Category: Politics

The ABC Vote Compass is a good tool for orientating yourself in the political spectrum but only showed the three major parties, as did Fairfax's YourVote; the third party iSideWith did a bit better, including the other parties with elected Senators: Family First and the Liberal Democrats. Meanwhile, the international Political Compass, for some reason, included Katter's Australian Party.

So, what about all the other minor parties? Well, here is my attempt at putting them on the graph:

Where possible, the results are based on an official email response from the party, otherwise, it is based on policy documents and other stated positions.

Being a classical liberal, I support both economic and social freedom, so am interested in the overall liberalism rating of parties, the forward diagonal, from the most control-leaning (bottom-left) to freedom-leaning (top-right).

In this post, I provide the calculated results for the parties, presented across several different dimensions, as well as the full details of the calculations.

Continue reading Minor Parties Vote Compass, Australian 2016 Federal Election(12 min read)

For the 2016 election, the ABC Vote Compass has a diagonal bias embedded in some of the questions, reinforcing the major party axis and making it impossible to score highly (or lowly) in both economic freedom (Economic Right) and social freedom (Social Progressive) at the same time.

Due to the structure of the questions, final results are only possible within the shaded area, and can never reach the top right or bottom left corners.

EDIT (2016-06-23): It is possible to get in the top right (or bottom left) by answering "Don't Know" (rather than the middle answer) to the six diagonal questions. Results are scaled to only the questions you answer (this also scales the position of the parties to those same questions). The limitation applies if you answer every question. Also, the actual limit is slightly curved (not a straight line), as each question has a slightly different economic/social ratio, so it is actually possible to do slightly better than all-neutral answers.

Continue reading ABC Vote Compass 2016 diagonal bias(5 min read)

There are many different criteria by which voting systems can be evaluated.

One of the most important criteria to me is proportional representation. Closely related to this are transferrable vote systems, which help maintain proportionality.

I was surprised to find out, after moving state within Australia to Queensland, to find out that it was the only state without some form of proportional representation!

All other states have an Upper House elected by proportional representation. The Lower Houses are formed from single member electorates, and so absolutely dominated by the major parties with no proportionality, but the bicameral parliament ensures some measure of democracy is maintained.

(Effectively, with the Lower House always dominated by one party or the other, there is never any possible meaningful debate there; the government will always win, every time. The only real debate, negotiation and compromise, or possibility of failure, occurs in the Upper House.)

As shown in the graphs below, at a federal level, there is already a degree of bias towards the major parties (getting more seats than the proportionally should), due to the high quotas (low number of positions) in the Senate. Recent proposed changes will make this even worse, with the 18% of voters for minor parties reduced to a single seat (2% of the parliament).