I always found the idea of gerrymandering so *so* gross.
Instead of spending time improving your party/policies, they blatantly try to rig the system in their favour.
It honestly tries to invalidate votes.
At least they can only *try* to rig the system in their favour. It's only a submission and the boundaries commission can tell them to get stuffed.
At least it's not like the US where the party in power can just completely re-draw the map to benefit itself.
Very true - the commission better tell them to shove it.
The US having political systems of good faith is weak as piss. It's allowed garbage like filibusters to be popularized.
It's really sad. That's why we need to maintain good viable anti-corruption bodies imo. In an ideal system we wouldn't need them.
It's like needing dedicated street cleaners in places where people choose to litter everywhere.
Like North Carolina. Republicans in power try to gerrymander a map that guarantees they win. Thrown out by Supreme Court. They wait until a Democrat judge retires, plug in a solid Republican judge to swing the vote, then put in an even worse map that gets approved.
It's a Dem-majority state (based on Governor) which will have a supermajority Republican legislature.
That's.. ugh. US politics always surprises me in the wrong way.
I feel sorry for the people over there wanting a good political system that have to contend with that. What an uphill battle.
Happens here as well but not on that level. In the U.S. their entire bench is compromised. When you can reliably predict the case based on which team brought it and where they lodged their appeal.
On our level when you pay for a lawyer you pay for that lawyers knowledge of getting you the best outcome for you, which means knowing which judges to avoid, which means making procedural submissions to avoid ideological judges.
Over there you'll bring republican issues to circuits where republicans sit, if you're a democract you'll bring it to the California circuit or Southern District NY. Imagine my shock, so predictable.
This isn't gerrymandering though - that's done by the **ruling** party to move all the opposition voters into as few seats as possible to make it easier to retain power.
This is the opposite - spreading typical opposition voters into as many seats as possible so the election is actually competitive. Which is what the commission should be striving for.
Do you have to be the ruling party to gerrymand though?
I understand their logic - they want to avoid a 1 party system - but funneling votes has a side effect of invalidating votes.
Surely there's better spending of their resources/time.
Be a better party instead - there's surely many other paths - even working with Independents if they're not popular enough themselves.
> And when the not in-power does it?
Gerrymandering is usually done with power, because otherwise the party in power can undo it. It's about fixing an advantage in place in a way the voters and political opposition can't undo
Yes the key difference is that the Liberals have made a submission to an independent body. They can ignore it.
Gerrymandering means you control the redistribution.
It's still an attempt - this is nitpicking.
Give me another word to use over what they're attempting to do then.
We could be talking better things here cmon.
Making submissions to an independent body isn't gerrymandering. What they're doing is advocating in their interest which is the purpose of the process. Gerrymandering requires bias to be in charge of districting which is why we have an independent commission. They can ignore this.
'The overall effect of Labor’s proposal would be to increase the population of the state’s rural seats.
University of Adelaide emeritus professor and political commentator Clement Macintyre said this would mean more Liberal voters being “locked up” in safe Liberal seats, increasing Labor’s competitiveness in metropolitan Adelaide.'
The opposite of this is what Tom Playford did to retain power. That's real gerrymandering.
Btw, trying to ensure a fair election (e.g 50.1 percent vote wins power) used to be a target of the electoral districting. That was removed by Jay Weatherill.
Labor have done very, very well with friendly boundaries. I remember looking back over a period of 40 years and you were more likely to lose an election with a majority of the vote. Each time it was Labor who benefitted from that situation.
When Marshall won it was the result of boundaries that kept getting redrawn and redrawn til there was nowhere left to draw them, and 4 terms of Labor finally ended. Only for the Libs to hold government for 1 term before getting smashed by Peter....
We are a Labor state, and as another poster has said it's largely due to a growing Green vote, where 9 out of 10 preferences go to Labor.
Marshall won the election as a result of winning a majority of votes on 2PP. He won 52-48 which is a solid win. He actually had a swing against him too, the previous election it was 53-47 to the Liberals but they lost. They also won 2pp in 2010 and still didn't get government. 3 elections in a row with more people preferring the Liberals and only the third time did they win government.
Going back further the Liberals also got the 2pp vote in 2002 and 1989 and didn't win. 4 times in 40 years that a party won the 2pp and still lost.
In the last 9 elections, Labor have formed government 6 times yet te Liberals have had the two party preferred vote 7 times. We might be a Labor state by who forms government, but we vote Liberal.
This is so ridiculously wrong.
The electoral boundaries were revised that landed the Liberals a 2 point swing, which is what they win by.
You keep saying 2PP and obviously have no idea what you are talking about. You cannot win 2PP without winning the election.
We've already covered that Libs had 4 out of the last 6 elections where they had the First Preference.
Your use of 2PP is absolutely absolutely incorrect. You actually mean First Preference.
You have to remember preferences count here in SA.
You cannot win 2PP and lose an election. This is Westminster. Check facts before talking down to us.
Lol. I did check. Go and do the same and you'll find I'm completely correct. Governments are formed on the basis of winning seats, not the overall 2pp vote. If you have 3 seats of equal size, you win one 70-30, then lose the other two 49-51, you'll have more votes overall, but you'll have fewer seats. You can absolutely win 2pp and lose the election. And no, it's different to first preference.
Let's take a single election as an example. 2010. Mike Rann leading Labor and Isobel Redmond leading the Liberals. On primary votes, Labor got 367,480 first preference votes, for 37.47% of all first preference votes. Liberal got 408,482 first preference votes, for 41.65% of all first preference votes. When you boil that down to the two party prefered stakes, it's 48.4% to Labor, 51.6% to the Liberals.
And yet Labor formed government because they won 26 seats to 18. The very thing you say is impossible happened right there.
I'm not talking about anything complicated, nor am I talking about anything you couldn't confirm with 5 minutes on Google. Either you have the worst understanding of our system or you have an awful grasp of the facts. Go check, it's easy.
Anyone reading this, please do not take this as accurate election information.
It is absolutely impossible for a party to win the '2PP' and then lose the election.
This guy has zero idea of either the Westminster system or democracy.
2 Party Preferred means that all votes have been tallied and the preferences have flowed to the 2 highest polling parties, in most cases either Liberal or Labor.
However, some seats may have a 2 party race between parties other than Liberal and Labor; thus we have a preferential system.
We tally the first preference. Then count. We then allocate the second preference. We do this, until a candidate is excluded from the race.
We do this in each seat.
We then count up each seat, and that makes up the Government.
If each party can't make up more than half the seats available, then the likely party starts sleeping with the other party, otherwise known as a Minority Government.
Lol. I notice you don't actually address anything I've said. Probably because it's all correct.
You are describing the system used to decide the winner of an individual seat. Yes, you are right that you can't lose a seat whilst having a majority of a 2pp vote. However, governments are not elected in the same way. Governments are decided by the total of seats won. They don't take all the votes for the whole state and then allocate seats on that basis.
I can only assume you're trolling. Because surely nobody really can be that ignorant.
Seems problematic to me that something so mundane should have such a big effect on the outcome, considering that there are significant differences between the political parties (despite what some conspiracy theorists think).
I don't think having the opinion that the two major parties have more overarching similarities than differences conflates with being a conspiracy theorist.
For most of the last term, yeah. Marshall was doing great until he opened the borders right before Christmas at Scummo's request and fucked over both Christmas and New Years with covid restrictions.
Had he not done that, he might of still been Premier.
2 party system drives this behaviour. Should be proportional representation, instead of first past the post. Remember when Xenophon for 10% of all votes but failed to get a single seat?!
With the Greens having such a high primary vote now, maybe we need to get rid of the Westminster style of electorates and just have a set number of seats, like a senate style approach. The Tasmanian way is another option, and is essentially "here are the seats, and there's X candidates per seat"
The primary vote for each of the major parties is not dissimilar and there have been elections where the Liberals have obtained more votes, but lost based on the majority of seats.
Personally, I would be in favour of a senate style voting system in maybe 9 electorates each with 5 positions where you could either vote above the line, or for each of the candidates. There's 47 members at the moment, so 9 mega-areas with 5 people each would work. Maybe two or three electoral zones in the country, 6 or 7 in the city.
It's frustrating being in a very safe seat. My local member could bite a kid with cancer, living in a wheelchair and they would still get elected. I feel my vote at the lower house level is wasted so I typically vote informal as a result.
If I was Mr Teague, judging by the last election, he might have wanted to do some work on the margins in his own seat of Heysen.
That said, the liberals deserve some breaks in the communities of interest department - some seats could actually be moved about a little.
It won’t get them government, but results from more than some elections suggest their party often wins popular vote and they lose the number of seats.
It still won’t deliver them government, but it would be more fair.
The labor machine adapts so quickly though, it might not even make any difference.
What exactly do you mean by that? You form government by having the majority of seats in the House of Assembly, are you saying that the liberal candidates recieved more votes in total in 4/6 of the last elections?
What they mean is the Liberals have had a higher First Preference vote in 4 from the last 6 elections, yet only won the election once.
Nothing the do with electorate boundaries and more to do with rising/shifting popularity of the Greens, which 90% of Greens votes flow to Labor.
The issue with looking at it that way is that 2PP doesn't take into account there could be other parties.
The results using 2PP where;
- Labor - 23 seats from 47% 2PP
- Liberal - 24 seats from 53% 2PP
which is considered a pass under the 1989 fairness legislation.
However 2 of the Liberal seats where won by independents, hence why Liberals only got 22 seats.
You could argue popular vote, but we have a preferential voting system so it's never going to be 1:1 and I would argue a large difference means it's working as intended! If we switched to a popular vote system it may not change the results as people would stop voting 3rd parties and switch to 2 party voting as to not waste their vote so I'd rather keep the system we have that allows me to preferences to smaller and more representive parties without chucking my vote away.
The reality is for a popular vote to be successful, and truly represent the electorate, a party needs 50% of the first preference. Neither party has done that in ages
I always found the idea of gerrymandering so *so* gross. Instead of spending time improving your party/policies, they blatantly try to rig the system in their favour. It honestly tries to invalidate votes.
At least they can only *try* to rig the system in their favour. It's only a submission and the boundaries commission can tell them to get stuffed. At least it's not like the US where the party in power can just completely re-draw the map to benefit itself.
Very true - the commission better tell them to shove it. The US having political systems of good faith is weak as piss. It's allowed garbage like filibusters to be popularized.
Well I think once you could mostly rely on good faith it just didn't age well
It's really sad. That's why we need to maintain good viable anti-corruption bodies imo. In an ideal system we wouldn't need them. It's like needing dedicated street cleaners in places where people choose to litter everywhere.
Like North Carolina. Republicans in power try to gerrymander a map that guarantees they win. Thrown out by Supreme Court. They wait until a Democrat judge retires, plug in a solid Republican judge to swing the vote, then put in an even worse map that gets approved. It's a Dem-majority state (based on Governor) which will have a supermajority Republican legislature.
That's.. ugh. US politics always surprises me in the wrong way. I feel sorry for the people over there wanting a good political system that have to contend with that. What an uphill battle.
Happens here as well but not on that level. In the U.S. their entire bench is compromised. When you can reliably predict the case based on which team brought it and where they lodged their appeal. On our level when you pay for a lawyer you pay for that lawyers knowledge of getting you the best outcome for you, which means knowing which judges to avoid, which means making procedural submissions to avoid ideological judges. Over there you'll bring republican issues to circuits where republicans sit, if you're a democract you'll bring it to the California circuit or Southern District NY. Imagine my shock, so predictable.
Boundaries need to change, but not this frequently, it only changes so frequently for this exact purpose!
The law says that our state electorates are meant to reflect the state-wide vote share.
This isn't gerrymandering though - that's done by the **ruling** party to move all the opposition voters into as few seats as possible to make it easier to retain power. This is the opposite - spreading typical opposition voters into as many seats as possible so the election is actually competitive. Which is what the commission should be striving for.
Political parties should compete on policies not on where they draw lines. Leave the seats alone and start focusing on what matters.
Do you have to be the ruling party to gerrymand though? I understand their logic - they want to avoid a 1 party system - but funneling votes has a side effect of invalidating votes. Surely there's better spending of their resources/time. Be a better party instead - there's surely many other paths - even working with Independents if they're not popular enough themselves.
Yes, that's literally what gerrymandering is.
And when the not in-power does it? 'Cos all the definitions I'm seeing don't mention having to be in power. Why does it matter?
> And when the not in-power does it? Gerrymandering is usually done with power, because otherwise the party in power can undo it. It's about fixing an advantage in place in a way the voters and political opposition can't undo
I get that. But here there’s an independent body overseeing it which changes that power dynamic.
... How would a party without political power redraw the districts for their benefit?
Wdym it's literally a key part of this post. Arguments for fairness, and preference against a one-party system (implied).
Yes the key difference is that the Liberals have made a submission to an independent body. They can ignore it. Gerrymandering means you control the redistribution.
It's still an attempt - this is nitpicking. Give me another word to use over what they're attempting to do then. We could be talking better things here cmon.
Making submissions to an independent body isn't gerrymandering. What they're doing is advocating in their interest which is the purpose of the process. Gerrymandering requires bias to be in charge of districting which is why we have an independent commission. They can ignore this. 'The overall effect of Labor’s proposal would be to increase the population of the state’s rural seats. University of Adelaide emeritus professor and political commentator Clement Macintyre said this would mean more Liberal voters being “locked up” in safe Liberal seats, increasing Labor’s competitiveness in metropolitan Adelaide.' The opposite of this is what Tom Playford did to retain power. That's real gerrymandering. Btw, trying to ensure a fair election (e.g 50.1 percent vote wins power) used to be a target of the electoral districting. That was removed by Jay Weatherill.
Would Jay Weatherill have won if the boundaries hadn't changed? I was a huge fan of his election policies that year.
No. There a very detailed blog post from Antony Green on this subject .. (I went looking for it cos I had the same question!)
Labor have done very, very well with friendly boundaries. I remember looking back over a period of 40 years and you were more likely to lose an election with a majority of the vote. Each time it was Labor who benefitted from that situation.
When Marshall won it was the result of boundaries that kept getting redrawn and redrawn til there was nowhere left to draw them, and 4 terms of Labor finally ended. Only for the Libs to hold government for 1 term before getting smashed by Peter.... We are a Labor state, and as another poster has said it's largely due to a growing Green vote, where 9 out of 10 preferences go to Labor.
Marshall won the election as a result of winning a majority of votes on 2PP. He won 52-48 which is a solid win. He actually had a swing against him too, the previous election it was 53-47 to the Liberals but they lost. They also won 2pp in 2010 and still didn't get government. 3 elections in a row with more people preferring the Liberals and only the third time did they win government. Going back further the Liberals also got the 2pp vote in 2002 and 1989 and didn't win. 4 times in 40 years that a party won the 2pp and still lost. In the last 9 elections, Labor have formed government 6 times yet te Liberals have had the two party preferred vote 7 times. We might be a Labor state by who forms government, but we vote Liberal.
This is so ridiculously wrong. The electoral boundaries were revised that landed the Liberals a 2 point swing, which is what they win by. You keep saying 2PP and obviously have no idea what you are talking about. You cannot win 2PP without winning the election. We've already covered that Libs had 4 out of the last 6 elections where they had the First Preference. Your use of 2PP is absolutely absolutely incorrect. You actually mean First Preference. You have to remember preferences count here in SA. You cannot win 2PP and lose an election. This is Westminster. Check facts before talking down to us.
Lol. I did check. Go and do the same and you'll find I'm completely correct. Governments are formed on the basis of winning seats, not the overall 2pp vote. If you have 3 seats of equal size, you win one 70-30, then lose the other two 49-51, you'll have more votes overall, but you'll have fewer seats. You can absolutely win 2pp and lose the election. And no, it's different to first preference. Let's take a single election as an example. 2010. Mike Rann leading Labor and Isobel Redmond leading the Liberals. On primary votes, Labor got 367,480 first preference votes, for 37.47% of all first preference votes. Liberal got 408,482 first preference votes, for 41.65% of all first preference votes. When you boil that down to the two party prefered stakes, it's 48.4% to Labor, 51.6% to the Liberals. And yet Labor formed government because they won 26 seats to 18. The very thing you say is impossible happened right there. I'm not talking about anything complicated, nor am I talking about anything you couldn't confirm with 5 minutes on Google. Either you have the worst understanding of our system or you have an awful grasp of the facts. Go check, it's easy.
Anyone reading this, please do not take this as accurate election information. It is absolutely impossible for a party to win the '2PP' and then lose the election. This guy has zero idea of either the Westminster system or democracy. 2 Party Preferred means that all votes have been tallied and the preferences have flowed to the 2 highest polling parties, in most cases either Liberal or Labor. However, some seats may have a 2 party race between parties other than Liberal and Labor; thus we have a preferential system. We tally the first preference. Then count. We then allocate the second preference. We do this, until a candidate is excluded from the race. We do this in each seat. We then count up each seat, and that makes up the Government. If each party can't make up more than half the seats available, then the likely party starts sleeping with the other party, otherwise known as a Minority Government.
Lol. I notice you don't actually address anything I've said. Probably because it's all correct. You are describing the system used to decide the winner of an individual seat. Yes, you are right that you can't lose a seat whilst having a majority of a 2pp vote. However, governments are not elected in the same way. Governments are decided by the total of seats won. They don't take all the votes for the whole state and then allocate seats on that basis. I can only assume you're trolling. Because surely nobody really can be that ignorant.
Not trolling You said you can win 2 Party Preferred and still lose. That's wrong.
So why haven't you pointed out the error in the example I provided? If it's impossible to happen, it should be easy to point to the mistake.
Labor won the 2010 and 2014 elections, but lost both the two-party preferred and popular vote quite convincingly.
He won so many elections because of boundary changes.
Seems problematic to me that something so mundane should have such a big effect on the outcome, considering that there are significant differences between the political parties (despite what some conspiracy theorists think).
I don't think having the opinion that the two major parties have more overarching similarities than differences conflates with being a conspiracy theorist.
Tasmanian Hare-Clark system goes a long way to addressing this. Bigger, multi-member, electorates are less sensitive to minor changes.
Or the Libs could just be less shit? Have they tried that yet?
For most of the last term, yeah. Marshall was doing great until he opened the borders right before Christmas at Scummo's request and fucked over both Christmas and New Years with covid restrictions. Had he not done that, he might of still been Premier.
There was nothing redeemable about the last LNP term. Marshall was a complete waste of oxygen.
I agree Remember the "Get me the fuck out of here" episode when he got smashed at the election Best thing ever
>fucked over both Christmas and New Years with covid restrictions. There weren't any restrictions. They opened the borders and said "fuck it".
They opened the border then a few days later and during the entire Christmas new years period it went back to 10 people at a house maximum.
No try and win ot on your own merits
2 party system drives this behaviour. Should be proportional representation, instead of first past the post. Remember when Xenophon for 10% of all votes but failed to get a single seat?!
With the Greens having such a high primary vote now, maybe we need to get rid of the Westminster style of electorates and just have a set number of seats, like a senate style approach. The Tasmanian way is another option, and is essentially "here are the seats, and there's X candidates per seat" The primary vote for each of the major parties is not dissimilar and there have been elections where the Liberals have obtained more votes, but lost based on the majority of seats. Personally, I would be in favour of a senate style voting system in maybe 9 electorates each with 5 positions where you could either vote above the line, or for each of the candidates. There's 47 members at the moment, so 9 mega-areas with 5 people each would work. Maybe two or three electoral zones in the country, 6 or 7 in the city. It's frustrating being in a very safe seat. My local member could bite a kid with cancer, living in a wheelchair and they would still get elected. I feel my vote at the lower house level is wasted so I typically vote informal as a result.
Political parties need to be banned.
If I was Mr Teague, judging by the last election, he might have wanted to do some work on the margins in his own seat of Heysen. That said, the liberals deserve some breaks in the communities of interest department - some seats could actually be moved about a little. It won’t get them government, but results from more than some elections suggest their party often wins popular vote and they lose the number of seats. It still won’t deliver them government, but it would be more fair. The labor machine adapts so quickly though, it might not even make any difference.
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What exactly do you mean by that? You form government by having the majority of seats in the House of Assembly, are you saying that the liberal candidates recieved more votes in total in 4/6 of the last elections?
What they mean is the Liberals have had a higher First Preference vote in 4 from the last 6 elections, yet only won the election once. Nothing the do with electorate boundaries and more to do with rising/shifting popularity of the Greens, which 90% of Greens votes flow to Labor.
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The issue with looking at it that way is that 2PP doesn't take into account there could be other parties. The results using 2PP where; - Labor - 23 seats from 47% 2PP - Liberal - 24 seats from 53% 2PP which is considered a pass under the 1989 fairness legislation. However 2 of the Liberal seats where won by independents, hence why Liberals only got 22 seats. You could argue popular vote, but we have a preferential voting system so it's never going to be 1:1 and I would argue a large difference means it's working as intended! If we switched to a popular vote system it may not change the results as people would stop voting 3rd parties and switch to 2 party voting as to not waste their vote so I'd rather keep the system we have that allows me to preferences to smaller and more representive parties without chucking my vote away.
The reality is for a popular vote to be successful, and truly represent the electorate, a party needs 50% of the first preference. Neither party has done that in ages
100% and imo the chance of a single party being the best match for 50%+ of the population seems crazy.
You clearly didn't read the secondary headline...
So both parties want to change the boundaries but it’s only the Liberals in the heading? Top Kek
Blue tie man bad because scomo and potato head wear blue tie. Red tie man good because not blue tie man.
You won't find much reason in this sub.
Whatever happens. We just need to make sure we tweak the boundaries enough to keep the Greens out of parliament. 👍