Outrider,
“For God's sake get it done before the new Senate. I am sure that the Coalition and ALP can come to an agreement before then. After that Palmer will adopt blackmail, threatening to reject all legislation put up by the Government if there is a change to the voting.”
Gee, democracy in action. We don’t like the new crop of representatives just voted in with a system we have used for 30 years, so quick, change the system before the new Senators can exercise their democratic right to stop you.

I find it amazing how the major parties, Coalition, Labor and Greens, who have lost out in the recent election, can create this smoke and mirrors scare that the electoral system is no longer democratic as the wrong people are winning seats because they are single issue candidates, or had little primary vote, or were previously unknown, or somehow “gamed” the system as though they were a computer hacker breaking into a bank.

There is nothing wrong with group voting tickets because every party arranges them to maximize their chances and if every party supporter “blindly” allows that preference in their name it is only to grant their party the better chance of success. As has been said above, if approx. 20% of voters don’t support major parties and approx 20% of seats are won by minor parties, is there really any discrepancy there

Dan,

It is a source of great frustration to me that people who don’t know what they are talking about get so much coverage. The reporting on the Gonski report is a classic case, in which only one journalist in the country correctly reported that it had recommended keeping the Howard government’s SES funding model, even though this fact leapt off the page the day the report was released, and it took him 13 months to do so. We see a similar thing with the discussion of Senate voting “reform”, when journalist after journalist fails to call on the natural scepticism of the profession to ask any insightful questions. Assumption just follows assumption.

The Greens are certainly trying to pull the wool over people’s eyes, and succeeding because of journalistic gullibility. The Greens are pushing for above-the-line preferences, saying that this will put the voter in charge, when it does no such thing as it makes voters follow the preference order within each party. Bob Brown even suggested banning below-the-line votes completely (http://www.theage.com.au/comment/how-to-reform-senate-voting-in-one-easy-step-20130910-2ti5a.html), contrary to Section 7 of the Constitution. Journalists act like the Greens’ case is self-evident, rather than self-seeking.

The Greens are not pushing for a threshold (4 or 5 per cent has been suggested), but that too would advantage them by knocking all the parties below it out of the race, a contemptible way to treat people who have voted for micro-parties.

The initial reaction was outrage at the micro-parties’ success. However, I expect the major parties will block any reforms designed to advantage the Greens by making it harder for other parties to win seats as the major parties do not want to give the Greens a lock on the balance of power in the Senate. Both the Coalition and the Labor Party want the option of helping parties other than the Greens, so they are hardly likely to support a voting system that makes this course of action more difficult.