On 5/12/19 9:55 am, Paul van den Bergen via luv-talk wrote:
My take on a lot of this is that Australia has one of the most representative electoral systems in the world (states not withstanding)
Australia doesn't have a very representative electoral system. Our lower house voting system results in a particularly unrepresentative parliament, as can be seen from the outcome of this year's election. Compare[1] the percentage of the vote each party received, with the number of seats that they won: Party | Seats | Share of | Vote | Seats | Won | Seats | Share | Warranted ---------------------------------------------------------------------- ALP | 69 | 45.39% | 33.34% | 50 Liberal/LNP | 67 | 44.08% | 36.66% | 55 Greens | 1 | 0.66% | 10.40% | 15 National | 10 | 6.58% | 4.51% | 6 UAP | 0 | 0.00% | 3.43% | 5 One Nation | 0 | 0.00% | 3.08% | 4 KAP | 1 | 0.66% | 0.49% | 0 Centre Alliance | 1 | 0.66% | 0.33% | 0 | | | | Other | 0 | 0.00% | 4.39% | 6 Independent | 3 | 1.97% | 3.37% | 5 I've added the Queensland Liberal/National Party to the Liberal vote, since they are a division of the Liberal Party. As can be seen, the Labor, Liberal and National parties receive considerably more seats than they should, based on their proportion of the vote, and The Greens, The UAP and One Nation are considerably under-represented. Combine this with a far stricter party discipline system than either the UK or the US have, and we get a democracy that really isn't serving its people well at all. Paul. [1] Apologies to anyone who isn't using fixed-size fonts to read email, that table will look particularly messy.