Before I begin this piece I have to declare that I hate The Australian. Its journalism is adequate and its writing is adequate. However The Australian does not exist as a newspaper of record but as a newspaper of persuasion by a foreign-owned media organisation which has repeatedly demonstrated that it hates the idea of commonwealth as a concept and especially hates the idea that ordinary people should have any say at all. This above all else is why this grotty little rag deserves my ire.
Over the years I have read pieces in The Australian and its semi-illiterate little sister The Daily Telegraph, which have called for the end of compulsory voting, called for Voter ID because of imagined voter fraud, called for a poll tax, and have actively called for the disenfranchisement of people because they didn't pay income tax. This last point is supremely hypocritical as News Corp itself doesn't pay tax and consistently calls for tax rates to be lowered.
Aside:
My departed mum used to say that you shouldn't hate anything unless you want it dead. I hate News Corp. I hate tuberculosis. I hate COVID-19. I hate injustice. I hate graft. I hate manipulating the public so that they work against their own interests. I wish all of these things dead.
This piece from The Australian, exists not as a piece of objective journalism but as a piece of persuasion. I have no problem with this in principle as I believe in the right to free speech. I also believe in the right to judge people's free speech and to judge people's intentions and character based upon same free speech. The right to free speech does not come with impunity and freedom from judgement.
This is a screen capture from The Australian:
So then, what do I make of this piece from the Australian? I both hate this and love this. I hate this because of what it is trying to do. I love this because it is like pulling back the curtain to reveal the grotty little playmaster who thinks that the parliament and the people are puppets to be played with and manipulated. Remember, The Australian exists not as a newspaper of record but as a newspaper of persuasion; especially for Canberra which has no real daily newspaper of its own to speak of.
First Past The Post is really a terrible name for the system which is being proposed. In reality this is the Most Votes Wins system. If this sounds like a sensible system, let me run a very simple election of 100 votes:
23 - Kittens
22 - Puppies
22 - Bunnies
9 - Fish
24 - BURN ALL THE ANIMALS
If this election were carried out under the First Past The Post System, then the winner would be BURN ALL THE ANIMALS. Does this seem sensible and just? Does it seem sensible and just when more than three-quarters of the electorate obviously have different motives?
Suppose you had ten friends who all wanted to go out for dinner? Again we're going to run a very simple election:
3 - Pizza King
3 - Angelo's Pizza
4 - Scavenging From Bins
Under the First Past The Post system, instead of going for a pizza, it looks like you're going to be spending the night Scavenging From Bins even though more than half of the friends wanted to go for a pizza.
Of course these examples are simple and silly but they demonstrate the inherent problem with using First Past The Post as a system to determine overall approval for a thing. When win condition for the game is only one option, then First Past The Post can and will result in winners who do not meet the approval of half of the electorate. Is this actually democracy? No.
Democracy in principle is rule by the demos; that is the people. Rather, that is the people taken as a whole. The Declaration of Independence of the United States might contain a lot of things that were outright lies but one thing it absolutely got right was that "Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed".
How do you get consent of the governed if you get less than half of the electors consent to the thing? You can't. Yet, that's what The Australian is proposing because that would mean that their preferred political party, the one set up by Keith Murdoch, would retain power. Rupert as the current inheritor of the job of Permanent Opposition Leader To The Existence Of The Commonwealth, would rather that ordinary people are excluded from the political process.
We see this time and time again. It is the root cause of why there are calls for Voter ID in the United States and Great Britain. It will be the root cause of why there will be calls for Voter ID in Australia. This is not even remotely about protecting democracy but rather killing it at the root and poisoning the stump.
As little as 200 years ago, most people didn't even have the vote. It was only through the work of people saying that they weren't happy that the Reform Acts of the 1830s expanded the franchise, then further Reform Acts in the 1870s expanded it further. In Australia in the 1890s, the conservative side of politics accidentally chose to give women the vote because they thought that they could expand the number of votes for conservative politics by doing so. Likewise in Australia, the 1918 Swan By-Election which caused a Labor Party victory was enough to convince the Nationalist Party that there should be preferential voting so that just as in the above examples, the conservative side of politics' vote would not be split.
The results of that election were thus:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1918_Swan_by-election
Labor Edwin Corboy 6,540
Country Basil Murray 5,975
Nationalist William Hedges 5,635
Independent William Watson 884
The Labor candidate won with only 34.4% of the vote. Is this just? No. Is this sensible? No. Is this the system that The Australian is calling for? Yes.
What has happened is that The Australian in their continuing act of aggression against normal people and their franchise, decided to run the numbers and correctly determined that under their chosen system, their political football team would have won. No doubt their target readers (who work within the State Circle in Canberra) will see this and the hope is that those readers will have words to their bosses who are Public Servants and most importantly, Members of Parliament. Thus, if legislation is changed to move to a First Past The Post system, probably under some confected story of simplicity, then the hope is that more economically rightist voters would vote Liberal or National because making any other kind of signal at the ballot box would be a wasted vote.
It is this last point that is so knavishly insidious. Other voting systems such as Approval Voting, Score Voting, the Single Transferrable Vote which we have, allow the voter to express nuance at the ballot box. First Past The Post removes that nuance and then actively punishes every voter who did not vote for anything with a viable shot at winning. If you are the conservative side of politics, and by conservative we mean that the only thing that you are conserving is your own naked power, then nuance should be quashed and so should anything that looks like unorthodoxy and non-conformity.
The real reason for running is that as Permanent Opposition Leader To The Existence Of The Commonwealth, News Corp has repeatedly made its corporate goal to smash its political enemies. That is the reason why Sir Keith Murdoch and Sir Bob Menzies set up the Liberal Party and that is their mission today. Arguably that's why The Australian exists in the first place.
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