New South Wales Elections Are A Cosy Affair

“… state electoral laws meant the party’s slate of 15 upper house candidates was barred from appearing ‘above the line’. This was because the SEP refused to allocate preferences to any other electoral group. NSW Electoral Commission official Terry Jessop spelt out the undemocratic implications of this regulatory catch-22 as follows: ‘If you run below the line, you will get very few votes’. In other words, the entire voting system is designed to force parties to engage in opportunist horse-trading over the distribution of preferences.”

Australia: Final votes counted in New South Wales election campaign

Why is this undemocratic and why are such specific processes important?

Quite simply, it restricts the discourse to those topics that major parties agree should be discussed. How is it possible that given the unprecedented demonstrations in opposition to the Iraq war, that Australian’s partook in - demonstrations that were not only large, but organised before the official launching of the war - we still have not had any elections, during which participation in the war, was an election issue of any magnitude?

These are the mechanisms which make such a thing possible; these details should be fixed if we are even slightly serious about democracy. Now think about this in respect to what we are supposed to be doing for Iraq and in the context of this ANZAC day.

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