🚀 go-pugleaf

On Oct 30, 5:39 pm, tim <t...@nospam.com> wrote:
> On Mon, 29 Oct 2007 21:55:03 -0700, Fran <Fran.B...@gmail.com> wrote:
> >On Oct 30, 2:59 pm, tim <t...@nospam.com> wrote:
> >> News poll has Libs only 6 points behind the ALP, no wonder Rudd did
> >> another backflip on climate change, now supports Howard on NOT doing a
> >> plan for 2012 if China and india are not on the table along with the
> >> US.
>
> >> Rudds plan is to follow the opinion polls and Howard and say me too on
> >> everything. No wonder Rudd has to have over 300 comittess on
> >> everything to come up with ideas because at present he's copying
> >> Howard all the way. If Rudd wins he's not have Howard/Costello to
> >> reply on for ideas.
>
> >> I think the Australian people are starting to see through Rudd.
> >> Not before time either.
>
> >When was the last time the coalition won an election without being in
> >front on primaries?
>
> A couple of the elections the ALP was 51% to 49% and 51.5% to 48.5%
> and still won the election. One of them was against Beazily. Hawke in
> one election was also down after the election but because he like
> Howard targetted margin seats won government

Strictly FYI ...

There are several features of Australian electoral arrangements that
predispose, one way or another who get to form government.

1. Over the last 60 years, supporters of official conservatism (i.e.
The Liberals, Nationals/Country Party, the DLP -- let's call them
SOCs) tend to be better distributed between electorates than opponents
of official conservatism (i.e. ALP, Greens, Democrats, Australia
Party, DOGS -- let's call them OOCs). Given that who forms government
reflects who wins the most electorates, from a tactical point of view,
the OOC vote is malapportioned. The ALP tends to rack up big numbers
in some seats but struggle in others, when they'd be better off if
they could spread themselves about more.

They have some compensation though in that the preferential system
allows them to milk two cognate constituencies that would be wedged if
in the same party. The SOCs used to be able to do this with the
Country Party/Nationals and thr DLP, but the demise/decline of these
conservative and anti-communist parties to their right has weakened
this advantage.

2. Electoral divisions are not all of equal size. Historically, the
SOCs have tended to be distributed in greater numbers in smaller
electoral divisions whereas the OOCs have tended to occupy the larger
ones. This means that on the whole, the votes of SOCs have tended to
be more efficient in underpinning government than those of OOCs. The
OOCs would have perfgormed much more strongly if the system had been
arranged on a one vote one value basis.

To illustrate this principle, imagine a state with 2,000,000 electors.
If the electoral system were one vote one value, one might have 50
electorates with 40,000 electors each. Each vote really would have
equal significance, in theory at least, with every other. In theory,
if we are all equal before the law, we should all have an equal say in
deciding what the law is.

But imagine that half of these fifty electorates (i.e. 25 of them) had
only 20,000 electors, (let's call them High Value Electorates -- HVEs)
and the other half had 60,000 electors) (let's call them Low Value
Electorates -- LVEs). In order to win an HVE, you'd need 10,001 votes,
but to win an LVE, you'd need 30,001 votes.

A party that dominated in the LVEs would need at least 7,540,026 votes
to win government 26-24 assuming it just won all LVEs and one HVE. Its
rival in the HVEs would need just 280,026 votes to do the same thing
assuming it just won all HVEs and one LVE. In short, the votes of
people in the small electorates would be nearly 27 times as valuable
as in the large ones. Since pitching at a smaller crowd is less
expensive in marketing terms and the largesse you can bribe them with
much greater in per capita terms, no prizes for guessing what will
happen. In a sense, this is what happens with the Senate, because the
large states get far less representation per capita than the small
states.  Hence, Mersey Hospital ...

The effects of 1 & 2 have seen the conservatives win in 1954, 1961,
1969 and 1998 despite being behind on 2PP. In the 1950s and 1960s, the
differentials between rural and city electorates were much larger than
today.

Fran