At 5:17 PM +1000 16/10/01, alister air wrote:

>I'm sure a lot of people hate him - this is the state that elects Brian
>Harradine as well, after all.  One tiny little state, electing a Greens
>Senator who's gay, and a right-wing Christian who's homophobic.  Aren't
>elections fun?

Tasmanians elect more politicians per head of population than nearly anyone else in the civilised world, so its a buyers' market - we can afford to shop around. ;-) We are also pretty broad-minded, we've even elected yank immigrants to state and federal parliaments over the years (you can't get any more broad-minded than that.) Even our current State Premier is a former organiser of the banned Builders Labourers federation and former member of the Communist Party of Australia (Marxist Leninist), (Maoist).

We are also a lot more savvy about proportional representation than other folk, State government is elected by the most democratic electoral system in the world, the Hare-Clarke system.

Harradine is a relic of the 60's splits in the Labor party, one of Santamaria's Catholic "Groupers". Anti-communist obviously, but not necessarily a right wing christian as many of our American readers would understand it. They'd see him as a "liberal" on many issues. But even "anti-communist" has to be qualified, Santamaria wasn't exactly a big fan of capitalism either you will recall. The old Catholic Groupers were more a third force - a reactionary force against both socialist and capitalist currents. They actually pine for a return to a form of paternal feudalism.

Harradine was (er, *is*, I tend to think of him in the past-tense even though he's still in parliament) a ferocious supporter of things like single parents pensions. Doesn't want to encourage abortion of course. But he's a declining force. A huge personal vote, but his attempts to annoint a successor to get his votes when he retires have been spectacularly unsuccessful. The people who vote for him flatly refuse to vote for anyone else he includes on his ticket. Most of them are probably too old to understand it by now.

Bob Brown is that rare creature, a politician who is immune to personal ambitions. He'll be difficult to replace too. If anything he seems to become deeper as he goes on. That is unheard of, most politicians start out shallow and just keep getting more shallow as time goes on. Some of them manage to defy all the laws of physics.

>Well, 1, 2, 2, 2 is now officially informal.  The laws were changed after
>Albert Langer was imprisoned for advocating voting in this way.

It appears I haven't been keeping up with things. Of course the provision in question was merely designed to prevent people's votes from being declared informal if they accidently repeated or missed a number or two. Since some of the senate ballots have  many dozens of candidates that all have to be numbered sequentially, this can happen. As I recall, the Electoral Act was amended in this way sometime in the 80's after a federal election where about 10% of voters voted informal. There was a lot of embarrassing speculation that people had deliberately spoilt their ballots in a protest against the vacuous policies of the major parties, so this provision was designed to minimise any future informal voting statistics.

Interestingly, the most successful vote informal campaign in Australia's history was the one organised by the Tasmanian Wilderness Society in Tasmania back in 1980 or thereabouts. (Bob Brown was the leader of that long campaign.) It was all about the Franklin dam. After a tumultuous campaign by environmental activists to stop a dam being built in Tasmania's SW wilderness, a state labor government, weakened by internal division over the issue, called a referendum. Instead of asking voters to choose between building the dam or not building it, they asked voters which dam they would prefer, the Franklin dam, or a compromise dam which supposedly wouldn't be as bad.

Bob Brown campaigned to have people write "No Dams" on their ballot paper. The Premier got dumped by his party and the government did an about face and campaigned against their own compromise dam. The Hydro Electric Commission and the conservatives also campaigned for the Franklin dam. One third of voters voted "no dams", technically an informal vote since that wasn't an option. Almost no-one voted for the compromise.

Then there was a huge non-violent blockade of the dam construction organised by the Wilderness Society and a federal election in which it became a major issue, with high profile arrests of prominent Australians and international celebrities throughout the campaign. The dam was stopped by the incoming Hawke labour Government, but not until after a challenge in the High Court. That whole thing went on for over a decade all up. Two decades, if you count the earlier, but ultimately unsuccessful, campaign against the flooding of lake Pedder (in the late 60's), where a young Bob Brown first learned his lessons.

Every now and again Bob issues a call for the draining of lake Pedder, he doesn't give up easily.

Now Bob is a Senator and his old nemesis, the Hydro, has been broken up into separate parts. And now he's starting a campaign against the laying of an electricity cable across Bass Strait. Watch out for that one, Bob is implacable once he gets going and he's already got all sorts of unlikely allies against the BassLink cable.

But I appear to be rambling on a bit here. Must be getting old, Bob needs all the votes he can get, but there aren't many potential Bob Brown voters on this list I imagine.

Bill Bartlett
Bracknell Tas