On May 21 the good and fair people of the Commonwealth of Australia are going to the polls to decide the make up of the next government. The current Liberal/National Morrison Government is likely to lose government and the Albanese led Labor Party is likely to form government with anywhere between 77 and 87 seats.
Owing to the fact the Senate is barred from originating money bills as per the rules of the Constitution, this means that the ability to secure confidence and supply, is the exclusive domain of the House of Representatives. If another party has control of the Senate, then it is of zero consequence as to who forms government. The only thing which determines who is control of government in a Westminster Parliament, is who can control the most votes on the floor of the lower house and thus control the budget.
Nobody votes for the government, ever. People vote for who they want to be sent to the parliament in Canberra, who will then form the government. Unless you actually live in the electorate of Cook in Sydney's south east, then the name Scott Morrison will never appear on a ballot paper which you will get at the ballot box.
The House of Representatives uses Instant Run-off Voting (IRV) to determine who the members are for the local divisions. IRV means that the system is in effect a series of run-off elections held simultaneously. The recent French election for the President had a two round run-off, where candidates who got knocked out in the first round didn't get another go, and the final election was between only a select few. IRV gives the voter the chance to indicate their preferences, and several rounds are counted until the required number of votes is achieved.
For a House of Representatives election, the required number of votes is 50% of all votes plus 1. That means that every member of the House of Representatives has been elected on the basis of a majority of voters in their electorate who have given their consent at some point in the run-off process.
There is this notion in political science called Durverger's Law (which is not actually a law), which states that a single member district system tends towards two-party politics. This is reasonably obvious when you consider that the only two possible conditions are WIN and NOT WIN. A very big proportion of the machinery of political parties is devoted to trying to win seats for their political party and since in a single-member district system there are only two outcomes, broadly speaking, there will be two blocs vying for power.
In the Senate, as the election is a multi-member election where a number of Senate seats will be filled (in this election it will be 6 seats per State), then the required number of votes will likely be about 833,000 of 5 million. As a multi-member preferential system, the Senate ballot paper uses Preferential Proportional Voting to determine who gets the multiple seats per state.
Multi-member district voting systems tend towards many more voices in parliament than just two because the win conditions work out to be far lower. As the Senate is a multi-member district voting system, then we should expect to see a plurality of voices all vying for a seats and in fact we do. So much so that in 2022, in the state of New South Wales, there are 75 candidates, in 23 grouped categories (mostly according to party), running for 6 seats.
On the face of it, looking at this many things is mind-numbing. Fortunately, behavioural science has lent us a handy tool to work out how all of these disparate groups fit together. This tool is the sociogram.
A sociogram is basically a relationship web. If you have a classroom of kids and you want it to be quiet, then all you need to do is ask the kids who they'd like most to sit with. If you give them three choices, then you can work out who the popular kids are, who the loners are, what kind of cliques exist, and work out who a ring of troublemakers is likely to be. The quietest classroom turns out to be the one where kids sit next to nobody in their preferred lists because they will then have a lesser tendency to act out.
In Australia because we have preferential voting for both the House of Representatives and Senate, then the machinery of the political parties actually provides the data for whoim they'd most like to work with in the form of a "How To Vote Card". The parties will actively tell you how they'd like you the voter, to distribute your preferences. Every political party would like you to put then 1st and this is so obvious as to be uninteresting when it comes to producing any meaningful relationships from the data. However, when it comes to the 2nd and 3rd preferences, a web of relationships begins to emerge and this can be mapped via the sociogram.
For the 2022 Senate Election in NSW, which I'm going to assume is broadly the same for all states and territories in Australia, the grand sociogram of the political parties all vying for power, looks like this:
I have only chosen to show the first 3 preferences (1 being the parties themselves) but you can see that the Liberal/National Party, likes the Lib Dems and the UAP but nobody likes them in return. The UAP turns out to be the most favourite 2nd preference party in Australia, with the LNP, Shooters & Fishers, One Nation, and the Informed Medical (Anti-Vax) Party asking voters to direct preferences there.
Labor, The Greens, Animal Justice, and Reason, all form a peloton, as do One Nation, the UAP and Lib Dems.
There are some instances such as the Indigenous Party asks the voter to direct their own preferences and so has no arrows coming outwards. There are also instances such as the Federal ICAC Now, Group F, and the New Liberals that have also asked the voter to direct their own preferences and have not been preferenced by anyone else. In a classroom, these are the lonely kids but in a political web, this might indicate that they are very highly independent.
It is always the way that single issue parties tend to be on the fringes of these sociograms, such as the Australian Values Party, Legalise Cannabis Party, and the Sustainable Australia Party, and at first glance you'd wonder why they'd even bother, considering that they are unlikely to get a seat. The fact is that all of the data from after the election is collected and used by the major parties in order to secure more votes at the next election; so what this means that even if a party never gets a seat, if they get enough votes, the big parties might adopt their policies anyway.
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The question which you've been waiting to know the answer to, as to who is going to get my 75th Preference, it is none other than: Marise Payne.
As a Cabiner Minster of a government which has defended rape within the walls of the parliament building, refused to disclose where $1m came from to fund the legal case of another Cabinet Minister in connection to another historical rape case, paid off the mistresses of other MPs, locked up refugees and children on tropical gulags, made the victims of domestic violence draw down their own superannuation during a global pandemic, proposed a policy to make widows eat their own houses through the mechanism of superannuation, removed more than 900 things from the Medical Benefits System, been willfully neglectful during times of fire, flood, and pandemic, and having degraded the ABC, sold Medibank Private, destroyed the domestic car industry, and which has thrown around more than $59.9bn in the form of rorts and pork barelling, then she just happens to be the most senior member on the ballot paper of the Liberal/National Party who is up for election.
I have nothing personal against Ms Payne but in the last 9 years and especially the last 3, the LNP has fallen further in my estimation to the point where they will probably get the last preferences on every ballot paper in every election for the remainder of my life.
Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world.
- James 1:27
Why would I vote for a party which is the antithesis of this? Why would I vote for a party which by repeated demonstration hates kindness, goodness, and peace, if those things get in the way of spinning a shilling?
Furthermore, by looking at who the various friends are within the sociogram, I can chart my way upwards towards my No.1 preference.
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