Tornado Alley (PROG)

[fuagf]

I've never been a party member, a political party member, i mean. So have never been involved in candidate pre-selection. My political activity has been confined to decades of union representation (was made a life member), and, lol, chatting up Labor principles and issues in pubs. Heh, being an ordinary, simple guy, i'm just glad in Australia the electoral system is so much simpler. Actually, only now i realize they considered US-type primaries here..

Do we need US-style primary elections in Australia?

WOULD changing our political process to US-style primary elections get Aussies
excited about politics again, or would it just be pointless window-dressing?

Paul Williams and Joff Lelliott

September 25, 2012 - 12:00AM


Mitt Romney

The case for changing our electoral process is argued by Dr Paul Williams, a Griffith University School of Humanities senior lecturer, while Dr Joff Lelliott, state director of the political think tank The Australian Fabians (Queensland) and an ALP member, argues the case against.

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Voting to select candidates would get Aussies excited about politics again and
ensure we had more say over how the country was run, argues Paul Williams

AUSTRALIAN party politics is in crisis. Not since the origins of our modern party system a century ago has party membership been in such rapid decline.

Add the 10 per cent of enrolled Australians who regularly fail to vote, plus those who have never enrolled, and we see record numbers of Australians alienated from the electoral process.

Something is clearly broken with our system when Australians no longer see party membership as a meaningful political activity.

Fifty years ago, the major parties boasted several hundred thousand members. Today, each is lucky to count 40,000.

And yet Australians are, by international comparison, well educated, availed of a robust news media, and generally interested in public affairs. The 2010 Australian Electoral Survey found 82 per cent of us showed a good deal or some interest in politics.

Far from being apathetic, Australians have strong and wide-ranging opinions, which we want to share with policy-makers. We want to have more say, not less, over our choice of representative.

For evidence, just look at our rejection of a parliament-appointed presidential model at the 1999 republican referendum.

The key to reinvigorating political engagement, therefore, lies with the parties themselves, which, put simply, must recast themselves as genuine conduits between voter and legislature.

Labor has taken up this challenge most assiduously. In the past 20 years the party has undertaken numerous reviews, with many calling for online branches, cheaper membership fees, increased member contributions over policy and, most radically, open primaries for candidate selection.

The open primary is an invitation for any Australian citizen - not just members or registered supporters - to cast a vote for candidates who will ultimately carry the party flag.

It is a huge break from the current plebiscite system - a tightly closed primary where only paid-up members have a say, and even then one mitigated by the parties' central offices.

Opponents of open primaries cite the potential for poor turnout. But low participation rates owe more to a lack of awareness than apathy. Political culture, like any other, changes slowly, and it would take time to familiarise Australians with a new way of selecting MPs.

Naysayers also suggest primaries encourage public infighting, and drain scarce party resources with expensive campaigning.

But competition for local seats will be nothing like the battle for the American presidency and its gritty, televised slanging matches.

Instead, the forums would be tame public meetings in district school halls where candidates could address voters directly over genuinely local concerns.

Second, the candidate selected via open primary would have to be a genuinely popular and articulate communicator, and strong enough to withstand the daily political grind. There would be no untried candidates and no political duds.

Third, it is the local nature of such contests that can minimise campaign costs, especially at state level now election spending in Queensland is capped at $50,000 per seat.

As late US House Speaker Tip O'Neill famously said, "all politics is local". Locally focused campaigns - beginning life at primary level - would force parties to genuinely engage voters away from television, and at a fraction of the cost.

Any power decentralised away from political elites is good power, and to suggest that Australians are too ignorant or immature to have a say in their choice of party candidate is patronising.

Open primaries won't solve all our participation problems, but they're a step in the right direction.

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The major parties must face up to the real reasons for their decay - and they need to do a whole lot
more than window-dressing to attract a public disillusioned by the political process, argues Joff Lelliott

THE recent review of Queensland Labor's state election performance called for the party to trial US-style primaries.

So too did last year's review of NSW Labor's state election result, as did the Faulkner-Carr-Bracks review of Labor's 2010 federal election campaign before that.

Primaries, involving members of the public as well as party members voting to preselect election candidates, are a universal panacea from the leadership of Labor's machine.

But they are the wrong answer to the wrong question. They will neither re-engage the public with politics nor grow Australia's shrinking membership of major parties.

There is no demand for primaries from the public or party members.

Common sense says the public does not want them because, by the end of every campaign, the media is full of stories of election fatigue. It is hard to imagine voters wanting another round of campaigning and voting.

Primaries are not setting the political world on fire and when Labor has trialled them they have been distinctly unsuccessful.

In the Victorian seat of Kilsyth, just 136 members of the public cast a vote in Labor's primary.

The party puts a braver face on the recent experience of preselecting its candidate
for Lord Mayor of Sydney, when 4000 people cast a vote.

The population of the City of Sydney is 170,000.

Further, only one side of politics is even talking about primaries. Although sections of the Liberal Party, especially in NSW, are dissatisfied with their system of candidate selection, there is no discussion of primaries.

If Labor goes it alone, it would do untold damage to itself for three reasons.

First, in a primary you hand all the ammunition to the other parties because candidates in a primary are forced to publicly attack each other. So it is no surprise US elections are full of ads showing candidates being criticised by members of their own party.

Second, primaries are expensive. That means already cash-strapped parties have to stretch thin resources further, starving the real campaign of vital funds.

Alternatively, public funding of parties has to increase or only wealthy candidates will be able to stand.

And third, unless an independent body such as the Electoral Commission registers voters as supporters of particular parties, as happens in the US, the system can be rigged.

Without a formally registered affiliation, parties can encourage their own supporters to cast votes for the worst candidates in another party's primary. The smaller the number of votes cast in a primary, the greater the danger of the ballot being tainted in this way.

If the public does not appear to want primaries, party members want them even less.

Ask around the ALP and it is hard to find a branch member who supports introducing them.

Party members are offended by their lack of a real say in choosing candidates. It would add insult to injury to change the system in a way that bypasses the membership in favour of handing decisions to a self-selected group of strangers.

A better answer to the twin problems of declining membership and the
public's disengagement with politics is to democratise the major parties.

Party members should be given a genuine say in decisions that matter, including developing policy, choosing candidates for parliament and selecting party leaders.

These are all things members of both major parties actually want.

Accessible, broad, democratic parties engaged in real policy debate are the best way to grow membership.

https://www.couriermail.com.au/news/do-we-need-us-style-primary-elections-in-australia/news-story/48fe46e1732b5e7c2a137a12f13b251e