The topic title "Stop the poll and surprise the parties" was the headline for Gretel Killeen's article that appeared on page 15 of today's Sydney Sun-Herald. See: http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/society-and-culture/stop-the-poll-and-surprise-the-parties-20100731-110km.html . The only reason the topic title is not in quotation marks is because the OLO software has in the past had issues with quotation marks being used in new discussion headings.




I am interested in this headline and article because I am curious as to whether it may be a indicator as to the extent to which ideas first floated on OLO may now be reaching, and being noted by, the MSM commentariat and politicians.




There has, to my knowledge, been no OLO Article or General Discussion topic that has expressly floated this idea of stopping the poll, but several recent posts of mine, on different threads, have touched upon such possibility.

There seems to have been an expression on OLO at least, if not more widely, that electors face a lack of real choice at these upcoming elections. Indeed a current Article is 'The Great Debate: No choice is the new choice', see: http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?article=10750

I have proposed one way of overcoming this perceived problem. See: http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?discussion=3820#93798 , and my subsequent four posts in that thread, as an outline. Gretel Killeen herself offers, if not a mechanism for genuine choice for electors, at least a somewhat tongue-in-cheek 'random political sincerity check' as a counter to anodyne campaigning.

I don't see any insurmountable Constitutional barriers to the electoral clock being reset by the Governor-General or the Administrator of the Commonwealth. Indeed, given the conflict of interest Exeutive Councillors from either of the major parties might face in advising the Governor-General as to remedy for the defective 1946 alteration to the Constitution, an Executive Council chosen from elsewhere than such in the interim would seem desirable.

What do others think?

Here is a Twitpic of how this topic rated when used as a search term on Google at around 8:00 AM this morning: http://twitpic.com/2askhc

It would be interesting to know whether it has, or does, generate any viewing traffic more than the ordinarily expected click-throughs.

I guess the topic is a bit challenging.

Let's see if this generates any interest, here or there: http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?article=10712#178530

This post from the Forum's newest registered user, 'The Larrikin', comes close to the theme of this topic: http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?article=10749#178578

A quote therefrom:

"It's time alright - to call on the
Governor General to establish a caretaker
government of passionate, proven, real
people - Paul Keating, Peter Costello,
Malcolm Turnbull and Allanah MacTiernan
(she gets things done), with a reviewing
senate of panellists from the Gruen Nation,
It’s the only hope we’ve got, the lunatics
are already in the building!"

I have no idea what may have moved him, first to register on the Forum, and then to suggest what he does, but its interesting seeing this sort of thinking being given expression.

The only difficulty in what he proposes is that it pre-supposes an exercise of choice on the part of the Governor-General as to the 'political suitability' of such as would be appointed to the proposed 'caretaker government', and the existence of some power of compulsion to serve exercisable over intended appointees by the G-G. The first would appear undesirable because it would go against the convention that the G-G does not exercise partiality, the second unworkable due to the absence of any legislation to effectively conscript such persons and require them to work together.

The Larrikin makes no mention as to whether or not the electors are intended to be able to ratify, or alternatively reject, such caretaker government. The proposal I have outlined does leave it up to the electors to either go with the status quo, or endorse candidates originally chosen by lot over whom the G-G does have an existing lawful power of compulsion to serve.

Interesting, nevertheless.

Welcome to OLO, The Larrikin. http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/user.asp?id=58763

Stop the clock and surprise the parties?

No, I don’t think this would be a good idea. Everyone would presumably be required to vote at very short notice. Not everyone would be able to get the message in time or be in a position to vote. And most significantly, a very large proportion of the population would not have made up their minds and would have to make a decision based on nothing of any substance.

A large portion of voters will be voting from a position of apathy or very poor knowledge about what is really on offer anyway. A snap vote would only increase this factor. At least a fair portion of voters that are largely apathetic do actually take some interest in the election race in the last couple of days.

Wouldn’t it be a much better idea to get the Governor General to outline the major issues that need to be addressed in a campaign and to make sure that they are adequately addressed?

It would appear that in this campaign some major policy areas are going to go virtually unaddressed. These include the urgency of steering ourselves towards a sustainable society; http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?discussion=3836#94223, and as you put so well Forrest: the critical need for Australian liquid fuel supply security; http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?discussion=3836#94228.

As for the idea of establishing a caretaker government, maybe, but certainly NOT with the likes of Costello or Keating, for goodness sake!! ( :>O

continued

A reviewing ‘senate’ of panelists might also be a good idea. The good folk from Gruen Nation wouldn’t be a bad starting point. We’d need a set of astute political analysts who are non-aligned or evenly aligned (ie the same number of people aligned to different parties and/or philosophies). And we would need them to be empowered to get our pollies to properly address all of the major policy issues.

To put it simply; we desperately need a mechanism for keeping our politicians on-track and getting them to actually put a fair bit of detail forward during election campaigns, and to then hold them accountable for sticking to it.

The current regime of policy-making on the run, with big disjointed handouts left, right and centre, designed specifically to appeal to voters in the immediate timeframe, is just a load of poppycock!

If there is a significant chance of an elected government taking up an agenda that was not clear in the election campaign – and there certainly is – then there is a fundamental problem with the system, which urgently needs addressing.

The Governor General should be the person charged with this. A panel of political analysts under her/his guidance that are empowered to direct political leaders to discuss all major policy areas and to do so in considerable detail, would perhaps be the way forward.

Ludwig, in his post of Wednesday, 4 August 2010 at 7:22:02 AM, says:


"Stop the clock and surprise the parties?

No, I don’t think this would be a good idea.
Everyone would presumably be required to vote
at very short notice."


I suspect we may be talking at cross purposes here. I sense that you are commenting upon Gretel Killeen's tongue-in-cheek proposal for snap election 'random political sincerity checks'. Whilst that proposal provides a good lead-in to this topic, I am not endorsing it, other than to acknowledge the wry humour of it in concept.

What I am talking about is not some vague and general set of proposals for a more hands-on Governor-General to participate in the political process in future elections, but the exercise by the present Governor-General of powers express or implied given her by the Constitution in relation to THIS election already called.

Given that the date for the close of nominations has already passed (nominations closed at 12 noon last Thursday, 29 July 2010), for the Governor-General to conscript, and identify upon the ballot paper, a candidate (one effectively chosen by lot years ago) in each electoral Division, the electoral clock would have to be reset, with new writs superseding the existing ones.

That a Governor-General in Council would have the power to replace the existing writs with new ones is, subject to the overall Constitutional constraints as to by when a Parliament must be able to be seated, beyond question.

The general question remaining would be as to whether there exists JUSTIFICATION for the Governor-General to act in this way at this time. Bear in mind that unless the present Executive Councilors were to advise the Governor-General to take just such a course as I am suggesting, that there would have to be a determination of a Prime Minister's commission, and the immediate appointment of a new executive council.

That would be, if not a big 'D', at least a little 'd': a dismissal with a twist.

Its time.

These sort of apparently legal-technicality-exploitative 'hypotheticals' can be interesting, can't they?

Where is Geoffrey Robertson when you need him? Nowhere to be seen!

So I guess it is incumbent upon me to suggest some reasons why the Governor-General would be justified in taking the unorthodox course of resetting the currently running electoral clock.

I'd start with the matter of the defective alteration of the Constitution that is the inserted placitum (xxiiiA) to Section 51 thereof, a defective alteration that has gone seemingly un-noticed since 1946. The Social Services referendum of 1946 did not meet the 'double majority' requirement of Section 128 of the Constitution, and was wrongly declared as having passed.

I'd start here because Section 61 of the Constitution places a statutory obligation upon a Governor-General with respect to the maintenance of the Constitution. Where statutory obligation is imposed, the issue as to justification for action does not even arise. Even in the absence of advice from her Executive Council, the Governor-General is both entitled and obliged to act to maintain the Constitution.




The Governor-General's acting to effect a removal of a defect would look like maintenance of the Constitution in my book.




Given that either of the realistically likely electable alternatives on offer to the Australian electors at these elections each can be seen to have political-egg-on-face with respect to this issue, why should the Governor-General not place before the Australian people a conscripted 'team' having no such egg-on-face or conflict of interest to oversee the rectification of this Constitutional defect?

It would be as dispassionate and impartial an exercise of Vice-Regal authority as is imaginable. One dictated by statute, and simply consisting of the placing before the Australian electors a choice of a collection of candidates who did NOT ask for the job of sorting this, and maybe other messes, out, while at the same time leaving before them all of the usual suspects clamouring for the job they have between them so consistently fallen down on.

Why not?

Forrest, yes of course the notion of stopping the clock and surprising the parties was a tongue-in-cheek idea, as it is never going to happen.

But it is an interesting idea worthy of logical consideration. In a way, it would be good if the GG could threaten to do this if the campaigns became too silly or boring and it was evident that the populace was just not tuned in or treating both parties with contempt, which...er....is just what's happening now!!

Afterall, an idea would have to be REALLY ridiculous to be more ridiculous than what we are now seeing in our federal political sphere. I mean, how ridiculous is the complete absence of discussion on peak oil / liquid fuel security or real sustainability? How ridiculous is our economic system that is based on never-ending dog-chasing-tail continuous growth? How ridiculous is it that a government could do what Rudd did with immigration – not mention it in the election campaign and then greatly boost it as soon as he got into power to a record high level much higher than the previous record high level without any consultation or publicity??

Whatever the case, I think that we really do need a mechanism that would get the big parties to properly address the things that really matter in sufficient detail, and to be held to account as sticking to their promises or assertions when in power.

Notwithstanding what happened to Whitlam, I think that the role of the GG should be much more significant in keeping the government and aspiring political parties on the right track.

The GetUp challenge to the constitutional validity of the 2006 legislation that changed the closure of the electoral rolls from seven days after the date of the writs back to what it had, prior to 1983, been closure on the day of issue of the writs, went before both the High Court and the Federal Court yesterday.

As of 10:55 AM today, no decision has yet been posted online. Here's my Google search: http://twitpic.com/2bo9z3

There may indeed be another reason, quite apart from any decision of either court, for the Governor-General to reset the electoral clock. It could relate to the seemingly non-statistical disappearance from the electoral rolls of 47,579 17-year-old provisional electors between 30 June 2010 and 22 July 2010.

It would appear to me that there are, apart from sheer error on the part of the AEC in the publishing of the respective figures, only two possible explanations for these disappearances from the 17-year-old cohort of the rolls: one is that they all turned 17 between 30 June and 22 July, the other is that those enrolments were found by the AEC to be in some way unsubstantiated or improperly effected (or, of course, some combination of these two explanations) by the time the rolls closed. This post I made to the Article 'Electoral roll makes a mockery of election' explains it more fully:
http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?article=10712#178530

From that post:

"Even if every 17-year-old in the population
had effected provisional enrolment, the most
one could expect to see turn 18 over such a
period would be around 14,000 persons."

59,831 17-year-old provisional electors were shown as being enrolled, nationally, as at 30 June 2010. This represented only around one in four of the 17-year-old cohort of the population.

On the face of it, there may be a problem with the rolls that warrants investigation. Investigations sometimes take a little time. An attempt to tamper with an election?

A correction.

My post of Thursday, 5 August 2010 at 11:34:39 AM, states, in the fourth paragraph:

"... two possible explanations for these
disappearances from the 17-year-old cohort
of the rolls: one is that they all turned
17 between 30 June and 22 July."

It should have read "......: one is that they all turned 18 between 30 June and 22 July."




Just by way of amplification of my previous post, the AEC figures for the close of rolls on 22 July 2010 that show only 12,252 17-year-olds as being enrolled, themselves require a comment. Whilst this number, 12,252 provisional electors, was it to represent persons who would turn 18 by polling day, might not be statistically improbable was the whole of the 17-year-old cohort of the population to have effected provisional enrolment prior to 30 June 2010, the fact is that only around one quarter of that cohort were shown as being enrolled as at that date. This means, if indeed the 12,252 provisional electors shown in the CoR figures are ones shown on AEC records as turning 18 by polling day, that there are around four times as many provisional electors in this sub-category as would be normally expected. An explanation is necessary.

The figures I am using are downloadable from this web page: http://www.aec.gov.au/Enrolling_to_vote/Enrolment_stats/elector_count/index.htm

Should the court uphold the GetUp challenge, it would seem as if the Governor-General would have to restart the electoral clock from scratch, not merely allow the disputed applications for enrolment onto the rolls, for from among the 100,000 or so applicants for enrolment that lodged between the end of business on Monday 19 July and that of the following Monday, the 26th, may have been some persons who otherwise would have intended being candidates.

The Governor-General may be thus given even more reason to restart the electoral clock than just that of her obligation of maintenance of the Constitution.

Interesting times for the Governor-General.

Yesterday, in my post of Thursday, 5 August 2010 at 11:34:39 AM, I posted this Twitpic of a Google search using the term 'High court challenge+Getup' in pages from Australia: http://twitpic.com/2bo9z3

Yesterday, also, in my post of Thursday, 5 August 2010 at 3:09:54 PM, to Ludwig's topic 'Wyatt Roy', I posted this link to a page that was right down near the bottom of the first page of the Google search for which I have already posted a Twitpic link above: http://australianconservative.com/2010/08/fraud-and-the-election-high-court-challenge/

Here is a Twitpic of the same Google search done again just after 6:00 AM today: http://twitpic.com/2bwwdv . The web page to which I linked in my post to the 'Wyatt Roy' thread is now the top search result on Google!

Interesting, in an oblique sort of way, in relation to assessing the possible influence of OLO discussions upon MainStreamMediaWorld and the internet. I guess the question is, does this show how many, or alternatively, how few, have clicked on sites shown in such Google search as I conducted over the last day? And, of those howsoever many or few viewers of Professor Flint's article, how many got the link from OLO?

I would have thought, with its claimed membership of over 350,000 persons, and the extreme topicality of the High Court challenge, that any of the GetUp pages would have been attracting far more hits than anything that OLO viewership could generate at present. Could the OLOverse be bigger than GetUp? Who could audit the GetUp membership, I wonder? The Australian Electoral Commission, perhaps?




I also wonder as to whether the Governor-General, of Her Excellency's own motion, may require the High Court in its consideration of the constitutionality of the roll close legislation to also consider the constitutionality of the exclusion of the permanently resident British subjects from the electoral rolls. They would make up the bulk of the allegedly missing 1.4 million electoral enrolments.

Breaking news:

http://www.smh.com.au/federal-election/getup-high-court-win-overturns-howards-electoral-laws-20100806-11m31.html

I just wonder as to whether GetUp has been acting as a proxy for the Federal government in its launching of its last minute challenge to the constitutionality of the provisions of the Electoral Integrity Act 2006.

It is a very appropriate time to call to mind that government's Electoral Reform Green Paper of 2009 that sought public input into the reforms canvassed therein.



Given that online participation in such input is of ever-increasing significance in community consultation, it was astounding to see the public online forum set up for that purpose initially only be open for just five days! One of the very early posts to that forum was one by Klaas Woldring, a regular article contributor to OLO, who warned that:

"... This is not an independent Inquiry.
Objectively, it is an Inquiry launched by
a major party, the one that is in Government."

More of the history of that dpmc.gov.au forum is set out in the OLO General Discussion topic 'An apology to Klaas Woldring', see: http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?discussion=3212&page=0 , with links thereto.



The long and the short of it all is that I suspect the government did not get the sort of community response it was seemingly hoping for, one that would have seen it receive widespread community support for large numbers of effectively unscrutinizable additional enrolments, and in due course votes, into the electoral process. Indeed it received advice as to the existence of potential problems with respect to unintended consequences of some existing legislation, about which it did seemingly nothing.

To have debated legislation that may have fixed these problems in Parliament would, of course, have attracted public attention to the fact that the executive government was trying to sidestep the bi-partisanly composed Joint Standing Committee on Electoral Matters that had been set up to provide balanced consideration of just such electoral proposals.

Could the recent leadership change have been made to divert attention from the government's unwillingness, perhaps even inability, to respectably debate electoral reform in Parliament?

Is this election now being rigged?

Forrest: The election is almost certainly being fixed! The question is really how fixed it is? and how far will the government need to fix it without causing suspicion.

Forrest: The election will always be a fix, it is really a matter of finding out how fixed it was.

Thank you for your recent request to the PM for my wife and I and children's sake.

I do not know you! But I know in my heart that you do what is right for your fellow countrymen even if it is at your own risk!

My wife and I are in court facing false charges without evidence on the 11th August 2010 and wish you more luck than we will have had with getting a fair hearing, and hope you can get a fair outcome in your election.

I have done my best, which has not been good enough I think to stop unfair extradition.

Forrest is the man to follow for justice and fairness. Goodbye! P.S Graham will not be allowed to communicate a court order

Interesting times indeed for the Governor-General.

Yesterday's ruling by the High Court generated some interesting comments to the relevant news item in The Australian. See: http://www.theaustralian.com.au/national-affairs/getup-wins-high-court-challenge-to-electoral-roll-cut-off/comments-fn59niix-1225902071456

In particular, this one, comment 38 of 91 to The Australian's news item, posted by 'roger connolly of hobart' at 2:10 PM August 06, 2010, in the context of this thread here on OLO, was interesting:

"Don't worry all you Labor voters, now the High Court
has handed down it's decision saying the Howard
government's 2006 electoral law is invalid, Labor will
try to cancel this election altogether and hold it again
early next year by which stage Gillard will hope to be
more popular. The current Governor General was appointed
by Rudd and a decision to rescind the poll is down to her.
In this scenario, don't put it past Labor to try any trick
in the book to cling on to government. They may even dump
Gillard and put Rudd back in. Be prepared for any kind of
stunt now they realise they have made a huge mistake going
early with Gillard."

I'm not sure that the Governor-General, having already issued the writs, can call the whole election off for the time being. I should imagine that the real situation would be akin to a re-starting of the electoral clock on the now-to-be-amended rolls as closed on 22 July 2010, in such manner as would occur in circumstance of the death of a candidate between the close of nominations and polling day under the provisions of Sections 180 and 181 of the Commonwealth Electoral Act.

It would seem as if the interests of some, who, if they had only known the view the court would take as to the constitutionality of their enrolment, may have nominated as candidates at these elections, have been overlooked.

It would seem the Governor-General could supply justice to such potentially intending candidates by re-starting the electoral clock, indeed may be obliged so to do.

That would open another door, wouldn't it?

For those viewers who are perhaps unaware as to what poster BrianHowes refers in his post of Saturday, 7 August 2010 at 11:06:14 AM, you can read yourself in on the thread 'Litter on Twitter from Switzerland for Julia', here: http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?discussion=3810&page=0

It is disappointing the UK government haven't got the cojones the Swiss have shown they have over extradition matters. Perhaps the Boersma case might focus a few Australian DPMC eyes on what can easily happen to an innocent person here under the USDEA jihadist attitude described in the last paragraph of 'Operation Red Dragon'.




Much has been made of the provision, now found unconstitutional, of the Electoral Integrity Act 2006 that closed the electoral rolls at 8:00 PM on the day of issue of the writs, as having been some invention of the Howard government that lacked any precedent in electoral law.

Not so.

Prior to 1987, roll closure upon the day of issue of the writs had been the rule for many years, if not since Federation. It was done, among other reasons, to prevent the opportunistic last minute emplacement of perhaps questionable enrolments in marginal seats.

At the 1987 Federal elections, at which the seven days period of grace for enrolment applied, there was a surge in the nett enrolment level across Australia of around 220,000 enrolments. Although the Coalition parties at that election secured a greater number of votes Australia-wide than did the ALP, the Hawke Labor government was returned, with that return being credited to a successful 'targetting of the marginals' in its campaigning.

Years later it was able to be shown from the AEC's own published records that there had existed a discrepancy of 204,880 enrolments in its record system at that roll close. Other records that might not normally have been publicly available, but were provided to a Parliamentary inquiry in 1988, upon analysis indicated that the bulk of the enrolment surge actually occurred prior to the announcement of that election.

All in all, a bit of a worry. Elections could have been rigged.

Happening again?

Given that in a clunky sort of a fashion I am trying to get a feel for whether stuff that starts on OLO gets transmitted to any degree elsewhere on the internet, and/or to MainStreamMediaWorld, I'll pass this little observation on FWIW.

Both before and after the breaking news as to the High Court ruling announced in my post of Friday, 6 August 2010 at 12:35:20 PM, I took some screenshots of my Google searches, some of the results of which I commented upon in my earlier post of Friday, 6 August 2010 at 7:50:51 AM.

A screenshot I took of the same Google search at 10:32 AM had shown Professor Flint's 'Fraud and the election: High Court challenge' article page had been completely displaced from the Google top listings, at a time when Google showed "about 34,700 results" on pages from Australia for the search term. See: http://twitpic.com/2co33n

I was most surprised to find that, after having previously been displaced from the top listings, at 1:46 PM Professor Flint's article page was again top listing on the first page of the Google search, an hour and a half AFTER the SMH's first reporting the High Court ruling at 12:20 PM. At this time Google showed "about 45,300 results" on pages from Australia for the search term. See: http://twitpic.com/2cnwjb

I must admit I don't understand how Google automatically rates pages in determining what will display toward the top of the listing, but given the increase of 10,600 search results over the interval from 10:32 AM to 1:46 PM, I am surprised to have seen such an apparent number of hits on the 'Fraud and the election' article.

Is OLO more influential as a source of links, or effective initiator of searches, than we all realize?

The devil, as always, is in the detail.

In the detail of this news item in The Australian, see: http://www.theaustralian.com.au/national-affairs/getup-wins-high-court-challenge-to-electoral-roll-cut-off/story-fn59niix-1225902071456 , is this statement:

"In addition to those who enrolled in
the seven days after the rolls closed
on July 19, the ruling also includes
people who are overseas or of no fixed
address."

In just what way it includes people who are overseas, or what numbers are anticipated as being involved, is left unclear.

This reference to persons overseas concerns me, because it is well nigh impossible to emplace any polling place scrutiny on behalf of candidates at overseas polling places. Presumably all persons presently entitled to vote while overseas (those registered in accordance with the current provisions of the CEA) are in possession of an Australian passport. Is the passport demanded for presentation when overseas voters make a vote claim?

The reference further concerns me because, in the touting of the figure of around 1.3 million unenrolled, no mention has been made as to from precisely what source the missing million or so, other than the youth cohorts, comes from. There are three different identifiable groups of around one million members that this estimate COULD have been referring to. Those groups are:

1. The expatriates other than registered overseas voters (not part of the population counted in a census);

2. Those who have migrated to Australia but have not yet taken up citizenship (not countable as part of the eligible, but counted in census);

3. Permanently resident British subjects unconstitutionally disfranchised (counted as part of the population, and perhaps secretly being counted as part of the eligible?).

Which group of around one million prospective enrollees IS being referred to?

It concerns me that, prior to the five-day short-fuzed opportunity for public input to the Electoral Reform Green Paper being extended, such response as had already been made was largely one complaining at the 'disfranchisment' of the expatriate Australian community. Was it a Dorothy Dix forum?

Three days out from a Federal election and we (the public) don't even have a published figure for the number of names on the electoral rolls, despite claims of as many as 100,000 new enrolments and/or transfers of enrolments having been ruled by the courts as being admissible for the elections since the roll close date of 22 July 2010. See: http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?article=10786#179799

Evenly spread, 100,000 names amount to 666 per electoral Division. But who is to say that they will have been evenly spread? If there has been any degree of selectivity in the lodgement of those enrolment claims, such a number could, perhaps improperly, completely alter an overall electoral outcome. Candidates and the public in general have a right to know these names before the poll. Why hasn't a supplementary list been published? These days enrolments are all electronically recorded: such a list could be put up on the AEC website within hours, surely.

I have just checked again the AEC website pages dealing with enrolment statistics, here:
http://www.aec.gov.au/Enrolling_to_vote/Enrolment_stats/ , here:
http://www.aec.gov.au/Enrolling_to_vote/Enrolment_stats/gazetted/index.htm , and here:
http://www.aec.gov.au/Enrolling_to_vote/Enrolment_stats/elector_count/index.htm

This Twitpic is of the lower part of the last web page link given above, with the page refreshed at 9:00 AM today. Note that the page was last updated on Thursday 29 July. http://twitpic.com/2fpwyn

It also seems as if 47,579 17-year-old provisionally enrolled electors turned 18 between 30 June and 22 July. See: http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?article=10786#179866

At most, the 17-year-old cohort of the population would comprise around 270,000 persons. With births spread more or less evenly throughout the year, that would mean only around 22,500 turning 18 in any one month, and then only if ALL 17-year-olds were enrolled. Only around 1 in 4 actually do.

Is this all just 'secret politicians' business', or do the people have some rights to know what is going on?

Restart the clock, Your Excellency, please.

Update! Update! Update!

In my preceding post I was critical of the apparent failure of the AEC to produce a supplementary list of the names of persons permitted to be enrolled in consequence of the recent High Court decision for the upcoming Federal elections.



I was behind the times, it appears.




The Governor-General in Council issued on Friday 13 August a Proclamation under Section 285(1) of the Commonwealth Electoral Act 1918 enabling the Electoral Commissioner to update the electoral rolls by the printing and distribution of supplementary lists. Here is the AEC announcement: http://www.aec.gov.au/About_AEC/Media_releases/e2010/14-08a.htm

I hadn't heard a word about it in the MSM. Did anybody else, I wonder?



It seems only fair to help promulgate the import of the Proclamation here on OLO, as it has been, seemingly, one of the few, if not the only, vehicles for raising public awareness of these electoral matters outside of the AEC's own publications. At least I draw an inference as to this being so from a Google search I just did a couple of hours ago using 'virtual tally room 2010' as the search term in 'pages from Australia'. It seems OLO outranks even the AEC's own pages, at least in some small measure. See: http://twitpic.com/2frx92 . And it stayed like that for over 15 minutes, too! Try it yourself if you don't believe me.




And yes, I am genuinely interested in the Virtual Tally Room for the 2010 Federal elections, as any poor hapless perusor of the complete comment history of Forrest Gumpp would likely eventually divine from that extensive gamboge tract of opening lines to posts, should they have had to wade through them. In 2007, for example, I thought the VTR was telling me that, transiently, more votes had been claimed in some Divisions than there were electors enrolled. That was a worry.

I still think the Governor-General should re-start the electoral clock and conscript randomly chosen candidates as a real alternative for Australian voters at these elections.

In the light of yesterday's little surprise as to Google rankings of pages relating to the Virtual Tally Room (VTR), and my having been just a little bit behind the times with respect to announcement of the Governor-General's Proclamation of Friday 13 August 2010, I draw to OLO viewers attention a new AEC web page: http://www.aec.gov.au/About_AEC/Media_releases/e2010/18-08.htm



It (the AEC media release) is headed "Election results broadcast live from the National Tally Room and Virtual Tally Room".




Near the bottom of this AEC media release is a purple highlighted text link of the words 'home page', from where it is advised a viewer of the media release can access the VTR for the 2010 Federal elections. This is where that text link delivers you, the viewer: http://www.aec.gov.au/About_AEC/Media_releases/e2010/\index.htm

This is a Twitpic of what I got when I clicked that link around 7:30 AM this morning: http://twitpic.com/2fzmqn

Surfing right along, I clicked the purple highlighted text link 'home page', expecting a link to the VTR to be visible thereon upon delivery. I saw this: http://twitpic.com/2fzo5f

Further down on the same page (the AEC Home Page), I saw the clickable text link 'Election results broadcast live from the National Tally Room and Virtual Tally Room'. That had to be what I wanted, didn't it? The VTR wasn't mentioned anywhere else on the Home Page that I could see. You now see what I saw: http://twitpic.com/2fzpiq

Nearly there, I thought to myself, thought I. Click!, and I got this: http://twitpic.com/2fzsgx

Yup, full circle: the AEC 18 August media release again!




All I wanted to do was have a look at the 2010 Federal elections VTR layout to see whether there would be provision this time around for the numbers of informal votes counted in the ordinary vote in polling places. Provision for this was omitted in 2007.

This, only two days out from the polling, Your Excellency.