Australian voting system opens doors for misfits

The sex-mad Sex Party did not get up at Australia’s weekend parliamentary election, but the sports-mad Sports Party did. Also headed for one of 76 seats in the upper house of the federal parliament in Canberra is the Motoring Enthusiast Party, formed by car nuts just three months ago. Another senator could be clean-living enthusiast Bob Day of Family First, which “believes in strong families, strong values and a strong Australia.”

The preferential voting system has thrown up unknowns who could hold the balance of power in the Senate. Tony Abbott took control of the House of Representatives in Saturday’s poll, but the cascading preference votes could result in single-issue senators blocking his conservative legislative agenda.

Only 1,900 voters ticked the Sports Party box on the ballot in Western Australia, but former professional footballer Wayne Dropulich could become a senator despite earning just 0.22 percent of the vote in his state. It is the same with the petrol-heads at the Motoring Enthusiast Party, where just one vote in every 200 in the state of Victoria could send Ricky Muir to Canberra.

The party has fewer than 5,000 Facebook followers and could only raise 6,000 Australian dollars (6,521 US dollars) in donations for its election campaign. One of its core values is to demand the right to fit noisy exhausts and blaring sound systems. “We will not accept proposed legislation that places the Australian Family Lifestyle at risk,” the Motoring Enthusiast Party proclaims on its website.

“This includes the average Australian family’s right to modify and restore vehicles based upon their own freedom of expression.” Muir was not answering requests for comment from the media, and news outlet ABC reported online Monday that he had gone to ground. Nick Xenophon, an independent senator who got more than 25 percent of the votes in the state of South Australia, demanded an overhaul of the voting process.

He condemned opaque preference deals where one micro-party is set up just to pass preference votes to another micro-party. Dropulich, who looks set to take a Senate seat from Labor, told The Australian newspaper that being an engineer helped him track how preference votes would flow between the 27 parties on the ballot paper. “It’s very complex,” he said. Christopher Pyne, a key legislator in the lower house from Abbott’s Liberal Party, sees a potential boon in the emergence of single-issue parties.

“I think it will be much easier in fact for a coalition government to deal with a crossbench dominated by centre-right parties or individuals than Greens or Labor,” he said. But Julian Assange, whose WikiLeaks Party came away from the election without a Senate seat, was miffed at the outcome. From his exile in the Ecuadorean embassy in London, he called it “rather bizarre” that the Motoring Enthusiast Party could get in with less than one-third of the vote total that his party received, because of preference swaps.

Antony Green, election analyst for national broadcaster ABC, said the emergence of micro-parties was turning the electoral process into a farce. “They’ll have to tighten it up,” he said. “It’s because of the swapping of preferences – the group ticket. No matter how few votes they get they have complete control over their preferences.” Also unwelcome to some is the emergence of professionals who help the tiny parties allocate preferences for the optimum result.

Glenn Druery, the go-to man for preferential voting advice, conceded that it might be too easy to register a political party, and would welcome some reforms. But he denied that the electoral system is being subverted, and he warned against making it more difficult for people to have a say. “This is politics and it’s working within the system the major political parties gave us,” said Druery, who runs a political consulting firm called Independent Liaison. “If you’re passionate about something, you can form a political party and you can push those views through the political process. Not for one minute do I think this is illegal or immoral or that I have to defend myself.”