Tim Wilson’s interview on the ABC last night was disgusting David. What a nasty little twerp he is.
He is gone for good, there is no way the liberal party will pre select him again
I didn't see that, will have to look it up.
Is this the only country in the world ,were the party who gets the most votes don't win.
Seriously 3 years of these idiots running the country ,we should be worried.
I don't know Mr Bengal, maybe we should ask the Americans, they put up with Trump for 4 years after he got less votes than Hillary, oh and G Bush the younger got less votes than Al Gore. Not to mention the way the Dems in the USA get way more votes in House of Reps elections and end up with less seats.
But, what exactly are you suggesting?
A direct vote for the PM (in a Westminster system, how would that work)? If so, first past the post or preferential?
Plus, if you suggest most votes wins, how do you do this? What if you have 3 candidates for PM, the Liberal gets 40,000 votes, the National Party gets 30,000 votes and the ALP gets 41,000 votes. Aah, the ALP wins. Does that make sense? Or maybe we go to the French system (called a second ballot and also common in South America from memory), whereby, if no candidate gets 50% + 1 votes in the first round, the 2 candidates with the highest number of votes go on to a second round, it is really a bit like postponed preferential.
To go a little further with the example above, adding together the votes for the Libs, Nats and ALP we get 111,000 votes, what if there were also 20 minor candidates who got 6,000 votes each, so, their votes mean nothing?
With the long and now very substantial reduction in the primary votes for the major parties, we should be very thankful we have preferential voting as it allows us all to have a say without resorting to voting for candidates we really don't support. We can take the risk of voting for an independent who is only a slim chance of winning as we can still allocate preferences.
The reality is that the LNP may have a higher primary vote in this election than the ALP, but there are a lot of reasons for this, not least that there were a lot of ALP voters (and Greens voters too) who voted strategically in the electorates with Teal independents because they know the ALP could not win those seats and the best chance of dislodging the Lib was to vote for the independent. If you add in the votes in those electorates which would normally go to the ALP I reckon the ALP and the Libs/Nats would have about the same primary vote. Both are very low, around the 35% mark.
The big problem for the Libs/Nats is that they only get preferences from the fringe loonies, and the fringe loony vote (LibDems, One Nation, UAP etc) is far smaller than the Greens vote and Greens preferences tend to go to the ALP. So, although the drop in primary votes is a huge issue for both parties, the ALP can survive it better than the Libs/Nats.
I'm hoping for a minority ALP government with a lot of pressure from the cross bench to seriously deal with climate change, corruption, indigenous affairs and real equality for women.
DS