The ABC website has a Vote Compass survey on their website regarding the Federal Election.
Interestingly, the only parties are LNP, Labor, ON and Greens…
Perhaps Clive will be suing the ABC for discrimmination.
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Clive Palmer now claims he will pay his former workers’ entitlements and restart the nickel refinery.
Wow. There must be an election coming.
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It would be great if this ex Politicians promise was the start of great things and just not one full of false hope for all those in Townsville?
The alternate feelings are:
Not since Gilbert and Sullivan has such a plot and performance proposed to stretch the imagination so bewilderingly.
Or is there a more recent one?
“Raise the Titanic!”
Even CP accepted the inevitable and promised to build a new one, didn’t he?
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Now Clive Palmer is supposedly running for the senate in Qld.
Now what did Keating describe the senate as? “Unrepresentative Swill”?
That quote from Keating never made any sense to me. The Senate is far more representative of how people actually voted than the House of Reps is. That is the intentional design of the voting system for each house.
I assume that Keating was expressing his frustration with the Senate’s not rubberstamping his legislation - something that most governments before his and most governments since his have had to contend with. Suck it up, princess. 
What’s our topic here?
‘Clive Palmer and his unsolicited SMS messages’
Is Clive running for the senate ‘unsolicited’? Yep. You can’t self solicit?
Is the act of nominating for the senate election the same as an SMS message from CP? Let me see - you can always delete unsolicited SMS messages. Sorry, Fail! I😂
I began this topic and it was about an unsolicited message way back. Read the first post and you will see that it was well before the election was announced. I posted January 18th. I had earlier blocked the numbers from the two messages I received. I had thought blocking the first one would have been enough. Any person running for parliament who sends me a message will have their number blocked. I’ve done it to a couple of others. Even though political parties are exempt from the ‘do not call’ procedure if they ring me then they are unsolicited (unwelcome, uninvited, uncalled for, unsought).
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They are also effectively exempt regarding putting spam in your letterbox.
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That must be why QLD doesn’t have one.
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Perhaps true in respect of the voters intentions for each state and territory?
Perhaps not so true in that the Senators usually vote according to Federal party policy direction irrespective of the outcomes for the state (and state government) they represent.
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In that respect no different from the House of Reps. Lib/Labs mostly just a bunch of time-serving droids, regardless of which house of parliament, rarely exercising their own personal judgement. Don’t know why we pay them a salary.
To be fair to Keating, I don’t think he ever explained what he meant.
He was just having a tantie about one of his ministers being subject to scrutiny by the Senate and was doing some name calling.
The Senate is unrepresentative in the sense that each state has equal representation.
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Palmer’s SMS campaign appears to have hit a target in the deep north.
‘Our’ right wing base seems to be alive and well, partly courtesy of the parliamentary system that enforces party discipline for all votes (save for the rare exception) so backbenchers would need never attend parliament if they could ring in their votes - their compensation could also be reduced to reflect their lack of purpose that rarely extends beyond partisan campaigning. Oh wait? Why have them except as window dressing to pretend ‘democracy in action’ when the front bench and party are all supreme?
Considering how senators get their seats it should be a national embarrassment in more ways than just being representative of a convenient farce. OTOH the senate has blocked some questionable rubbish from the House from various governments, as well as obstructed from time to time. Some would say that has value, and maybe it does by reigning in the otherwise unchecked zeal of a government of the day.
I’m suggesting to go further. They are just a rubber stamp for party policy. Don’t have them at all. Save on the salary.
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It might improve if Senators were elected using a different system. First past the post! You get to vote for one only. No party tickets. Preferably no partisanship. It’s a house of review, and not for policy.
It follows the latest trend in reality TV. Determine winners by a simple count of viewers votes. Only the most popular survive.
It might also lead to improve the ratings of televised parliament?
‘I’m a Senator, why am I Here?’
What a great show? 
That way you get the 6 or 12 most popular and able individuals in each state. Isn’t that what is needed. Currently the bar is set low in the eyes of many. A worse outcome would seem unlikely.
P.s.
Another approach hinted at in the discussion appears to be to scrap the senate. No room for a Clive or Pauline then. No more SMS grief from Clive? Needed that to stay on topic! 
And that would leave NSW and Vic to govern Australia? And we could all have a VFT to Geelong plus a WestConex in every large city! 
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Ha ha. Perhaps you have forgotten already that Clive Palmer was elected in the House of Reps, not in the Senate?
Always up for discussion in a democracy but what a terrible idea!
That would leave a quarter to a third of all voters unrepresented (in terms of no outcome from their first preference vote i.e. what happens today in the House of Reps but does not happen in the Senate).
It would prevent the worst excesses of the government of the day being blocked or curbed.
Unclear what you mean by this. I assume that you mean that a party can only put up one candidate? Wouldn’t that lead to a proliferation of secondary parties and a whole lot of crazy coordination e.g. by region within state? (Hence, for example, if the ALP believes that it can win 3 seats (a reasonable belief), it will divide the state into 3 geographical regions, create three political parties each with one 1 candidate, assign a candidate to a region, and tell ALP voters in that region to vote only for the assigned candidate.)
Isn’t there a risk that far fewer than 6 individuals would be elected? Or alternatively if you forget about needing a quota then that an individual who is not popular at all would be elected? Having a fair and reasonable way of electing 6 individuals is one of the strengths of the preferential system (as compared with “first past the post”).
Please then explain how good the quota is as practiced for the senate. While Ricky Muir was an unexpectedly decent man in a mostly self serving chamber,the Motoring Party only got about 1/2% of the vote.
Fair and reasonable? Or as flawed as any? Then there is how vacancies are filled in our system, that result in the likes of Fraser Anning taking a seat having had 19 votes.
The point is that Muir did get a quota - not from first preferences but from preferences overall. So while he was not the first preferred candidate, he was the overall preferred candidate to take the final seat.
It is true that there were some anomalies in the 2013 election (via micro party preference deals) but the voting system has subsequently been modified to weaken the effect of preference deals. That took effect as at the 2016 election but because that election was a double dissolution we haven’t yet seen how the new voting system might play out in a normal (half) Senate election.
In other words … complaining about Muir is obsolete. The parliament acted. Let’s see whether they fixed the ‘problem’.
Technically not a vacancy and the distinction is important. Senator Anning’s is an unusual situation because the High Court ruled that the actual winning candidate ahead of him was not validly elected (due to the dreaded Section 44). Therefore the High Court directs the AEC to redo the count as if the ineligible candidate were not present. In practice, this is likely to reduce the number of first preference votes obtained by the now elected candidate.
Again though first preference votes are not what matters. What matters is the overall preferred candidate (albeit that in this case the candidate overall preferred by voters was subsequently ruled ineligible). It could be said that Anning did a Bradbury. What could be more Australian than that?
You might point out that Section 44 ineligibility is not in fact “unusual” but that is a whole other can of worms.
Do you realise that the above-the-line voting system means that a party could have X elected senators all of whom received 0 first preference votes? Number of first preference votes for a specific candidate just isn’t relevant.
Exactly. We vote for parties far more often than their candidates. Therein lies a part of the problem. Regarding the senate, it is quotas not preferences at the end game when awarding seats, and I find that insidious and we might disagree on whether that is the case.
With the preferential system we do not elect the most popular candidate, we elect the least objectionable, an outcome almost purposefully designed to assure mediocrity.
That may well be true but with the first-past-the-post system we would in many cases elect someone who is simply not popular.
It is unclear whether that would have any effect either way on mediocrity.
Yes, we do. Parties or policies but not candidates. Senate or House of Reps.
