Skip to main content

70% of Voters Didn't Vote for a Labor Government - Misrepresenting a Statistic | Australian Federal Election 2022

Caricature of Anthony Albanese - Australia's 31st Prime Minister
Anthony Albanese - Australia's 31st Prime Minister

In the aftermath of the Australian Federal Election, in which the Australian Labor Party won the right to govern, taking over from the Liberal/National party coalition, one of the most misrepresented statistics I have seen bandied around is:

70% of voters did not vote for a Labor Government.

At a surface level that's true give or take a percentage point depending on the final count of the primary votes (primary vote being every voter's first choice in our preferential voting system). However the people who are holding this statement up (notably the so-called 'Freedom Parties') for validation of the claim that the majority of Australians don't want a Labor government are grossly misrepresenting the Australian people.

Using myself as an example, I put The Greens as my first choice, knowing full well they have next to no chance of forming a government. I'm most aligned with The Greens in terms of their policies and ideology and I like to support them on the off chance there's a Green swing in my electorate - extremely unlikely. 

However if any candidate gets above 4% of the primary vote in an election they become eligible for government election funding to support their future campaigns. So it's not a complete waste of time to vote for your preferred minor party/candidate, even if they don't win their seat. Maybe next election they will. The Greens have won seats. In fact, this election has been one of their best results, so it's not totally out of the question in my electorate.

Want to guess what my second preference was?

Labor. Of the major parties, Labor is who I'm most aligned with.

Take a guess at my third preference...

Liberal. Yes, given a choice, I would rather have kept our current Prime Minister/government than give any preferences to the remaining minor 'freedom' parties.

I'm fairly certain plenty of people may have voted with the strategy of putting their preferred minor party first, and then putting their preferred major party higher in the mix than any other minor party.

The Freedom Parties

I'm not 100% clear on which of the minor parties would call themselves the 'Freedom' parties but I am kind of sure they include One Nation and the United Australia Party as the two largest candidates. At least those are the two I've paid more attention to over the last year. More so than The Greens for that matter because those two parties spend so much time complaining, nit picking, calling everything out they don't like, and generally sounding like awful people.

These parties (all of them, not just the two I mentioned above) combined barely got 15% of the primary vote.

Naturally their supporters are claiming the election, while not rigged, certainly had some suspect goings at many of polling booths, from volunteers giving incorrect voting instructions, to preferences being distributed incorrectly during the count (after receiving suspect phone calls from the Australian Electoral Commission who are obviously corrupt). Let's also not forget that polling booths distribute pencils to fill in your form, so you know someone during the count is going to break out an eraser.

What is most laughable is calls by these voters to do away with preferential voting (which is so confusing a concept, understanding that you can rank candidates from your favorite to least favorite) and give voters just one vote for one party/candidate.

In this election if it was just one vote per person the Liberal/National Coalition government would have won. From all the rhetoric I heard from the Freedom parties, that would be the absolute worst possible outcome. A change of government is actually a very minor win for their campaigns.

70% of Voters Didn't Vote for a Labor Government

If you're a Freedom Party supporter (or you're an elected member from one of these parties) you can sure has hell hold the incoming Labor Government to task by saying 70% of voters didn't vote for a Labor Government. You're not wrong.

The thing is, 85% of voters didn't vote for the freedom parties first. Not a single freedom party got more than 5% of the primary vote. That's pretty much 95% of voters did not vote for your party either.

30% of voters did vote for a Labor Government first. Enough people put Labor high enough in their preferences to allow them to win the election. At the very least, 51% (maybe more in the final count) of Australians would 'prefer' a Labor Government to a Liberal/National coalition, Greens, or any Freedom Party candidate.

The primary vote is not the whole story of Australian elections. Preferences matter and should never be ignored. Particularly not in the post election summary.

Comments

Buy Gifts and Apparel featuring art by TET.

Popular posts from this blog

TV Series Review: Skeleton Crew (2024) (Disney+) *No Spoilers*

I f you saw the trailer for  Skeleton Crew  and decided the show looked too much like Star Wars for little kids, and didn't watch, you missed out on a real treat. While I will say this show was definitely targeted at bringing in younger fans to the Star Wars universe, it is very much more like family viewing than kids only TV. Not to mention, characters are literally gunned down or murdered on this show, but without the really graphic violence you might see on a more adult orientated show. It's actually no more kid only orientated than the first series of Stranger Things  (2016), or even the original  Star Wars  (1977) movie. In fact the whole show is a not so subtle homage to original Star Wars (1977), Treasure Island  (1950), and eighties movies like The Goonies  (1985), ET  (1982), Explorers  (1985) and others. The plot is very straight forward. A group of children, living in the Star Wars equivalent of the suburbs, find an aband...

I'm Confused About Why People Prefer to Say Discombobulated?

D iscombobulated. Is a word that I think someone rediscovered about three or four years ago (maybe more because the pandemic years have thrown out my sense of time) and now I hear it a lot. It's not a new word by any means, but when I started hearing multiple celebrities using it in everyday sentences, I actively had to look up what it meant. Define it with as many synonyms as you like but essentially it's just another word meaning 'confused'. Seinfeld Quotes: Quotes.net The words are pretty much interchangeable. He was discombobulated by too many choices. He was confused by too many choices.  My confusion is the length of the word. It's unnecessarily long with too many syllables. There are many other words that mean confused, and therefore also mean discombobulated. Most of them are shorter and easier to say. So why not just say 'confused'? Perhaps discombobulated sounds more intelligent, maybe?  Hawaii Five-0 Quotes: Quotes.net I've noticed it gets us...

TV Series Review: Creature Commandos (2024) *No Spoilers*

O fficially, Creature Commandos is the first show of James Gunn's kind of reboot of the DCU. Technically though, it starts with James Gunn's, The Suicide Squad , and includes his series, Peacemaker , as the events of both are either referenced or felt within the show. Potentially that means Margot Robbie is Harley Quinn in the DCU, but I'd be surprised if she would even want another crack at it, let alone that James didn't recast the role. However that's a whole other rabbit hole for a character that may not appear again for at least a few more years. Creature Commandos is Suicide Squad but with monsters, and no real threat of Suicide - well, having your head blown off if you stray from the mission at least. Though I don't recall that being a thing in Gunn's Suicide Squad movie since the team was renamed 'Task Force X'? Amanda Waller (Viola Davis) somehow still has a job, but is no longer allowed to use humans on her team, so she assembles a team of...

TV Series Review: The Penguin (2024) *No Spoilers*

W hile we wait for an eternity (well an eternity in movie fan years anyway) for The Batman Part 2 , sequel to Matt Reeves acclaimed, The Batman  (2022), we have, what is essentially a direct sequel with  The Penguin , a limited. eight episode, TV Series set within a week or two of the end of the first film. Unfortunately it's a direct sequel to Colin Farrell's Penguin rather than Robert Pattinson's, Bruce Wayne/Batman. Fortunately that's the only real disappointment I have with this series.   Right from the first episode The Penguin establishes itself as a show for grown ups who enjoy actual character development, that hooks you in, is thought provoking, and raises questions that you expect will be answered as the story unfolds. After the events of The Batman, there is something of a power vacuum left in Gotham's crime world that Oswald 'Oz' Cobb a.k.a. The Penguin, sets out to fill using his experience, quick thinking, and his ability to hustle his way into...

Real Flying Car Prototypes That Look Like What the Movies Promised - Ace VTOL GT Slipstream, Alef Model A, and the Bellwether Flying Cars

Ace eVTOL GT Slipstream Flying Car. I've been a little obsessed with flying cars of late and I thought I was done with the subject for now but then Google News put  flying car company, Ace Vtol , based out of Perth, Western Australia in front of me. How could I not take a look?  The GT Slipstream's next-generation Arc Reaction Engines. Images: Ace Vtol website. Especially when their flying car, the  Ace eVTOL GT Slipstream , kind of looks like a regular car (in terms of size and shape) and has engines that look like they're straight out of a sci-fi movie. Even more surprising is you can actually pre-order one of these vehicles . Ace Vtol has done a USD$250 million deal with Palm Beach, FL based Aeroauto , the leading retailer of eVTOL vehicles in the United States to sell the craft to future owners. The GT Slipstream is described on Ace Vtol's website as follows: The aircraft, named the GT Slipstream, is a two-seater flying “muscle” car that will reach spee...

Introducing Resident Dragon: The Trials and Tribulations of Living in a Shared House with a Dragon in the Suburbs

Resident Dragon Cast: TET, Red the Dragon Cool Froyd the Cat, and Grrr Dog. Buy Prints of finished toons . L ast year (2024), for my birthday in May, my sister bought me a quality, metal bodied, ball point pen (black ink).  As someone who likes to sketch with ball point pens, and with a big concern that these last few years I really wasn't drawing as much as someone who considers themselves to be an artist should, I decided to put the pen to good use. In June of the same year I bought two A5 sketchbooks and spent as much time as I needed to fill a page with ball point pen 'doodles', each morning after breakfast.  I'm predominantly a cartoonist who's always drawn from imagination, so filling a page in a sketch book is not a challenge. I just draw a line, or a circle, or whatever and see what emerges. Filling Sketch Books Just to Draw More Filling an A5 sketchbook page would take me about 20-25 minutes. I drew all kinds of random things, occasionally using the time to...

Movie Review: The Fall Guy (2024) *Minor Spoilers*

W hen I initially heard they were making a movie version of the TV series, The Fall Guy (1981-86) , I was definitely interested, as a person who tuned in to that series, weekly, when it originally aired. I had intended to see The Fall Guy in the cinema but, for whatever reason, didn't get there, and didn't prioritize seeing the film as the reviews, and more importantly, general information about the movie came out. Specifically, The Fall Guy makes no effort to capture whatever magic it was the TV show had that made it the show it was. A fact that is driven home by the reworked TV series theme song, played over the end credits and behind the scenes footage of stunts in the film, that removes all references to real world actors and replaces iconic line of "I'm the unknown stuntman who made Redford such a star" with the nonsensical "I'm the unknown stuntman who tries to win your heart." - sure... I guess... I mean, the original song is about never gett...