In Victoria, for example, the likely flow of votes from parties such as Family First, Shooters and Fishers and the Christian Democrats under a preference swap arrangement would have been enough for One Nation to achieve a full quota. This means that One Nation’s lead Senate candidate would have overtaken the Liberals’ Jane Hume for the twelfth Senate spot in Victoria.
One Nation would have had an even greater chance of cobbling together quotas in smaller states like Tasmania and South Australia.
If the government has any responsibility at all for the unusually large Senate crossbench, it admittedly lies in the Prime Minister’s decision to hold a double dissolution. By having each state elect the full contingent of 12 senators (as opposed to the usual six at a normal half-Senate election), the quota required for a senator to be elected was halved from the usual 14.3 per cent of the vote to a much lower 7.15 per cent.
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Labor has also – correctly – pointed out that the new system has allowed for the exhaustion of votes for the first time (that is, for voters’ preferences to extinguish before reaching a successful candidate).
This means that in some cases, it has been possible for the ‘last candidate standing’ at the end of the count in some states to be elected with less than the double dissolution quota of 7.15 per cent of the vote.
For example, Bob Day in South Australia had a vote of just over 6.8 per cent after preferences at the final count, the highest remaining of any candidate. This was enough to see the Family First senator scrape back in and grab the final Senate place in that state. David Leyonjhelm won the last spot in New South Wales with a vote after preferences of 6.1 per cent.
But even though Labor is partly correct on the ‘exhaustion’ factor, it is not as big a factor as they would have had you believe. During the debate on the Senate voting reform bills in March, Labor claimed that the number of exhausted votes in the election would be over 3.4 million. In the end, the exhaustion rate was less than a third of that. Still high, but arguably not enough to make a significant difference to the final composition of the Senate.
Besides, all of this ignores the major flaw in the old Senate voting system that the Turnbull reforms have successfully fixed: The ability of political parties to ‘game’ the vote by manipulating the old group ticket voting system.
You know, the system that made it possible for the likes of Ricky Muir to get elected in 2013 with just 0.5 per cent of first preference votes in Victoria (after ending up with a staggering 14.9 per cent of the vote thanks to an elaborate preference swap arrangement).
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The system that meant that Victorians who parked their votes with single-issue parties such as the Animal Justice Party, the WikiLeaks Party, Drug Law Reform and Stop CSG ended up electing a senator from the Australian Motoring Enthusiast Party.
But Muir’s is not the only example of bizarre Senate results. That same year in WA, a senator was provisionally elected from the virtually unknown Australian Sports Party despite receiving just 2,997 votes. (The result from that election was, of course, later scuttled by the High Court due to the disappearance of a stack of votes, resulting in the 2014 ‘re-run’ WA Senate election.)
The election before that, John Madigan, then of the Democratic Labour Party, was elected with just 2.34 per cent of the vote. And in 2004, the bungling of party apparatchiks in Victoria saw Labor’s preferences flow to Family First instead of the Greens, resulting in the unlikely election of Steve Fielding.
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