If the New South Wales Liberals had been on the ball, the Greens would have had their first lower house beach-head in mainland Australia in Port Jackson. If the Liberals had preferenced the Greens' Jamie Parker ahead of Sandra Nori, Parker would have won the seat.

Our polling that election http://onlinefocus.nationalforum.com.au/nsw-election-2003/files/nsw_results_week_4.xls showed that a possible Greens boil-over was on - they were polling around 30%, more than usual in our polls. According to our poll on Victoria the Greens are polling 45% of our sample. While they won't do that in the real world, it is an indication of how motivated, numerous and active they are, and it means they are in a position to win seats, but to be sure they need the Liberals to preference them.

A win in one lower house seat in Victoria, and maybe more, would be a great result for the Greens. There is a large group of passionate Australians who are disenfranchised by the mainstream parties. They have gravitated to the Greens and this would be accelerated by a Greens win. The Greens have lost momentum to the Democrats in the polls, but they could make this a mere statistical blip with the right result.

A win for the Greens would also be a win for the Liberals. Not only would it deny Labor one or two seats, important if there is a close result, but it potentially forces Labor to the left.

The political battles in Australia are won by occupying one side or the other of the socio-demographic divide and reaching into the conservative blue-collar vote. John Howard has achieved this federally. The failure of the state Liberals is almost entirely due to their inability to duplicate the trick because state Labor has firmly grasped this constituency. A Greens win, if it moves Labor to the left, will losen its grip and free these voters up so that the Liberals can have a chance of winning them over.

Full marks to the Victorian Liberal Party machine for cunning, and the Greens for coming of age.

Not sure I'd agree it's a correct call.I suppose it is from the political perspective of potentially denying a seat or two to Labor but I think these contrived preference deals only confirm the corrupt nature of our preferential voting system. Far from delivering the outcomes people want it allows the wheelers and dealers to manipulate the system.
First past the post is a much better electoral system - and while we're at it - non-compulsory voting.

Call me Stupid but anything which promotes the Greens is anathama.

Green ISSUES I agree with.
In particular renewable energy, and prevention of large multinationals turning old growth forests into wood chips.
I don't have as much of a problem with sustainable timber harvesting for structural and ornamental timber for furniture etc. Thats very tribal and natural.

BOB BROWN specifically OPPOSED shutting down the availablity of XXX rated Pornography by mail order from ACT. this attitude seems to be prevalent in State level greens also.

GREENS seek the support of, and support the Muslim segment of the community in a racist divisive way. (cheap points scoring to gain the Muslim vote)

There are many other socially DANGEROUS policy's of the Greens, which I feel are downright evil, but thats only my and many others opinions in the final analysis.

Apart from SOME Environmental issues, the Greens appear to me, to be morally bankrupt and totally relativist in their foundations.
The closest biblical saying I can think of for them is "Woe to those who call evil good and good evil"

I would much rather put energy into Family First who at least have some moral basis for their position, whether we like it or not.
They are also more open to common sense viewpoints about sensible issues.(except for a couple I'm dark on them about...RRT2001 being one)

Fielding showed his independance from Howard over the PNG Assylum seekers issue. He does NOT dance to a Liberal tune.

POLITICS should never boil down to the choice of:
Save trees, destroy morality.
or
USE trees, support morality.

There has to be an alternative and I believe family first may be closest at this point.

These so called preference deals rely on apathetic voters. The informed voter will always mark his or her own preferences, and not follow how to vote guides.

There is the problem Robg. Informed voters - where are they? The figures show that the overwhelming majority of voters follow how to vote cards - pathetic though that is!

Boaz David complained that

"BOB BROWN specifically OPPOSED shutting down the availablity of XXX rated Pornography by mail order from ACT. this attitude seems to be prevalent in State level greens al so"

Are you coming out of the closet BD, what would JC think?

Boaz: "Call me Stupid but anything which promotes the Greens is anathama."

You said it, Boazy.

Freeranger, what is ironic is that Greens, Dems and One Nation voters, are the least likely to follow how-to-vote cards. Maybe that's where all the "informed" voters are?

Yes could be GrahamY. Supporters of the major parties do seem more likely to follow the ticket - because they are voting for the party and not for the best person to represent them in their electorate.
I understand the need for party structures as a effective way to form government but I find it quite hilarious when hard line members of a party (any party) think their local candidate is a dog - but they still hand out for him or her on election day and vote for the machine!

GrahamY,

An interesting take on the situation in Victoria. I find I can't get out of my head something that former Australian Electoral Commissioner Colin Hughes said in a submission he made in October 2000 to the Parliamentary Inquiry into the Integrity of the Electoral Roll that followed the revelation of enrolment irregularities in North Queensland.

This submission is published at http://www.aph.gov.au/house/committee/em/ElecRoll/subColinHughes.doc

Professor Hughes estimated that, should the electoral roll for the division of Herbert have to be recompiled from scratch, somewhere between 26,000 and 36,000 names out of a total of around 86,000 formerly carried on that roll would NOT have claimants present themselves for re-enrolment. This represents between 30% to 40% of all names carried on the roll. Other divisions may well have somewhat less (perhaps as little as 10% of all names) than these percentages, if the number of missing expected claimants is related to population mobility as Professor Hughes appears to indicate. Whether or not the proportion of missing claimants is really related to population mobility, should such proportions of names effectively be available for use manipulatively in elections, the prospect exists for the political complexion of whole parties to be subtly altered without change of 'trading name'.

Could it be equally correct to restate your claim that "political battles in Australia are won by occupying one side or the other of the socio-demographic divide and reaching into the conservative blue-collar vote" by saying that political agendas in Australia are established by the manipulative use of very large numbers of electoral enrolments in combination with genuinely popular minority causes in an otherwise innately conservative electoral environment?

Something said by the late (Sir) Kieth Murdoch also worries me. He reportedly said, while reporting with respect to the Gallipoli campaign in 1915 and the Australian political oversight of the war, something to the effect of "you don't understand how things are really done". At the time I first read it, it seemed a non sequitur. What did he really mean?

I don't think Colin Hughes has the slightest idea what he is talking about. In the court case leading up to the Mundingburra re-election both the Liberal Party and the Electoral Commission canvassed the whole electorate looking for false enrolments. They found hardly any. Mundingburra is part of the Herbert electorate.

We know subsequently that there had been some, because Karen Ermine was jailed for using a handful of false enrolments in internal ALP ballots. But I stress the word "handful".

Everytime I have managed a campaign in a winnable seat, or been the candidate, the first thing that I have presecribed is a direct mail to every elector. When you get a return you send that to the electoral commission with a request to have them removed. In Greenslopes I did find a few enrolments in cow paddocks, and I did keep a copy of every return, but there were nowhere near enough to even think of challenging the result. Certainly nothing like 30 to 40 percent.

It's possible in a seat like Herbert that you'd get a higher turnover than average, and as we all move house on average once every five years, then in an average electorate each year you'd expect 20% of electors to have moved from the place they were first enrolled. That doesn't mean they've moved from the electorate, nor that they won't re-enrol in the correct electorate if they have moved.

And of course that assumes that they were on the roll in the first place. The most mobile Australians are the youngest ones, and they have an increasing propensity not to enrol at all.

Robg, you can be as "informed a voter" as you like but if you think your vote is counted beyond your first preference then you are sadly mistaken.

When I scrutinized a federal election in Eden-Monaro in 1982 the votes were bundled into piles according to which box had a "1" in it. When it came to allocating preferences the votes for the minor parties were sampled and then the block of votes was allocated to the major parties.

As a left leaning Greens letterboxer, I stopped everything when I read the article about Greens preferences. Absolutely no way do I believe Ted Ballyhoo's promises to rebuild the infrastructure that the previous Liberal government sold and trashed.

GrahamY,

You describe from experience that which I must admit I would have instinctively thought must have been the case with respect to returned mail and electoral roll canvassing. I should feel relieved. Yet other contradictions nag at me, and make me wonder whether there could have been some substance behind Hughes' anticipations in circumstances of a whole roll recompilation in the division of Herbert having been required several years ago. Of course the matter is academic, inasmuch as there was little prospect of such recompilation ever happening, due to the seeming provisions of Section 85 of the Commonwealth Electoral Act, as Hughes himself made clear. But I still wonder as to whether your experience, and Hughes' presumably educated expectations, are not capable of being reconciled.

Conventionally in attempting to assess electoral roll accuracy, everything hinges upon whether mail is returned to sender, or, in the case of face to face contact, knowledge of the existence of named persons in connection with a particular address now or in the recent past is comprehensively denied. Nothing in this process is capable of determining whether the named person(s), whose existence as electors would in most cases appear substantiated, has in fact effected the electoral enrolment THEMSELVES as the law requires.

It would thus be possible for a roll to appear to be substantially correct, but in fact contain something like the from 20% to 40% oversubscription that both the mobility statistics and Professor Hughes variously indicate. Only the act of whole roll recompilation would actually put this to the test. It is possible that Hughes was drawing upon international norms or specific experience overseas of whole roll recompilation comparisons with previous rolls in anticipating 30% to 40% of names carried on the roll for Herbert might not attract matching claimants at a recompilation.

In reading posts to this forum, it is impossible to escape the feeling that, across the political spectrum, there is a massive disconnection between electors and the elected. A routinely bogus vote of the order of 20% to 40% of all enrolments might account for such a perception.

The Victorian election result should send a clear message to Canberra that Victorians are unhappy with Canberra.

The former Liberal leader, Robert Doyle, conceded that this was a worse result that the Liberal defeat in 2002 making it the worst result in the party's history. Right wing voters who were unhappy with the Liberals voted Family First or Green.

Left wing voters were too frightened of causing a Liberal victory, to register their disapproval of Labor policy by voting Green, so by and large the Greens lost votes back to Labor.

I think the result sends a very unclear message billie. You could say that voters in State elections have been sending the same message for some years - but the same voters have been re-electing John Howard! Talk about schizoid!