Australian Electoral Commission

If the election was a referendum on the Government then the Coalition has lost.

Opposition leader Tony Abbott may have fond memories of referendums because of 1999, but his statement at 1.56 am on election night that the 2010 Federal ”…election has been a referendum on the political execution of a Prime Minister” could come back to bite him. If the Independents take his advice he’ll probably remain in Opposition for the foreseeable future.

The media and the Opposition are suggesting that the country rejected the current Government: “a humiliating rebuff” was the way ABC Radio National’s breakfast presenter Fran Kelly framed it in her interview with Federal minister Tony Burke on Monday morning.

Continue reading "Abbott losing his own election referendum" »

Like many young Australians, I move house a lot. Since Kevin07, I have been located at four different addresses within four different electorates. So when Julia Gillard dressed up in pure white to call an election, I went online and started to update my details with the AEC. So did my girlfriend.

A couple of clicks and a signature and soon I was done. My girlfriend had a little more trouble. It seems she had disappeared from the electoral roll. Immediately I became suspicious. I castigated her for insulting our democratic privilege and never voting. I had already spent most of the weekend sulking because she refused to join me at the polls in August to hand out ‘how to vote’ cards. ‘You obviously don’t care about how much money we get given after you have a baby because the Government has pulled RU486 from the shelves,’ I said, slipping from my soap box as I wagged my finger at her.

‘I vote,’ she shrieked. ‘I voted for Kevin, I even voted at the Council elections’.

Continue reading "Voting ain’t easy when you’re a Russian spy" »

Coalition Senator Michael Ronaldson decries the current mixed funding system of elections in his post on the Punch last week.

Early last year the newly elected Government introduced the Commonwealth Electoral Amendments (Political Donations and Other Measures) Bill 2009 to the Senate to make political donations more transparent. However the bill was defeated by Liberal Senators who did not want to clean up our campaign finance system.

Australia has a very clean electoral system by world standards. While we don’t hear complaints in Australia that elections have been rigged, the funding system is in need of some reform.

Continue reading "Clean up our election laws now" »

Last year I had the honour of being elected to the Australian Parliament by the people of Mayo in South Australia.  I was elected at a by-election following the retirement of Alexander Downer who had represented Mayo since its inception in 1984.

The by-election was hard fought with ten other candidates representing all political parties and a range of independent (with the exception being the Labor Party who chose not to run a candidate presumably because it is so ashamed of how it has treated the Lower Lakes, but that is another story…)

Something struck me during and following the campaign that I did not expect and that was the genuine lack of interest in participating in the election. 

Continue reading "Trust the voters? Why not?" »