ballot where they like;
3. No overlap between party memberships; the 500 names on registration to actually be checked off the roll by the AEC; and
4. Order the ballots according to the first preferences received last election.

The first gives voters reasonable control over their preferences again. If you don’t care about the order of the half dozen candidates within a party, and just want to choose between parties, then you can do so and number a dozen or so boxes instead of over a hundred.

The second ends the undemocratic practice of simply discarding votes that are CLEARLY cast for a candidate just because the voter didn’t want to preference the rest. A vote that numbers half a dozen boxes consecutively and leaves the rest should not be discarded. It should count as a valid vote. That’s one person, one citizen, who has made it clear which candidate they choose. Ignoring them is profoundly undemocratic.

Third, make sure that the same people can’t run multiple parties. There’s been a bit of that this election. It’s just asking for ballots filled with dummy parties.

The fourth might seem a bit odd, since I support the Greens and not either of the two biggest parties. But it’s the order voters actually expect it to be in. I’ve handed out at elections where there’s a candidate with “Labor” in their name in the first few parties on the ballot that gets a whole lot of votes from people who meant to vote for the ALP and didn’t realise that not all parties with “Labor” in the name are the ALP, or even preference the ALP.

Ordering the ballots according to last election’s vote ends the advantage for running dummy micro parties as preference feeders. It makes the ballots less confusing to voters, and accordingly helps them exercise their democratic choice.

If we don’t do these, the ballots will get longer and longer until momentum is created to make it harder and harder for legitimate new parties to arise and compete. They’ll keep raising the barriers to entry so that no-one but the big parties can afford to run – which won’t, by the way, remove the micro parties that are actually funded by the big ones.

Or worse, people will continue to disengage with politics and the informal vote will keep rising.

An ALP candidate, Clare O’Neil, writing in The Age, tries to make progressive voters reconsider voting for the only consistently progressive party in the national parliament, the Australian Greens:

By voting Greens, we diminish Labor’s ability to represent progressive Australians. This is the case for three reasons.

First, Labor will have to go in to battle against other progressives, taking resources away from the fight against the conservatives.

Second, losing inner-city seats threatens to take progressive voices out of the Labor caucus (such as Cath Bowtell in Melbourne, who will run against Adam Bandt on September 7, or Tanya Plibersek in Sydney, whose seat could be under threat). These are, or could be, MPs who will work from the inside to create real change.

Third, by endangering Labor’s ability to govern in its own right, we push Labor towards the centre, because the party is more likely to need support from conservative independents or Liberals to get its policies across the line.

Let’s deal with the two silliest ones before we address the one that has some sense to it (provided that you accept that the status quo of the two big old parties alternating majority government is all we can ever achieve so we might as well try to make the best of it).

Clare’s third and first points kind of contradict each other. In her reckoning, if Labor loses seats to the Greens, then for some reason it will have to move to the right (which is what Labor means by “towards the centre”) to appeal to “conservative independents or Liberals”. It’s not clear why the more Greens MPs in parliament, the more the ALP wouldn’t have to move left and address progressive concerns to appeal to the Greens MPs whose votes it would need to govern. Why is it that the ALP only has to change policy to appeal to people on the right? Don’t the votes of the Greens MPs count as much as those of “conservative independents”?

Simultaneously, according to Clare’s first point, if progressives start leaving the ALP for the Greens, it will have to pull back from its fight with the conservatives and allocate resources to winning seats back. From us, apparently, because it doesn’t appear to have occurred to Clare that maybe the way Labor might have to move to win progressive voters is to adopt progressive policy. No, apparently the way it will win those seats back is by continuing to advocate and adopt right-wing policy, but it will spend more money on trying to trick progressives into not noticing how right-wing it is.

Or something.

In Clare’s bizarro-world, the more people who vote for avowedly progressive candidates who consistently stand for progressive principle, the more the ALP will have to lunge to the right to both win seats from left-wing candidates and to appeal to right-wing parties. Rather than, say, realising that there are progressive votes out there and it had better start representing them either to win back progressive voters or at least to work constructively with all these progressive MPs in parliament who can’t be silenced by “caucus solidarity”.

You know, just like how in order to win back the One Nation voters the Coalition became more lefty. Oh, wait.

Okay, so what of Clare’s one sensible point – that if lefties leave the ALP, both as candidates and voters, then the ALP will only be left with right-wingers? And that if we do live in a system where it must always be ALP majority government or Coalition majority government, then isn’t it better that at least one of those two parties has some lefties in it?

Well, it would be, if those lefties had any power. First point in response is that clearly lefties do not have any power in the ALP, which is why it’s been lunging further and further right since Hawke.

The second is that we progressives don’t actually want to accept this undemocratic, two-party system as the way things must always be. We don’t accept that just because the two big old parties have rigged the system in their favour we should just lie down and accept it. We’d like a pluralist democracy where progressives don’t get silenced in caucus before they even get to open their mouths in parliament. Where voters have a choice between more than just party that imprisons refugees against our humanitarian obligations A and party that imprisons refugees against our humanitarian obligations B.

And voting for one of the big parties is just a big vote for the status quo. Where that will never change, and the best we can hope for is that some lefties in the ALP occasionally sneak something vaguely progressive through when the Right are on holiday or have had a good lunch or something.

Voting Green is a vote that says – no. The system may be set out to disenfranchise me and other progressives so that our preferences are taken away and given to the big parties. The Greens may never govern as a majority in their own right. And I’m okay with that – I just want to be represented. I want to know that the person I voted for will vote for legislation I support and against legislation I don’t. I want to be confident that the candidate I vote for will not vote to lock refugee children in offshore camps, or for tax cuts at the expense of public services.

I want to be part of the solution, not part of the problem.

Faux lefties like Clare, who want the rest of us to give up and just hope that the ALP at some point does something we agree with, are part of the problem.

I think it’s pretty clear the best message you can send with your vote.