There's this inscrutable belief among some progressive Labor supporters that the internal politics of Labor are really important to the direction of the country. If "progressive" Labor MPs lose to the Greens then that's progressive action set back because the main battleground is Labor's cabinet.

I want the Australian federal parliament to expand to: 90 senators (14 from each state, 3 from each territory) ~170 HoR seats However I thought that was unlikely this term because Labor likely wouldn't want to dilute their favourable senate by growing the next class. However...

The Australian electoral system is not perfect. If our lower house were elected with a more proportional system our politics would better reflect the views of the people rather than deliver power on the basis of strange mathematical quirks.

www.tallyroom.com.au/60511 Great article by Ben Raue. Look at this chart of how often states are an even split in the current allocation of 6 senators per half senate election. Some day soon we should expand the parliament and ensure each state can give a decisive result.

I saw some One Nation signage with "we've got to guts to say what you're thinking" and for the first time I've realised the full extent of how stupid that phrase is. Rather than spend advertising space claiming that you're saying something why not have the guts to, you know, actually say it?

Pollbludger has a wonderful 3 candidate preferred projection in their results tabulation. It let me quickly make this graph.

I think prepoll split booths should be much rarer in Australian politics. Low engagement and ESL voters don't know what seat they're from. With so many independents and minor parties running the probability they find the right part of a HTV card amongst all the pieces of paper is quite low.

The Vic Socialists do preferences the right way. Preference who is ideologically similar, no matter what. The confusing "deals" that micro parties try to do just discredit themselves and rarely even help them gain seats or an outcome.

I'm not aware of a prepoll exit poll being released before polls closed ever before. I think it's a bad trend and bad data. Comparing a sample of prepoll voters on the first two days of prepoll to the *total* prepoll behaviour in the previous election is not comparing the same cohort of voters.

Why I'm always wary of micro parties, especially single issue ones. The chance of candidates being completely off the deep end is significantly higher. Guess what some guys who think "Hitler did nothing wrong" are also on drugs, so might associate with the LCP.

My strange opinion is that most of the FUSION constituent parties (and other left-of-centre micro parties like AJP and some Socialists) could be factions within the Greens if the Greens had a more transparent and organised way for factions to exist. And it would be symbioticly beneficial to both.

I did my best to graph Redbridge's latest MRP in seats where 3 party dynamics are in play. Unfortunately unlike the YouGov MRP in these ones the 4th party data is all jumbled up. Presume *very* high variance. Also in general Redbridge has far stranger looking Green primary votes.

We really squander the resources of the planet. We have a growing number of EV car batteries sitting around rarely working for us and meanwhile power is basically free when the sun is shining (we have "too many" solar panels now) and expensive just after the sun goes down.

Can anybody find the seat-by-seat data for the Redbridge MRP? I want to make some 3PP graphs out of it like I did with the YouGov MRPs but I can't find it. @kossamaras.bsky.social

Button pressed on WA Legislative Council count at 3pm tomorrow

As an aside, Vader, D?

Coalition scores just 1/100 points for environment and climate policies from conservation organisation

Labor's next housing thought bubble

Josh Burns (Labor, Macnamara) has announced that his How To Vote card will be "open", ie- will *not* recommend who to put higher out of Sonya Semmens (Greens) and Benson Saulo (Liberal). I've graphed what that would mean in the extreme case where the Labor voter preferences split evenly.

Instead of executing the US economy with an axe to the neck Trump has announced they'll starting by chopping off a leg. I don't think the market bounce makes sense unless it's anticipated for Trump to at some point back off from the 100+% tariff on Chinese goods and 10% tariffs on everyone else.

The US tarrifs are completely stupid. My question is, how long before much damage is permenant? Like, if Trump backflipped right now surely the market would bounce nearly totally back immediately? What about in a month. There'd be more net loss? What if he sticks to it until after the midterms?

Queensland children as young as 10 could face life in prison for non-violent crime under new laws

Vote Compass is out now!

I fixed some boneheaded errors and improved the colours on my previous post graphing today's YouGov MRP to show the seats where 3PP dynamics involving the Greens are closest to relevant. I'm doing the independent seats now.

Did a 3PP graphed of the more relevant Green seats with the new YouGov MRP numbers. The Greens really need to perform much better than this in their target seats or they would fall over. The weakness of the Liberals across the board is also a spoiler (if true).

The UK electoral system cannot withstand the diversity of opinion among the voters. They need Proportional Representation. Then voters won't have to abandon their 1st choice strategically. Strategic voting by LibDem and Green supporters is why Labour have majority right now.

People in the centrist wing of the Democrats will really be like 'you believe in passing good bills? that pales in effectiveness to my strategy, respecting norms like the Senate Filibuster that we will need when in opposition' and then when in opposition not use the Senate Filibuster.

A ridiculously lie from Plibersek. Disproved in seconds by googling the text of the 2010 agreement, the press conference announcing the launch of the policy, or 1000 other sources. In a sane political culture this obvious lie should see her hounded on this until she recants.

Cooker QANDA thread for those who want a laugh but don't want to watch it

Anyway sign up to help here.

For the people that support Trump's or some other ludicrous view of the war in Ukraine, what's the end game? You give Russia massive rewards for their invasion, new territory, new resources, and then what?

Potential Pasokification in Germany, with the SPD likely to have to do the right thing and support the CDU/CSU into government. But both the Greens and Die Linke in opposition and each starting from a pretty healthy base the SPD could honestly be in single digits next election.

For the first time I've tried a 3PP graph with a party other than the Greens in the cut up. Rebekah Sharkie for the purposes of this chart counts as an independent. The figures are from the YouGov MRP last week, with a bit of fudging to account for preferences.

I thought I'd do some 3PP maps from the recent YouGov MRP. Caveat: too many to name. Polls are a snap shot not a prediction. It's plausible that candidate factors are under-measured by this MRP. I had to guess at 4th party preference flows and round to the nearest whole numbers. Etc.

Question for @kevinbonham.bsky.social or @benraue.com and anybody else interested. The division of Brisbane looks set to be a rerun of the same top 3 candidates. Has that ever happened before?

I can't bare to watch the news anymore. ABC just had some "youth crime in Melbourne" story saying it's "highest in 15 years", which sounded suspiciously wrong. Within minutes of googling it seems they've used *nominal* crime figues, not per capita figures.

The Lattouf case brings up one of my pet hates. I don't think there is such a thing as "balanced" or "impartial" really, and attempts to constrain institutions to those things basically always does the opposite of what is supposedly intended.

Appalling that the Victorian Labor government appears to be once again keeping Group Voting Tickets. Labor seem to cynically gamble that the chaos is more beneficial to them than fairness, but eventually they will hit a whammy of deadlocked upper house full of crazies and it will be all their fault

#AUSvIND What happened to the rule change 3 years ago that said the bails *do* count for DRS? www.espncricinfo.com/story/icc-cr...

Albanese was elected with the most progressive parliament since at least 1951, if not the most progressive ever Unlike Gillard in 2010 Albanese has outright squandered the whole term We could have had so many good things, but he'd prefer to do nothing and cast the Greens as blockers To what end?