this post was submitted on 05 Apr 2024
1 points (100.0% liked)
Australian Politics
1271 readers
2 users here now
A place to discuss Australia Politics.
Rules
This community is run under the rules of aussie.zone.
Recommended and Related Communities
Be sure to check out and subscribe to our related communities on aussie.zone:
- Australia (general)
- Australian News
- World News (from an Australian Perspective)
- Aussie Environment
- Ask an Australian
- AusFinance
- Pictures
- AusLegal
- Aussie Frugal Living
- Cars (Australia)
- Coffee
- Chat
- Aussie Zone Meta
- bapcsalesaustralia
- Food Australia
Plus other communities for sport and major cities.
https://aussie.zone/communities
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Austria, Brazil, Germany, and the UK region of Scotland (for devolved parliament and council elections only) have already enfranchised 16-year-olds. We should too.
There's currently a Parliamentary Inquiry into civics education, engagement, and participation in Australia. Changing the voting age is not in its terms of reference, but a large enough number of submissions calling for that could at least get a broader national conversation started.
(I also plan to put into my submission something about other voting systems and how feeling like your vote actually matters in a way that it largely doesn't in IRV would be a big help for civic engagement.)
I've never felt this offended
Sounds good. I'm interested in why you think your vote doesn't matter in IRV? And what system you'd replace it with
So, it's obviously a relative thing. Your vote matters a shit tonne more in IRV than in FPTP, of course.
But it's also a lot less than proportional systems. At the last federal election, over 12% of Australians wanted a Greens representative. Less than 3% actually got one.
A combined 9% wanted One Nation and United Australia Party. They got 0. Labor got 51% of seats, from less than 33% of votes. The LNP is actually the most fairly-represented party, getting 39% of seats from 36% of votes.
My preference is a proportional system. Probably MMP, to keep local representation, as well as to remove the need for party lists. Rather than the proportional seats being done in party order, I'd do them in "nearest loser" order based on their local races. But that's a very niche aspect. The important thing is that it be some form of proportional representation.
A counter-argument could be that our Senate uses STV, which is quasi-proportional. Which is certainly a good thing, and far better than if we didn't have it. But it's still only a rough approximation of proportionality. Labor and the LNP each won 39% of seats, from their 30% and 34% of votes. That equates to 3 or 4 seats too many for Labor, and 1 or 2 too many for the LNP.
But even if it did work perfectly, the fact is that all the attention and most of the power is in the House of Representatives. It can be very disheartening and discouraging for someone engaged politically who doesn't support Labor or the LNP to know that the chances that the candidate they give their vote to will probably not actually get in, and that's not good for civic engagement.
Current system gives all regions some chance to have a voice. Otherwise only interests of cities will be considered and interests of outback will not be represented at all.
MMP gives people local representation while still making sure a party with 30% of voters' support doesn't win 51% of seats, resulting in 100% of power.
I thought you'd be thinking of MMP - that nearest loser sounds interesting! It does seem to be the road to better representation.
I'm all for change - I think it'd need to be accompanied with plenty of education in the form of AEC ads on tv and online. Not so much the 'how to vote' but more the 'how our system works'. Plenty of people I talk to have no idea about IRV, and consider voting for anything other than libs or Labor "throwing your vote" - which it can totally not be if people are aware of how it works.