"Unrepresentative Swill" - A Keating Line Way Past Its Use-By Date

"But one Treasurer borrows and turns a short term borrowing into a medium term borrowing—no more money is borrowed; a short term borrowing just becomes a medium term borrowing—without telling our Treasurer and our Treasurer immediately responds and tells him he has to regularise it and you, who let 75 per cent of borrowings run everywhere, have the gall to get up and talk about the Loan Council and to set up a Senate committee. Then you want a Minister from the House of Representatives chamber to wander over to the unrepresentative chamber and account for himself. You have got to be joking. Whether the Treasurer wished to go there or not, I would forbid him going to the Senate to account to this unrepresentative swill over there—"

With these words, spoken on 4 November 1992, then Prime Minister Paul Keating created a colourful insulting description of the Senate that has endured to this day, and is commonly seen when anyone wants to attack a Senator they do not like.  In the last month alone, Twitter users have used Keating's line at least 76 times, mostly but not exclusively to attack Senators or the Senate itself.  In the last month for instance it has been used especially to attack UAP Senator Ralph Babet, but also to attack Coalition Senators Linda Reynolds, Michaelia Cash, Gerard Rennick and Bridget McKenzie, JLN Senator Jacqui Lambie, Greens Senator Sarah Hanson-Young, ex-Greens Senator Lidia Thorpe and ex-Labor Senator Fatima Payman.  But no Labor Senators, funny that.  

Ralph Babet Was Elected Fair And Square. I Know It's Hard But Try To Deal With It

For the avoidance of any doubt at all, I'll start with my view of the subject of this article.  Most of what I see of United Australia Party Senator Ralph Babet is his social media output, and it is awful.  He delivers dumbed-down denser-than-even-Sky-News versions of what were in general stupid ideas to begin with (MAGA nonsense, supposed conspiracies against Christians and western culture, whining about "wokeness", gender, sexuality and multiculturalism, and baiting people who would rather at least try not to get COVID).  Babet is perhaps our purest yet elected example of what happens when you spend way too long inhaling what Christopher Hitchens called "the exhaust fumes of democracy", and then attempt to breathe them out. His Senate career so far has been even cringier than very early Jacqui Lambie.  As with Bob Katter, the concussed-sounding nuttiness of Babet's output frequently leads to debates about whether he's just harmlessly insane or whether some of what he's saying might dangerously affect a few impressionable chaps out there.  Think you can tell I'm not a fan.  

I Threw It All Away: The United Australia Party Self-Deregisters!

I keep an almost daily watch on the AEC's party registration page, but it's been a pretty boring vigil lately.  So imagine my surprise when a newly minted Twitter account alerted me today to the news that the United Australia Party had up and jumped into the billabong of voluntary deregistration for the second time.  As a result, the UAP is not now a registered party for the purpose of contesting federal elections.

This has a precedent.  The original Palmer United Party was registered in the leadup to the 2013 election and voluntarily deregistered on  5 May 2017.  The United Australia Party was then registered in December 2018.  However, the PUP had flopped miserably in the 2016 Senate election (polling below 1% in every state in the absence of a big-spending campaign), unlike the 2022 election at which it polled much better and won a Senate seat.

The deregistration came as a surprise to the UAP's Senator Ralph Babet.  When contacted by the SMH's Lisa Visentin today, he initially didn't remember what it was about, then said he had forgotten because of the death of the Queen, and produced such lines as:

Senate Reform Performance Review And Senate Notes 2022

The results of this year's half-Senate election are all in so it's time to observe how our still relatively new Senate system performed at its second half-Senate test.  For previous assessments see 2016 part one, 2016 part two and 2019 (single article).  I have changed the title mainly so I am at liberty to add pointless fluff about candidates who finished last.  On the agenda for this issue are: proportionality, blocked Senates, how dreadful this election would have been under Group Ticket Voting, winning vote shares (with a focus on Babet and Pocock), preferencing impacts, just-voting-1, exhaust, informals, below the lines, How to Vote cards, blank above the line boxes, and a special schadenfreude section at the bottom.

Senate voting was reformed in 2016 to remove the problems caused by preference harvesting under the old Group Ticket Voting system, under which Senators were being elected off very low vote shares as a result of networked preference deals and a system that coerced voters into sending their preferences to parties they did not support.  This was not only discriminatory and wrong, but also a threat to the integrity of the electoral system because of the ease with which minor issues could cause a count to collapse.  A great many alarmist predictions were made by defenders of the (no longer defensible) GTV system, and most of those have been debunked already.  However in 2022 there are two new opportunities to test predictions about the new system.  Firstly it is the first time we have had a Senate composed entirely of half-Senate election results.  Secondly, it is the first time Labor has come to power in the House of Representatives under the new system.