I disagree. I think it would have been a different outcome because first-past-the-post is garbage and leads to garbage results.
Attacks on Australia’s preferential voting system are ludicrous. We can be proud of it | Kevin Bonham
Submitted 5 weeks ago by vividspecter@lemm.ee to australianpolitics@aussie.zone
Zagorath@aussie.zone 5 weeks ago
I’ll attack our voting system.
It’s better than FPTP, but that’s like saying the meal your restaurant is serving is better than literal cow shit. It’s not the compliment you seem to think it is. The latest election results do a pretty damn good job of showing the problem. The fact that a collapse of the vote for the right-wing party resulted in a collapse in the number of seats for the left-wing party, to the benefit of the centrists, is a completely aberrant result that happened because of the odd ways IRV behaves. Even other preferential systems might not have had that effect.
But the real answer is that single-winner systems like both IRV and FPTP are poor fits for a diverse population. What we really need is a proportional system, like the Mixed-Member Proportional that they use across the ditch, as well as over in Germany.
abff08f4813c@j4vcdedmiokf56h3ho4t62mlku.srv.us 5 weeks ago
Agree 100% - this was a non-ludicrous but entirely reasonable and well-reasoned response.
That being said I do think there's many good points made in the article. The Greens are doing better in Australia, while they hurt quite a bit here in Canada due to FPTP being in use. And it really hurts to see the NDP fall so much, which likely would not have occurred if Canada had the same system as Australia.
The linked article is a response to https://www.theaustralian.com.au/nation/politics/preferential-voting-system-ousts-half-a-liberal-ministry-of-talent/news-story/7cd4e33e0a05e786a8c4943645c5525d?amp&nk=d1a6519026cb614e2502f09a887f82c4-1747124133 and I think Canada makes the perfect case for that article being wrong - Canada actually has FPTP but the leader of Canada's CPC still lost his seat. If FPTP had been in play, perhaps all those Liberals would have still lost their seats, as folks started using strategic voting instead to ensure a Labour win (but also then hurting independents and other parties like the Greens) - which is exactly how it played out in Canada.
Zagorath@aussie.zone 5 weeks ago
Maybe. But although the fact that Dutton, like Poilievre, lost his own seat, was much more remarked-upon in the international press, we here in Australia had another parallel to your election. Our Greens are probably the best equivalent to your NDP, being a left-wing party with significant mainstream success historically. And Adam Bandt lost his seat while his party lost 3/4 of their seats, just as Jagmeet Singh lost his seat while his party lost 70% of seats.
This happened largely because of a quirk of how IRV works. The precipitous drop in support for the LNP mostly went to help Labor (side note: for weird historical reasons, our party spells its name the American way, despite in every other context in Australia, labour having a u), which helped them finish ahead of the Greens on 3-candidate-preferred, which meant the Greens got eliminated and their votes went to support a Labor victory. In essence, a drop in support for the right-wing candidates resulted in a centrist candidate winning where previously a left-wing candidate had won. That’s an aberrant result that doesn’t really match anyone’s intuition of how elections should work. And it’s one reason
Thanks. I didn’t realise it was in response to a specific article, but I gathered it was a response to general comments from some in the LNP praising FPTP. I agree with the conclusion it makes about campaigns being run differently and voters’ strategy being different. I was responding primarily to the headline suggesting we should be “proud” of what is literally the worst acceptable voting system. (Personally, I consider FPTP completely unacceptable and anti-democratic; it should not even be part of any discussion among serious people.)