cont...

Now if you had actually voted before youd realise that you dont put your name on the ballot paper (like yo do in high school) and no one checks whether your vote is valid or not...youd also realise that an invalid vote does not equal a vote for liberal??

"So you are actually lying in order to make yourself look as though you are taking a position which is simply impossible"...So how was I lying again?

"your arguments illogical, irrational, unreasonable". So a logical argument would be - voting for an independant upper house and not voting for any party lower house means that you are pro war and pro liberal. "good one".

Your comments on hitler's rise to power being attributed to voters like me are incredibly innacurate. I think you need to study modern history at a tertiary level and realise that hitlers rise to power was caused by a number of factors such as:

- A flawed democratic system that allowed for "back room deals" to take place
- 28 different political parties competeing with no true majority
- a complex preferential system that had issues in itself
- corruption that was legal within there consitution but would not be legal in a any true democracy
- proganda that the germany would be the world empire for 1000 years (yes people knew what they were voting)
- anti jew sentiment
- world war 1 depression
- weakness of the Weimar Republic (constitution) - many germans wanted dictatorship again as a result
- bullying of opposing parties
- support from wealthy businessmen to drive his proproganda campaigns

need I go on...

On top of this point, I voted for an Independant in the upper house. Legislation has to be passed through both houses and the governer general before it can be come a parlimentary act. So my one independant couldnt introduce "child canabilism". Are you aware of every green policy (don't look it up to refute). How do you know that one of the green policies is not world domination? This is the stupidty of your argument.

I can't leave your glaring error uncommented on. Kish, you don't understand voting procedure. You forgot to read the second line from the website you quoted:

"By casting a vote this way, voters are following the Group Voting Ticket (GVT) that the party or group has lodged with the AEC. All the preferences will be distributed according to the GVT."

Also--"Group Voting Ticket
Within 24 hours after the close of nominations for the Senate, parties or groups may lodge a GVT which shows the order in which they want their preferences distributed. If a voter chooses to put the number '1' in one of the boxes above the line on the Senate ballot paper, all the preferences will be distributed according to that group's GVT. Electors may choose to vote according to their own preferences below the line."

Do you get it now? By ticking the box above the line you let your independent/s chose who is to be your other preferences--they may have allocated them to Liberal or Labour. All you did was abnegate you option to chose your preferences yourself. You don't understand our voting system. Above the line doesn't mean no preferences.

Forty senate postions are available at each senate election. There is a quota system whereby candidates who receive more than 1/40th of the first preferences are elected outright, if there are still positions vacant at the end of this process(there always is), then their excess votes are transferred to the second preference of their voters, then the third, etc. If there are still positions after all excess votes are counted then the lowest scoring candidate is eliminated and their preferences are redistributed, etcetera.

The difference with the House of Reps is only one candidate wins instead of 40, if your first choice doesn't achieve enough votes then your second preference will count as a full vote etcetera until there are only two candidates left.

While it's only possible your preferences will help a Labour or Liberal into the Senate, it's most probable in the House of Reps as minor parties rarely poll enough to win.

I said: "You also know well that for your vote to count in either the upper or the lower house you must indicate a position for all candidates (even if you chose to allow these preferences to be chosen for you by your main party choice)." Please note I took into account that you may have voted "above the line"--proof I already knew this option was available.

Your posts have insulted Labour, Greens and Democrats and praised the Liberals. You also insisted throughout you voted independent. It's only natural I thought you gave your preferences to Liberal and if you had said sooner how you did vote I could have sooner pointed out your error.

Your comment:"Legislation has to be passed through both houses and the governer general before it can become a parlimentary act. So my one independant couldnt introduce "child canabilism"--implies if your independent was stupid enough to vote for something extreme you hope Liberal and Labour will stop them. Wow, what an admission that you don't have a clue what the policies of the candidates you voted for were. They could have been bigger war mongers than the Liberals and you just don't know.

I have read all the Greens (and other parties) policies and update myself on them now and then--always before elections. There is no policy on their website about 'world domination'. I can promise you without having to look it up. Unlike you I like to be informed.

Your piece on Hitler does not prove what I said was wrong. It just wasted space.

You could have voted in a way to maximise your antiwar stance--instead you chose to vote for senators you seem to have no idea whether they were antiwar or prowar, then allowed them to distribute your preferences to whomever they chose. No way is that an antiwar stance. You had an opportunity and you just did not care enough to stop the war.

Aziliz,

"Do you get it now? By ticking the box above the line you let your independent/s chose who is to be your other preferences--..."

Once again your taking me completely out of context and twsting waht I say to discredit me. You said it was impossible for me to just vote for an idependant on the ballot paper. I said it was not. This has nothing to do with whether or not the independant distributes his seats or not, I merely made the point that when I voted I literllly voted ONLY for the independant on the ballot paper. You said this was impossible and that I lied by suggeasting that I voted in this manner, it is not impossible and it does not void your vote by doing so. Unlike the lower house the upper house is counted differently and the likelyhood of my independant not getting a seat is far less than the likely hood of the greens winning the lower house. So next before you accuse someone of lying, read there post and comprehend what they are saying before wasting your time writing a thesis of accusasions. And if your going to refute by suggesting I create fanatasies about you being a uni student, etc re-read my post and you'll discover that I said you sound like one, I didn't say that you were one.

"--implies if your independent was stupid enough to vote for something extreme you hope Liberal and Labour will stop them"..once again take something out of context and twist it to suit your cause. I didnt say that I hope liberal and labour would stop them i said that my one independant CANNOT pass legislation by themselves, Liberal can, this means that your contraversial argument about independants having fundamentalist polices is really irrelevant as they dont have the power to ever enforce such policies, and i can assure you wihtout reading their policies that none of them have world domination on there agenda (let me guess, youll refute with, but how do you know when you havnt looked up there polices...

And yes of course youve read every policy from every party, you know the greens back to front right...of course you had to refute with this otherwise you would loose obvious credibility. Who really is the liar here aziliz? At least I am honest enough to admit I don't know every policy of the independant that I voted for in the upper house, it had absolutely NOTHING to do with why I voted for the independant...

I voted for the independant to give some balance of power that was non bias in the upper house, which i have explained to you about 600 times. The problem is; like I said before, you werent around when the democrates last had the balance of power so you have no idea based on experience of how PRO labour / anti productive they were.

Theres no point in having a government in the lower house if EVERYTHING in the upper house gets rejected, explain to me the point of this? You just talk from what you have learnt in class, not from experience.

"It's only natural..." Doesn't this sum everything up. I CLEARLY STATED SO MANY TIMES I DIDNT VOTE FOR LIBERAL. I said in my first post that I produced an invalid vote in the lower house. you took one comment I made about Liberal being more competant than Labour and attempted to label me as pro liberal / pro war.

On the ballot sheet for the lower house I was very tempted to put N O W A R in every box. If you had just read what I said in the first place we wouldnt have wasted god knows how many posts debating this, do you now finally accept I AM NOT PRO LIBERAL / PRO WAR?

My comments on hitler are based on historical fact, yours are based on an assumption, it is a historical fact that hitler did not win based on niave voters, there were a number of factors that influenced his win, and the majority of his voters knew about his world domination plans.

okay, sorry I take it back. You are not a liar. You are just not very bright.

But here's another angle for you: what really happened to your vote in the 2004 election?

Firstly, no independant senator won a seat in the senate--not one. So did your vote count for nothing? No, not in Australia, never fear your vote always counts.

You chose to let your independants distribute your preferences so they took your vote and gave it to someone else. But whom?

Well that depends on two things.

Firstly, it depends on what state you are in.

Let's take NSW for starters. NSW had four groups of independants: A, D, K and W. So secondly it would have depended on what group of independants you voted for. A, D and K's preferences ultimately wound up with Fred Nile of the Christian Democratic Party--who are incidentally more pro war than the Liberal Party. While group W's preferences went to Labour. But in the final showdown between Labour and CDP for the last senate seat in NSW, Labour won. But it was close.

So you had more than a three in four chance of voting for CDP as you were more likely to just pick the first group A. So thanks to people like you who throw there vote away CDP nearly got in. For their policies on the war: http://www.cdp.org.au/fed/policy_federal.asp

In Victoria there were two groups of independants K and S. K passed their preferences directly to the Greens while S passed theirs to Family First. Family First won. There policy on Iraq: http://www.familyfirst.org.au/hot_topics/war_iraq.php

In Tasmania there were two independant groups whose preferences both went to Family First. Greens got in.

In Queeensland there were Group G, K, and O. G and O went to the Greens and K went to Liberal. Liberal won.

Continued . . .