A quick post on slurs and preferencing

I’m not planning on doing an ornate series of posts for this election like I was for the last election. If I have to say anything, I probably will say that my opinion on the fibre to the node is the main one in a series of issues that will possibly sway me towards preferencing the ALP over the Libs.

The election is still a couple of weeks away, though.

Ok. That out of the way, it’s worth getting in a post about hardened, rusted-on political party members. I’m not a member of a political party and because I also consider myself a swinging voter, I think that I’m way more objective than most.

I had this discussion with someone on Twitter who is honest enough to post his party membership upfront in his Twitter bio. He’s a Labor man. But I thought this was a rather interesting tweet when he posted it:

Post election post

You have to love parliamentary democracy. Even better, you have to love the comments on this article in the Herald-Sun that proves my point that I made several weeks ago about Australians: We all know bugger all about our own system.

The article itself begs some pretty powerful questions.

Firstly, how illiterate actually is the Herald-Sun's readership?

Secondly, is our system actually broken?

What is a donkey vote? (Keeping your member "local" part four)

Well the candidates are all in as far as both the House of Representatives and Senate are concerned. I will do a post in the future on voting for the Senate, but at the moment I'm looking closely at how to get a local candidate into the House of Reps.

And although this series looks at the electorate of Jagajaga specifically, I hope that those of you who live in the rest of Australia can get something out of it.

First of all, it's interesting, but I thought that there would be more candidates for Jagajaga. I thought maybe the CEC might field a candidate. And that maybe there might be an independent or two.

But it does appear that as far as Jagajaga goes, all the candidates are going to be representing political parties.