The election campaign out in Lindsay had some curious elements to it – something I will be writing about later this week. One of the more curious was the sight at prepoll of Fiona Scott patiently explaining to lined up Liberal voters to vote Y on the Senate ballot. At that point it was obvious that the placement of the “Liberal Democrats” in Box A on the NSW Senate ticket was already having a calamitous effect on the primary Liberal Senate vote. In a first for any election I’ve seen, there were posters at polling places telling Liberal voters to fill in Box Y.
8.88% of voters – roughly 20% of Liberal voters – in NSW did not fill in Box Y – . They glanced at the massive Senate paper, saw the word “Liberal” in the first spot and put 1 in the box and walked away. The Liberal National primary vote had a 4.36% swing away from the Liberals, indicating the enormity of the mistake. It was also not necessarily an issue of education or socio economics that determined the level of the mistake. Lindsay, for example, was pretty close to the average, coming in at 8.8%. The nearest marginal Labor seat Greenway – the seat that swung to Labor – was 12.40% for the Lib Dems. However, in Malcolm Turnbull’s seat of Wentworth, the number was 9.58%. In Mackellar, Bronwyn Bishopland, the figure was 10.2%, in Abbott’s Warringah, 9.05%. Even in the seat often referred to as filled with “savvy” voters, Grayndler, the figure was 7%. It is little wonder that the Liberals’ Brian Loughnane objected to the name before the election.
The enormous number of new “Liberal Democrat” voters have played into a game that has been set up over a long period of time – a way of filling a Senate paper with a large number of novelty political “parties”, which all work together to funnel votes into the pockets of parties dedicated to stopping the agenda of the Greens – whether they be the Shooters and Fishers, the “Outdoor Recreation Party” – or, on this occasion, the Liberal Democrats in NSW. David Leyonhjelm, the new Senator elect for the “Liberal Democrats”, has been an Outdoor Recreation Party member and a Shooters and Fishers party member. As a result, the votes of parties like One Nation and the Wikileaks Party will be funnelled into the hands of a man who wants Australians to have the right to bear weapons to defend themselves. He is also a staunch supporter of agribusiness, with a profile on Business Spectator and an Agribusiness Consultancy Business. It is pretty clear from this evidence that Leyonhjelm has been driven by an anti-Green agenda for some time, but will also argue with an Abbott Government on middle class welfare policies such as the Paid Paternity Leave.
In other states, the preference funnels have worked as the main figure behind them, Glenn Druery, was hoping they would. The largely elusive Mr. Druery managed to largely evade investigation before this election, though he was happy to explain how preference deals work on the ABC. Druery has been behind the creation of some micro parties and also has advised other micro parties how to group together in order to funnel preferences to and from other microparties. In that way, otherwise progressive parties like “Stop CSG”, “Animal Justice” and Wikileaks were being advised to direct preferences away from the Greens and towards parties that advocate shooting things or keeping non white people out of the country. The Druery approach has worked in Victoria, with the “Australian Motoring Enthusiast Party” looking likely to gain a seat, despite only receiving .0361% of the primary vote. This particular candidate quickly went to ground and made his Youtube Channel private - not before some people, like me, watched entertaining footage of cars being enthusiastic, some enthusiastic mock fighting and mates mucking around, pulling each other’s pants down – the video has now come to light in this article. It’s little wonder that he brings a variety of interesting attitudes to the Senate, as outlined here by Damien Murphy :
His party’s website says its core values include ”mateship”, small government, lower taxation and ”taking pride in our vehicles”.
”I have owned, maintained and modified a couple of street driven Commodores, nothing magazine worthy but they were safe, reliable and reflected my taste. My intention is to help educate the public that we are not hoons out to destroy the environment,” Muir wrote on Facebook.
In May 2011, when Osama bin Laden was killed, Muir tweeted: ”Media is reporting that the person who ordfered [sic] the 911 terror attacks is dead … what a load of shit, george bush is still alive!”
One can imagine how difficult it will be for the Coalition to be negotiating bills with Mr. Muir. Then there’s the Australian Sports Party in WA, which has received .0155% of the vote. Its candidate, Wayne Dropulich, seems a touch startled that the Druery plan worked to get him into the Senate to work on getting more children involved in sport – though he seems like he’ll be easier to negotiate with than a man who wants us to carry guns or one who thinks George Bush planned 9/11.
Glenn Druery will now be the focus of an intense amount of attention – and so he should be – the Australian’s Christian Kerr - who knows more than most about his activities – is one of the first off the block, giving us these comments related to his activities:
Mr Druery defended his strategies yesterday as rumours continued among some minor parties of offers to pay nomination fees in exchange for preferences. “The major parties introduced this system,” he told The Australian yesterday.
“This has not been invented by the minors. The fact that the minor parties are getting themselves educated is completely legitimate.”
Sources from the major parties said registration requirements, nomination fees and the electoral system itself were likely to be closely examined when parliament’s powerful joint standing committee on electoral matters conducts the inquiry that follows every poll.
The Liberal Democrats did not work with Mr Druery. Motoring Enthusiast secretary Keith Littler said they had not worked directly with him.
“We have only been going for four months,” Mr Littler said. “We became aware of the alliance after the party was formed and made contact with them and that basically gave us a network.”
But there is speculation some parties and their leaders and candidates may not have been aware of who they were dealing with and their ultimate agendas, with suggestions the gun lobby and those keen to see national parks opened up to wider uses may be behind much of the deal-making.
The perversion of the electoral process by Mr Druery and his associates will need to be addressed by the new Abbott Government, in order to prevent such events occurring again. Cynics would say that the Liberal Party would like to get right wing micro parties into the Senate, but it could hardly be the case that the Liberals would want a gun rights campaigner asking for embarrassing concessions in the same way the Shooters and Fishers sought permission for Shooting in National Parks in NSW, such as being asked to pass the Fully Sick Modifications to All Cars Bill or the Compulsory Sport on Weekends for All Children legislation.
It might even be the case that during this term that Abbott will be forced to call a Double Dissolution election, unless these disparate forces can be tamed. And by disparate forces, I also include the election of a Family First senator in South Australia and 2 Palmer United Senators. Abbott and his team will need to be twerking it like they have never twerked it before. I suspect, too, he would be hoping that Nick Xenophon takes these people under his wing and shepherds them through the process. Watching Xenophon over the weekend, I could see a man already wearying of conversations with Ricky Muir about his Commodore and hearing Leyonhjelm’s theories about gun ownership. Not to mention hearing Glenn “The Brick with Eyes” Lazarus’ rugby league anecdotes.
The first step and probably the easiest solution to the problem of micro parties gaining power they don’t deserve is to institute the voting system for the upper house in NSW – Voluntary Above the Line Group voting – a system already being advocated by the Greens in the Federal Senate by Lee Rhiannon. Rhiannon was part of the change to this system, which came as a response to the 1999 NSW State Election, when Glenn Druery similarly played with the system to get an Outdoor Recreation MLC elected.
If the Liberal Party don’t want to adopt a Greens plan, maybe they should ask Antony Green what to do. He warned everyone about this event in the last week of the campaign – one of the few outside political backrooms that did. Maybe now they will listen.
Filed under: Greens, Independents, Labor, Liberal, Minor parties, MyVote, Policies, Polling day, Senate, Voters / voting
