While perhaps not popular s/he would be the most popular of the lot. It makes at least as much sense as the east objectionable, and sometime results in statesmen or clowns, and sometimes dangerous clowns, but rarely mediocrity.
Would those policies be core, non-core, carefully scripted and written down, rhetoric in the heat of campaigning, blatant lies, or as often as not just BS to get a vote, quickly forgotten immediately after election when ‘things change’. ? Or all of the above when it suits? You might detect my cynicism and disrespect for those we must endure who do that.
How would that be?
You only vote for one candidate. No preferences and you get to choose exactly and only one of the Senators. It’s a very simple ballot paper. All the names down the page. You simply put a cross in the box next to one name and it is done. Who gets the most votes is the no one senate selection. Who gets the second highest no gets the second position, and so on. Noting there are no regions in the Senate. Just one big state.
Are you suggesting that someone who is not popular will get so much support they get more individuals prepared to vote for them as an unpopular candidate than any of the other choices?
With at least 6 senators to elect in each state it would seem reasonable that there would be a great deal of diversity between those that succeed!
Quotas don’t come into it. Preference deals don’t exist. And there will not be any no 2 or 3 candidates with way out ideas sneaking in on a party ticket or section 44 replacement. If one of the six selected falls out of the senate, who came 7th is a very straight forward pick to step up.
What percentage of the vote would the sixth senator get (half senate election) / twelfth senator get (full senate election)?
What percentage of the vote would the elected House of Reps candidate get?
In a Senate election you could get the situation where the first ranked candidate is exceedingly popular (say, a celebrity, rather than a party hack), getting 75% of the vote, leaving just 25% to be split between the remaining 5 senators (half senate election). Some of those senators are by definition not particularly popular. It might not differ much from the percentage achieved by the typical “last senator” in the current voting system.
Alternatively, there could be 500 individual candidates with a fairly even spread of support and basically no candidate received more than a few percent - and it is almost a lottery as to who is in the top 6 (half senate) - and no candidate is popular anyway.
The preference system specifically exists in Australia to avoid “vote splitting”, where for example 60% of people may broadly agree with, say, a left wing agenda but there are too many left wing candidates to vote for and none of them ends up in the top 6, while the right wing limits themselves to 6 approximately equally popular candidates. So the right wing gets all 6 seats with only 40% support - and 60% of voters get nothing. Or vice versa.
That could be anomalous if a senator dies in office or is otherwise unavailable through no fault of his or her own.
The lesson from 1975 and the constitutional change from 1975 is that a casual vacancy should be filled like-for-like. (This is completely different from “ruled ineligible” e.g. Section 44.)
Not saying you couldn’t do it your way but it seems unfair - and there are lessons of history.
Anyways “the forum” is telling me to “Let others join the conversation” and to provide “adequate time for other people to share their points of view” so I’ll leave it here. We have rather drifted off topic too.
Totally! My apologies for testing the water so directly.
It is as @PhilT says a very interesting discussion. The prospect of finding a better solution to what was created for us mostly with late 19th century knowledge in creating our constitution is most alluring! But not for today perhaps.
Yes, found me on the Telstra mobile network last week.
Best to delete the SMS as it contains a link to click on that could …… who knows if it’s really Craig Kelly, Palmer United, or a scammer who is sending them?
The really annoying thing is that it comes from “UAP” rather than a number, so there appears to be no way to block it, at least on my phone with Optus.
The Conversation looked at the problem in general, also specifically Palmer and what is legally permitted use of the service. Politics has an exemption!
How trustworthy or honest are some? The Conversation also reported:
I’m going to play that with the straightest of straight bats: The difference is the difference between the real Craig Kelly and someone pretending to be Craig Kelly.
This not as silly as it sounds because once you delve into politics, dirty tricks do arise - like someone sending something out from a different political party (pretending to be UAP, but not actually UAP) in order to get UAP into trouble or to discourage people from voting for it. I don’t think I need to elaborate on how that could be used.
Yes.
That’s not UAP’s fault though. Blame the government, blame your mobile provider, blame your phone provider.
If it were a number then that would introduce new problems as it solved that one problem.
I’ve missed out on all the rubbish recently - no Flubot (scam text messages), no Craig Kelly (anti-vaxer text messages). Maybe that’s because I don’t give out my mobile number to anyone. Problem solved.
Isn’t this about the how rather than the what is being communicated?
There are many ways other than SMS the two large men or any politician could communicate their views. Whether there is a right or entitlement to use any or a particular method/media, are we only able to speculate?
For now it would seem there is but one choice for those not wanting to receive the SMS. Can one live without a mobile service?
I have chosen simply to swipe left and not stop. Of greater concern is the payload such messaging can carry, and the harm it may inflict.
Perhaps a small change would be in order for political information to be distributed using SMS.
Just as letter, radio, TV, political messages have to have the identity of an authorising person and address, then so could SMS require a real phone number, unchanging, to be legal.
Easy to then block if you didn’t want to be bothered by these things.
