this post was submitted on 16 Oct 2024
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???
Also, does he mean moving to optional preferential or going to a FPTP system? Frankly, fuck both ideas but FPTP would be the worst.
He means optional preferential. It's what Queensland council elections use already, and at the time of the elections earlier this year the BCC Lord Mayor made comments about how the Fitzgerald Inquiry had recommended optional preferential and that it was wrong to switch to compulsory. The LNP runs on a very successful "just vote 1" campaign in Council elections, which is one of the reasons they control a 19/27 seat supermajority in BCC (5 Labor, 2 Greens, 1 independent).
I tried finding out why the FI made that recommendation but couldn't find a good answer. I did find other articles that pointed out FI also recommended changes to number of seats & voting system should not be decided by Parliament...and that in 2016 both parties were guilty of breaking that rule—LNP increasing number of seats, Labor switching to compulsory preferential. That turned out to be a fascinating story of powerbroking and political gamesmanship.
It's not clear to me that moving to optional is what he means:
This quote suggests to me he wants to get rid of preferences all together.
Yeah I understand the lack of clarity in that statement, and I have no doubt that if he could get away with it he'd get rid of preferential voting in its entirety. But if you look at the context where the LNP has been pointing to the Fitzgerald Inquiry, and the comments by the Brisbane Lord Mayor, and the fact that Australians on the whole are very proud of our preferential voting system, he's definitely only proposing switching to optional preferential. Which is dangerous enough, considering how effective the LNP's "just vote 1" campaigns have been at Council elections.
Fair call. It would be nice if QLD had an upper house to hopefully block proposals like this.
Yeah absolutely. Or if we had a unicameral proportionally representative lower house, like New Zealand's national parliament, that would also be an improvement over the current situation.