With the Australian federal election coming up in a few weeks — it happens on Saturday, September 7th — it’s time to share an important public service announcement about Australia’s ranked voting system. In a ranked voting system, also known as a preferential voting system, you vote by ranking the candidates on the ballot. You assign a “1” to the candidate you like the most/loathe the least, “2” to the candidate you like second most/loathe second-least, and so on.
The comic below — You Can’t Waste Your Vote, subtitled This is AUSTRALIA, not America — explains how the Australian system works, and as a bonus, it does so quite amusingly:
I’m not too familiar with Australian politics, but I assume that the major parties parodied in the comic are are the current ruling Labor Party (left-leaning) and the Liberal Party (right-leaning), and that the Australia Australia Australia party are a comic stand-in for “The Nationals” (to the right of Star Wars’ Emperor Palpatine).
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Joey, the AEC would be skating in thin ice if it was caricaturing the actual parties since it is an independent, publicly-funded commission with part of its remit to maintain the fairness of elections. Those caricatures are really of a cartoonish far right party (none really exist in *mainstream* Australian politics -- that is, there are loony right parties here but none of them is going to get a majority of first preferences in any electorate), a less-than-far-right party, an idealistic but unrealistic party, and a raving loony party. You could perhaps project the Liberal-National coalition onto the less-than-far-right cartoon and possibly the Greens onto the idealistic-but-unrealistic, but I think it would say more about the person doing the projecting as the cartoonist.
It's a great cartoon, though, and it explains why our preferencing system is so damn good. It doesn't guarantee that the person with most first choices wins, but it does guarantee that the person who is most acceptable to the majority of the electorate wins and it does save people from double-guessing what other voters will do when they cast their vote. As Election Koala says, you're not wasting your vote even if your preferred candidate gets the least number of votes.
Friendly Australian here!
The two major parties are Labor and the Coalition (Liberals and Nationals). The Nationals are an odd party; half of them are relatively decent if incredibly conservative country folk trying to get a better deal for those of us who live outside the major cities for whom it's not cost-effective for the market to provide services, and the other half are raving loonies from Queensland. (I'll admit there is a bit of wishful thinking in this description, since my electorate is currently held by an independent but will almost certainly go National at the election. Not looking forward to it.)
The Aussie Aussie Aussie party is an unholy mashup of One Nation (xenophobic idiots), Family First (conservative Christian nutbags) and Bob Katter (raving loony from Queensland).
Lovely cartoon. You could also parse the political parties as ALP (centre-left), Lib-Nat Coalition (right), leaving the AAA party to stand in for some of the more amusing minor parties that have decided to give it a go this election cycle. There's Bob Katter's Australia-was-better-in-the-'50s party, Clive Palmer's won't-someone-think-of-the-billionaire-miners-party, and the still undead One Nation, all of whom think Palpatine was a bleeding heart commie.