What Tony did next...

Hasn’t Tony been a busy man.

In between kissing strangers, squeezing out nuggets of wisdom and pimping out Liberal candidates, he has found the time to release a statement that might actually have an effect on the electorate (other than a frenzied creation of enema-related memes).

Today Mr Abbott announced the Coalition would be not preference the Australian Greens (i.e. placing them last on how to vote cards) in a somewhat predictable move to hamper the minor parties’ prospects at the September 7 poll.

Of course this is not an entirely new process, as we all know. Deals to swap preferences were probably being struck moments after the move to preferential voting was made in Australia in 1918. It wouldn’t surprise me if the allure of swapping preferences was the reason behind preferential voting’s introduction in the first place.

The Coalition are no doubt taking this action in the wake of the last federal election where Liberal Party preferencing enabled Adam Bandt to become the first member of the Greens to hold a lower-house seat in federal parliament. Not only was that unpalatable it also helped create, as some would have you believe, the unmitigated disaster that was the 43^rd Australian Parliament. The ALP on the other hand, seemingly feeling the electoral hurt are grasping at any opportunity available to them, drowning sailor-floating driftwood style.

Is it just me, or do these dealings seem to be a little undemocratic and if I may be so bold as to borrow a term from The Thick of It, morally bankrupt. This may be a bit harsh on a perfectly legitimate and heavily utilised electoral exercise, but wouldn’t it be better if people could vote however they wanted?

The answer to that is of course you can, that is the whole point of preferential voting. You rank from highest to lowest you favoured candidates. The problem is though most of us don’t. As I alluded to in previous posts and electoral doyens Colin Hughes and Brian Costar have stated most emphatically in their work Limiting Democracy (I highly recommend this), voters tend to vote for who the major parties vote for both the House of Representatives and even more so in the Senate.

In a perfect world no doubt the parties would come to us selling their vision for the future of this country. But when it is much easier and even more effective to simply dish out numbered how to vote cards on Election Day, you can see why they don’t bother.

So my challenge for voters on September 7 is simple. On your way to the polling booth don’t stop when the volunteers of political parties attempt to foist their preferences upon you. As Johnnie Walker would say just keep walking as this is the one day where the electorate gets to say what they think, not what the parties want them to think. And for credit go below the line in the Senate, as this not only ensures you have complete control over your vote it also annoys the pants of those working at the polling booth!