I just watched Clive Palmer claim that the United Australia Party had had 3,000 Greens switch to it. Maybe. That would leave the Greens with 12,000 members if true.

Australians are not a political lot, and are certainly not interested in party membership, but I thought that I would check the numbers, and was surprised to find that the United Australia Party shares the largest membership with the Nationals.

National Party 100,000
United Australia Party 100,000
Labor 53,500
Liberal 50,000
Greens 15,000 (not sure if that's before or after the big desertion).

The total of registered voters who are members of serious political parties is less than 2% of registered voters. There are no figures for the odds and sods, but they would need at least 500 hundred members on the electoral roll to be registered.

It's a good thing in one way for people not to be too intense about politics, but it could also be why politicians get away with so much, particularly their current whittling away of democratic freedoms, and sucking up to globalised activists instead of listening to, and serving, the people they are supposed to represent for the very good money they are getting to do that.

That will be the day that 3,000 Greens join Palmer! Palmer and his lying leeches, at the last election I was talking to a bloke doing HTV's for Palmer, he was promised $100 for the day, I wonder if he ever collected, Knowing Palmer most unlikely.

ttbn, yep 500 "members" to form a political party. In the case of your Australian Conservatives there must have been "rats in the ranks" as the party only scored 488 votes Australia wide. Yep, a dozen rats deserted the cause! Were you one?

From my experience less than half of the party membership are active. The National Party with 100,000 members, I assume 3/4 of them are the sheep in Barney's back paddock, the party would find it difficult to muster 10,000 including supporters at election time, probably a lot less. In the good old days, many unionists would be invited to join the ALP, in reality they were simply making a donation. At branch meetings the same small group turn up every month. In strongly unwinnable electorates even the big two find it difficult to get people on election day to take on the incumbents, often having to bus them in from other branches.

tweedle dum and tweedle doo. Is there a difference between the parties today? The media have most of the say and both parties jump saying what the media minority want.

Palmer and his lying leeches,
Paul1405,
I don't think Palmer would want hypocritical morons in his party !

Good statistics ttbn. Kudos.

CM

You would know as much about political parties as ttbn, and that's nothing. Included in those figures for membership are both financial and non-financial members. Political parties tend to keep non-financials on the books, under the rules, unless there is a written resignation. Since non-financials have no voting rights, a better indicator of membership would be how many vote at pre-selections. In a hotly contested pre-selection in a 'gun seat' as many as 100 or more members might vote, but in a unwinnable seat as little as 10 members choose the candidate, usually there is only one nomination in those unwinnables anyway. In most safe seats the incumbent is not challenged, so the pre-selection is a formality.

In the case of Palmers Party which is strongly based in Queensland, I would say in that 100,000 there might be 99,000 free members, whose bona-fides are questionable. Same goes for the Nationals, since they contest a relatively few seats, they should have no problem at election time throwing 1,000 members behind each candidate, I suspect they would be lucky to have 100 to 200 members support on the day.

Once a Greens member came up to me at a meeting, and all excited proclaimed; "We now have 30,000 members!", I replied; " They must be in the Tasmanian rainforest, they're sure not here tonight".