“these so-called spontaneous community movements, by apparently complete coincidence, appeared in a range of Liberal seats and made no appearance in Labor seats”.
Well, yeah, they were originally Liberal members, of course they’d be campaigning in Liberal seats.
“The intention was to get people to think, ‘That nice teal candidate could almost be a Liberal, I’ll vote for her.’”
Almost like the Teals are Liberals that differ on one or two key policies.
The fact that he’s blaming preferential voting is worrying, I expect the Libs will start adopting that stance across the board soon. Our system isn’t perfect, but it’s much better than the absolute shitshow that is first past the post.
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Liberal candidates who care about the environment are winning our seats!
You’d think this would be the wake-up call to shift the needle on party policy regarding the environment. But nope.
“If Australia had a first-past-the-post system, none of the six teals who entered the parliament in 2022 would have been elected” he declared. “Of the six, most had a first preference vote which was only in the 30s or even 20s, a long way behind the first-preference vote secured by the Liberal candidate.”
This is a good thing, mate. I’d preference a teal candidate over a Liberal candidate any day. And it turns out, that goes for a lot of us. I’m glad we don’t have a first-past-the-post system. It forces people to hold their nose and vote for a candidate they think has a chance of winning, just to prevent the candidate they hate from getting in. I much prefer having the choice of voting for who I want, and then falling back to my second, third, fourth choices instead of being forced to vote for my sixth-preferred candidate, just to prevent my ninth-preferred candidate from getting in.
“If Australia had a first-past-the-post system, none of the six teals who entered the parliament in 2022 would have been elected” he declared. “Of the six, most had a first preference vote which was only in the 30s or even 20s, a long way behind the first-preference vote secured by the Liberal candidate.”
This is an asinine thing to say anyway, because it assumes people would just vote for whoever they preferenced first under our current system. We know people would vote tactically if we had a FPTP system.
Voting for my sixth preference over my ninth is what would be considered tactical voting.
Yes? My point was that Fletcher’s unspoken premise is that if we had FPTP, the results would just translate over 1:1 from the primary vote. They wouldn’t.
What kind of arse about thinking gets you to a position to state this view in front of… people…
