An expert on preferential voting rates the Australian voting system on 4 key measures.
- Senior Lecturer, Department of Languages and Linguistics, La Trobe University
Thanks to preferential voting, Australian House of Representatives members are each elected by an absolute majority of the voters in the electorate they represent.
Senate voting is pretty complicated. Here’s how preferential voting and proportional representation work – and how to make sure your vote is counted on election day.
Captain Cook’s 1770 voyage is well known. But at this time, Indigenous Australians also travelled great distances - let’s recognise this in the 2020 commemorations.
Aboriginal songs found in the notebooks of a Victorian anthropologist shed light on the mystery of a ‘captive white woman’ that has been debated for generations.
Ngár-go (Fitzroy), Quo-yung (Richmond), Yálla-birr-ang (Collingwood), and Bulleke-bek (Brunswick), are just some of the Woiwurrung names uncovered in the notebooks of a 19th century anthropologist.
The new Senate is representative of the wide range of views in Australia – and far more so than the House of Representatives.
Following the Turnbull government’s recent changes, Australia has new rules for electing senators. How will they work in practise?
What do Australians need to know when they go to vote for their senators in this year’s federal election?
What are the government’s proposed changes to the way the Senate is elected? And how will they affect us as voters?
Reform to how Australia’s Senate is elected should happen – but only if it genuinely strengthens voters’ rights.
Labour, UKIP and the Greens all gained much bigger swings than the Conservatives, but were election losers. The first-past-the-post system let the Tories pick up a swag of seats with a 0.8% swing.
This week the “mother of parliaments” faces a general election in the UK. The ‘first past the post’ electoral system means we can’t predict the result with certainty, nor expect it to match the vote.
The final count for Victoria’s Legislative Council is still some days away, but it appears members elected from micro-parties will hold the balance of power in the upper house. This will be a challenge…
The unexpected and developing election story is that the balance of power in the Senate will belong to “microparties” most electors had never heard of before. In Victoria, people are asking how Australian…
The record large Senate ballot papers have probably already annoyed many early voters. Their great length - over a metre in NSW and Victoria – will soon annoy many more voters. However, the real annoyance…
A casual vacancy in the Victorian Legislative Council has now been filled. The replacement member for the Western Metropolitan Region in the upper house, union official Cesar Melhem, enters Victorian parliament…
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