Australia held a federal election for all seats in the House, and many of the seats in the Senate, on May 22. The Green Party made its strongest showing ever in Australia, increasing its representation in the House from one seat to at least three seats, with the possibility of more. Elections for the lower house do not use proportional representation. In the Senate, which is elected by proportional representation, the Labor Party will probably need the support of the 9 Green Senators to reach a majority. See this wikipedia story, which continues to be updated.
Innteresting, Richard, and I know you write occasionally about elections outside the US. Curious as to what criteria you use for what you write about. For example, I saw nothing here about the significant Northern Ireland election of earlier this month.
USA — in Gerrymander-Plurality ANTI-Democracy Stone Age.
—
PR
APPV
TOTSOP
https://www.yahoo.com/news/scott-morrison-australias-conservative-pragmatist-035525543.html
standard brain dead media NOOO mention of pct of seats vs pct of votes
my choice of blogs about foreign election returns is somewhat arbitrary, I admit.
But in no case have I ever blogged about an election that was in just a region of a country, as opposed to the entire country.
Stockfly wants to know why the El Reno erection wasn’t covered.
Labor will probably need the Greens in the House too. Labor needs 76 seats, right now projections show only 73. They may end up with a minority government or hung parliament.
Got it, Richard. My thoughts? 1. There’s plenty of countries that use PV as part, at least, of their elections, so singling out Oz on that reason alone wouldn’t interest me. Some people have said climate change worries were a factor on the Aussie vote, but I doubt Labor will be THAT MUCH more aggressive on the issue than Liberals, even if Greens try to force that in a coalition. 2. Even if Stormont wasn’t “national,” it at least potentially has more global impact.
The garbage comment on May 22, 2022 at 3:23 pm is from Robert K Stock.
FATAL Parl systems — same hack monsters having both legis and exec powers — and sometime also judic powers.
—-
PR – legis
APPV – nonpartisan execs/judics
TOTAL SOP
The Australian Senate has 6 Senators per state elected by proportional representation. It often happens that the party that won the lower house doesn’t win in the Senate.
Expanding the US Senate to 6 members per state would result in there being 300 Senators. I don’t think it is necessary to expand the US Senate by that much in that way.
IMO, it would be a good idea to consider breaking up any state that has more than 5% of the US population into new states. This could result in CA and TX being divided into 3-4 states each, and FL and NY being divided into 2-3 new states each.
The government tripled the number of members that a party needed to remain qualified. They also required the names to more unique. The Liberal Democrats, which is usually described as the Australian libertarian party, was being forced to change the name of their party as too similar to the Liberals (this action was suspended because of the snap election).
I have always been an advocate for proportional representation here in the USA. I believe it would give better representation to people and especially third parties.
That’s interesting Jim. There was also Democratic Labor, which is more socially conservative; not sure how they are up to these days.
Even more significant than the increase in the number of Greens elected is the success of a somewhat informal coalition of independents, called the “teal” group after the color of their jointly produced campaign materials. The new lower house will include 9 independents compared with 2 Greens, although it’s unclear how many of the independents are “teals”. As is typical for first-past-the-post elections, the Greens got their 2 seats on about 12 per cent of the vote, while independents got their 9 seats on only 6 per cent of the vote, partly because the “teals” carefully picked which districts to run in.
There’s some reason to believe that this will lead to the formation of a new party:
https://fruitsandvotes.wordpress.com/2022/05/21/australia-2022-when-does-a-group-of-independents-become-a-political-party
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2022/may/24/teal-wave-expected-to-spread-to-victorias-state-election
The Truth once again shows that he doesn’t know what the truth is. He’s been told half a dozen times that I’m not Stock and he repeats his lies for whatever griftopia or other reasons.
Walter: Interesting. But, until a multiparty system actually took off, even 6 senators a state would not be enough to let third parties do a PR breakthrough.
I’d support 100 “national senators” on top of the current 100 of all 50 states; I say that this doesn’t break the equal representation, as that’s … equal to other states … but some originalist nutter on SCOTUS would probably disagree.
Well, really, I’d support neutering the US Senate into a quasi-House of Lords.
I would not water down the power of the Senate. I am a believer in bicameralism. Legislatures should always “think twice” before passing anything. Sometimes, even that is not enough.
USA Senate — carry forward Rot of 1775-1789 — one State – one vote — almost fatal in 1775-1781 Am Rev War
———
Perhaps time delays on passing stuff – in peacetimes esp.
Sunset times for ALL laws.
Walter Ziobro – actually each state in Australia elects 12 Senators, with the two autonomous territories electing 2 Senators each – a total of 76 Senators
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_Senate
The garbage comments on May 23, 2022 at 12:36 pm and 12:38 pm are from Robert K Stock.
@Skylar,
Democratic Labour (note they use the British spelling of Labor) has been deregistered. The Australian Labor Party (ALP) had objected to the name. The two paries also used “Labor ALP” and “Labour DLP”. DLP also failed the new 1500 member requirement.
The Liberal Party objected to Liberal Democrats and The New Liberals. The Liberal Democrats were in the process of being deregistered when the election was called, which apparently suspends registration activity including that of new parties.
The New Liberals apparent reregistered as TNL and ran as such in Senate elections.
Several parties voluntarily deregistered, including Voluntary Euthanasia, which perhaps was a victim of its success.
The Pirate Party deregistered and then merged with several other small parties as FUSION: Science, Pirate, Secular, Climate Emergency their web page specifically credits the new higher member threshold to forcing the merger.