No one votes for the Greens. Or something.
Posted: Wed Mar 09, 2011 5:00 pm"They may have one seat, but it’s a seat that represents more than 1.4 million Australians":
One other line that Miranda indulges in in that column is this week’s favourite News Ltd line on the Greens: they have only one seat in the House of Representatives! Why should they have any power at all! As Bolt puts it:
Third, to please the Greens extremists who hold just one of the 150 seats in the House of Representatives, rather than appeal to the voters who chose the other 149, not one of which campaigned for her tax.
How dare the Greens use that one vote! That one vote that represents the 11.76% of Australians who voted for them.
You might have noticed that 1/150 is not 11.76%. In fact, it’s two thirds of one percent. If we had a genuine representative democracy, on those votes the Greens would have seventeen (17) seats in the House of Representatives. But, because of the single member electorate system that ignores voters if they’re not concentrated geographically, they only have one. Where did the other sixteen seats’ worth of Greens votes go? They went to the major parties in preferences.
Which highlights the deception in the second half of that sentence. Many of the voters represented by those 149 non-Green MPs – more than 1.4 million Australians, all the Greens voters who didn’t live in Adam Bandt’s electorate (like me, as it happens) – actually did vote for the Greens.
http://blogs.crikey.com.au/purepoison/2 ... stralians/
One other line that Miranda indulges in in that column is this week’s favourite News Ltd line on the Greens: they have only one seat in the House of Representatives! Why should they have any power at all! As Bolt puts it:
Third, to please the Greens extremists who hold just one of the 150 seats in the House of Representatives, rather than appeal to the voters who chose the other 149, not one of which campaigned for her tax.
How dare the Greens use that one vote! That one vote that represents the 11.76% of Australians who voted for them.
You might have noticed that 1/150 is not 11.76%. In fact, it’s two thirds of one percent. If we had a genuine representative democracy, on those votes the Greens would have seventeen (17) seats in the House of Representatives. But, because of the single member electorate system that ignores voters if they’re not concentrated geographically, they only have one. Where did the other sixteen seats’ worth of Greens votes go? They went to the major parties in preferences.
Which highlights the deception in the second half of that sentence. Many of the voters represented by those 149 non-Green MPs – more than 1.4 million Australians, all the Greens voters who didn’t live in Adam Bandt’s electorate (like me, as it happens) – actually did vote for the Greens.
http://blogs.crikey.com.au/purepoison/2 ... stralians/