A federal election is likely to be called very soon, so I wanted to write a neutral post (as in not advocating a particular vote) encouraging people to be well informed voters. The first thing is to be a voter in the first place. If you’re not yet enrolled to vote then now is time to do it. Once the election is called you have very little time to get onto the electoral roll and you will miss out. Take your responsibility as a citizen in a democracy seriously. The info on what to do is at the AEC website here. Also if you are enrolled but have moved then you should update your address on the electoral roll so you can vote in the correct electorate.

Next, make sure that you cast a valid vote. If you don’t follow the instruction properly then your vote may not count. Antony Green at the ABC has an excellent post on how to vote here. It’s an excellent post that’s worth reading even if you already know how to vote.

Following up on that, it is a good idea to understand the electoral system. The AEC is a great place to go for that. Consider the following questions:

• How are votes counted in the House of Representatives (HoR)?
• How are votes counted in the Senate?
• What’s the difference between the HoR and the Senate?
• Which federal electorate are you in, who is your current member and which party do they represent?
• Who are the Senators from your state and which ones are up for re-election this time? Only half the senate is elected at each regular election.

The last link is from the parliament house website, there is lots more at their FAQ.

Another way to be informed about the sitting members is by visiting Open Australia where you can access detailed info on each member of parliament.

Next you need to decide who to vote for, while of course you may already know of a candidate or party you wish to vote for, or have some idea of how your preferences will go for the larger parties, you don’t yet know exactly who will appear on each of the ballot papers you will fill in on election day since the election has not been called and the candidates have not officially nominated – so I’ll return to this in part 2 later on. (UPDATE – part 2 now available)

Who is the PM referred to in the title? Is it Julia Gillard? Or is it one of these other Australian Prime ministers who also were not elected to the position by the people of Australia.

But first, what this post isn’t about. It’s not about the relative merits of Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard. It’s not about the effect of the change of PM on the result of the forthcoming election. It’s not about internal ALP politics. It’s about whether the recent change of PM is a sign that something has gone wrong with our democracy.

In the wake of the change of PM the comment threads at the ABC and elsewhere started filling up with

a) People complaining that they didn’t vote for Julia Gillard, and
b) other people pointing out that the first group of people didn’t vote for Kevin Rudd either (even if they thought they did).

I initially sided with group b). Clearly lots of people didn’t understand our political system. Unless they live in the electorate of Griffith then they didn’t vote for Kevin Rudd at the last election, and if they do, and they did vote for him then it was as member for Griffith, not PM. After this initial reaction though I started to think about it a bit more – after all, facts aren’t everything in politics, perception is important. It surely matters that people perceived that they were voting for Kevin Rudd, whether they technically were or not. Really it goes beyond perception, if they voted Labor (or many cases just preferenced Labor above Liberal) then they were effectively voting for Rudd as PM in a very real sense. There’s more to it than that and to give credit where it is due it it was primarily this post by Mark Bahnisch which made me really reconsider the whole issue (see also latest LP discussion here). Perhaps the key is to turn it around and think not so much about who put the PM there, but who takes them away. While people may complain that they voted in Rudd, perhaps it’s more the way that the right to vote out a PM appears to have been usurped. Of course those complaining loudly weren’t in a hurry to vote him out, but resent anyone other individuals or groups being able to do it instead. Which obviously brings up comparisons with the Whitlam dismissal, while the circumstances are very different, there is that same feeling that someone else has taken the power of removing the PM out of the hands of the public (and of course those most aggrieved at the removal of Rudd are likely to be people who exercised their power to remove a PM at the last election). This raises the question of who did remove him then? The easiest answer is factions within the ALP, but this still shifts the question to the factors which motivated them. If you read enough blogs and newspaper columns then there are lots of culprits out there – the media, the mining industry, the very nature of modern politics … personally I’m still trying to get my head around it all and am not going to be pointing the finger, but the idea that a PM has been removed as a result of these sort of influences is a worrying one. Is our political system broken as Mark Bahnisch claims?  I’m still not sure, I certainly hope not.

Pulling back from the bigger picture of the implications for our political system and back to the fact that Kevin Rudd is no longer PM, there are some other factors to consider. One is that we are nearing the end of the electoral cycle, the new PM who has not lead her party to a general election will be doing so shortly. If a party is successful at election does that then mean that they have to go into each subsequent election with the same leader until they choose to retire or are defeated (sounds familiar doesn’t it … I’m sure plenty of Peter Costello supporters weren’t happy with that model). If not then when do they change? Surely now is pretty much the time when it would happen … when the previous leader has served most of their term and delivered on as much of their legislative agenda as is possible, but early enough to give the new leader a chance to properly contest the next election.  Even if you put aside the technicalities and say that people are effective electing a PM then isn’t that to serve one term, or are they also voting for the right to vote for them again next time.

One final point (in post that has, admittedly, meandered around without really concluding anything), is that I hope that for those people who are generally shocked to see the PM they thought they’d voted for (this time in the technical sense) booted out of office will give a bit of thought to how our electoral system works as a result, I think that we’ve gone too far into treating elections as personality contests between the two major party leaders. This incident is a very strong reminder that we need to weigh up a number of factors when we choose who to vote for – sure, the personality of the leader who may become PM is important, but we also have to take into account the party they lead and what they stand for (amongst other things, such as who your local candidate is, the distinction between the two houses, the potential role of minor parties and independents, the use of prefernences  …).

Lately there has been a bit of fuss over the high percentage of people favouring the Greens in opinion polls. As a result there have been quite a few articles about the Greens on the websites of the various media organisations and political blogs. A common feature in the comments threads are comments along the lines of “I would vote for the Greens but … ” or “you may think you want to vote for the Greens but shouldn’t because of …”. In this post I would like to explore some of the common reasons given for not voting for the Greens and explain what I think is wrong with them. I want to be clear that this isn’t a post on why you should vote Green, it is aimed at those who have decided that the Greens are the party that best deserves their vote but feel that there is a good reason for not voting for them anyway.

I’ll also just note that I’m a Greens member. Anything I say here is not on behalf of the party, I hold no office and am not active in the running of the party at any level. It is all just my own opinion.

1. They seem friendly and moderate but are hiding a secret extreme agenda.
   The Greens are a very open and democratic party. Before believing what their opponents have to say about them you should try reading their charter and policies on their website. One of the four guiding principles of the Greens is Grassroots Democracy and this applies to internal party processes. The fact that the Greens have much less coverage in the press than the old parties may mean that people know less about them but that does not mean they are hiding a secret agenda. Mostly the Greens get press coverage on environmental issues but they do want other people to know about their views on a wide range of issues. The fact that they get less coverage is not due to any desire on the part of the Greens party.
2. A vote for a minor party is throwing away your vote.
   I’ve dealt with this sort of argument in an earlier post, I’ll repeat some of the key points here. Due to preferential voting you are free to vote for whoever you want and still get a say in picking who you like out of whoever ends up being the last two contenders. If you know that either Labor or Liberal are bound to win your electorate then why not just vote for one of them? There are a couple of reasons. One is that if they win on preferences from the Greens then it will send a message about the priorities of the electorate and may influence the policies of the major party. Another is that parties are awarded public funding based on the number of first preferences they receive. If you don’t really like the major parties but vote for them anyway then you are giving them funding to help continue their dominance and at the same time denying funding to the party you do like who will continue to find it difficult to challenge this dominance. Vote for the party you like, they’ll get the funding (if they get over the threshold), and then with your preferences you can still have a say in who wins the seat (and who forms Government).
3. A vote for the greens is just a vote for Labor / They aren’t preferencing Labor so they might help Tony Abbott to get in.
   The first of these two contradictory statements is the traditional one, but the second is turning up a bit now. The key point is that each voter gets to decide for themselves where their preferences go. Worrying about where preferences go is a silly reason not to vote for the party you like, you choose the prefences yourself. In the lower house you have to write in all the preferences yourself anyway (someone might give you a how to vote card but you don’t need to follow it), and in the Senate you can look at the AEC website to find out the above the line ticket before election day or just number the boxes below the line if you’re concerned about it. The second comment seems to result from some comments from Bob Brown about how people can decide their own preferences. Labor people seem to be trying to make people think this means that the Greens want the Liberals to get into Government, really I think what it is about is convincing those moderate Liberals who don’t like the current Liberal leadership, but who also don’t like Labor, to consider voting for the Greens instead – making it clear that such people (who are always going to preference Libs over Labor) can still vote Green.
4. I don’t want my vote to go either Labor or Liberal, but it will because of the preferential voting system so I’ll vote informal.
   I’ve seen variations of this one a bit lately and find it quite bizarre. These people seem to think that preferential voting is some sort of scam on the part of the major parties so that they (eventually) get everyone’s vote. Without preferences it would be much harder for a third party to break into the two party system as those voting for them (before they were well established enough to seriously contest seats) would be giving up any opportunity to have a say in the actual outcome. In reality this would mean that many potential Green voters would stay with Labor so that they don’t help the Liberals win power and then the ALP could safely ignore “green” issues. On the other hand, suppose you hate both the majors and like the Greens in our preferential system. So you vote for the Greens, but they don’t get elected. One of Labor or Liberal will get elected – the fact that your preference is carried on doesn’t make this happen, it is happening anyway, the party you voted for didn’t get enough votes to win. So under these circumstances, no matter how much you dislike both majors, isn’t it better to get a say in which one gets elected? And the option of voting informally is even worse since it denies resources to the Greens, meaning that it is harder for them to challenge to dominance of Labor and Liberals in the future.
5. The Greens didn’t support the ETS.
   Already dealt with previously – but in short: you want action on climate change, so rather than vote for the Greens you are going to vote for either a) the party who claimed they’d take action but then put up pissweak, flawed legislation instead (which largely ignored the expert advice they’d commissioned) and refused to even talk to the Greens about it, or b) the party that also did not support the legislation, and with some prominent members who think that it is all a communist conspiracy.
6. I like their policy on A,B and C but don’t like their policy on X.
   For a start you should check the website to see if the policy on X is what you think it is since there is quite a bit of disinformation about Greens policies out there. Now suppose that you have seen the actual policy and don’t like it. Given that the assumption here is that you would otherwise vote for Greens then clearly you don’t agree with all of the policies of any other party either or you would have decided to vote for them. Chances are you are not going to find a single party who agree with you on absolutely every issue, you have to weigh it up overall. There is chance that there is one thing that’s a real deal breaker, but apply the same standards to all parties before rejecting one on the basis of a single policy.
7. They haven’t done anything.
   The Greens Senators are very active, you can read about what they do here. It might not be in the news much, but it doesn’t mean they aren’t doing anything. You can go and read speeches, debates, questions, motions and press releases at the Greens MPs site and see that the Greens are active on a wide range of issues (which are in some cases otherwise ignored). It’s worth checking out their contributions to Senate Estimates as well. The fact is that much of the work of the Senate (not just the Greens senators) is not everyday news, which tends to focus on announcements by the Government and responses by the Coalition. The Greens are of course limited in what can be achieved with just a small representation in the Senate, but a look over the transcripts from parliament show that they are not slacking off. Also, you might try thinking of what your other Senators have done lately. Have a look at Open Australia to see what all the members of parliament have been up to.