Some excellent work: GetUp’s simple guide to Senate preference flows.
It’s worth digging around the GetUp site for their various election guides – they have heaps of material looking at single issues, big pictures, voting records and more. I imagine most people reading this have been fairly firmly decided for a long time now, but you might find some supporting information to help persuade some waverers who you know.
Categories: Politics
Elections #AusPol 2019 Thread 
Vale John Clarke #PutOutYourGumboots 
QOTD for IWD: Aung San Suu Kyi 
Hoyden About Town 
I just got the shock of my life to see that, according to the GetUp guide, the Climate Change Coalition has preferenced Pauline Hanson above Labor in Queensland, and One Nation then Family First above the Greens and Labor in WA. My ballot paper tells me the second Climate Change Coalition Senate candidate is Karl Kruszelnicki, who I always thought was one of the white hats. What’s going on?
Yes, I found that a bit startling as well (you can confirm it by going to the AEC website and scrolling through the Senate Group Preference Tickets).
I suspect Realpolitik is what is going on, with someone simply crunching the numbers on what might get the CCC the most votes, but it doesn’t strike me as principled either. It’s certainly made the difference between me considering the CCC at all and now definitely not, although I was already not that keen because by giving Kruszenicki the No.2 spot in their NSW team they were being blatantly cynical – they know they don’t have the numbers to scrape in a seat, and even if they did it would go to the No 1 candidate, so they’re just using Kruszelnicki’s celebrity to increase their portion of the vote to get more AEC funding for the next election.
That’s a perfectly sensible strategy in some ways for a brand new party (get a profile and some funds for the next election), but the preference allocation strikes me as really taking advantage of the fact that most voters really don’t understand our Upper House voting system very well. Obviously you assumed that they would be preferencing Dems/Greens, as did I before I read the AEC site last week, and they’re not making much noise about how they have not done that, or why, are they?
I just realised that I never crossposted the post I made on LP last week about the AEC page showing the registered Group Tickets for Senate preference flows.
You can check them out in all their detail here: [link]
Edited to add:
In NSW, the CCC have preferenced first the Democrats, then the What Women Want party, then The Fishing Party, the two prefs to the Carers Coalition, then the Greens, then two more to the Carers Group, then a whole heap of other minor parties before they preference Labor over the Coalition.
The What Women Want Party and the Carers Alliance are broadly progressive groups – they won’t get a candidate up, but it’s good to see them getting even a molecule of media oxygen, so good on’ em. The Fishing Party is less progressive – it wants sustainable fishing, but also wants a moratorium on any more marine parks, and specifically want to prevent the Greens getting another Senator up, according to their website (which hasn’t been updated since before the NSW election earlier this year, by the look of it, but that was the goal in that election so it probably is also the goal in this one). Penguin Unearthed examined all the small Senate groups for NSW a few weeks ago.
The Carer’s alliance is exchanging preferences with the Non-custodial Parents Party . That is a huge shame. Noncustodial parents preference The Fishing party and Pauline as 2 and 3! And What Women Want and the Greens last (of course!).