2019 Queensland Senate: Who Will Be Last When The Music Stops?

2019 Queensland Senate

Outgoing Senators: 2 LNP 2 ALP 1 Green, Fraser Anning

Seats won: 2 LNP (Paul Scarr, Susan Macdonald), 1 Labor (Nina Green)

Four-way fight for three seats with one to lose: Gerard Rennick (LNP), Chris Ketter (Labor), Malcolm Roberts (One Nation), Larissa Waters (Green)

Rennick and Roberts are overwhelmingly likely to win; Waters is most likely to win final seat
Final result won't be known for certain until the button is pressed

Warning - Senate races are complex! This article has been rated Wonk Factor 4/5.

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Senate Voting: Another Poor Article By Richard Denniss

It's a shame to have to be distracted from more important things (like counting all the candidate malfunctions this election) in order to deal with an article by Richard Denniss in the Guardian.  I wasn't going to do this, having already done so on Twitter, but unfortunately an email has been seen by me suggesting that a voter took it seriously.  I can scarcely believe this is so, and wonder if I should refer the email to the AFP as a hoax, but the thought of people being Wrong on the Internet about this needs addressing.  Rant warning applies.

To start with, let's declare on Richard's behalf what he failed to admit in his latest article.  Richard Denniss is a former sceptic of Senate voting reform who defended the coercive, corrupted and dangerous Group Ticket Voting system.  In that system, abolished prior to the 2016 election (but still extant in the WA and Victorian upper houses) voters' preferences were being sent they knew not where, and parties could be elected off tiny vote shares based on a weighted lottery of preference deals and effectively random events.  In defence of this old system,  Denniss, of the left-wing Australia Institute, made the ludicrous claim that "the vast majority of Australian voters trust parties to allocate preferences and opt to vote above the line."  Really, Australian voters trust political parties when politicians are among the least trusted occupations?  (OK, the link is only Morgan, but with effect sizes that large, even Morgan can be trusted here!)  We saw exactly how much Australian voters really trusted parties in 2016 when only about 30% of Coalition above-the-line voters, 14% of Labor ATL voters, and 10% of Green ATL voters (and single figures for most minor parties) followed their party's Senate how-to-vote card.  In Tasmania, voters didn't even trust the Labor Party to pick its own candidates properly, and overturned its preselection.

More Section 44 Cases In Spotlight

A very long time ago now two Greens Senators resigned after discovering they were dual citizens.  The Senate will refer their cases to the Court of Disputed Returns (typically the High Court) which will determine whether they were eligible to have been elected in the first place and, assuming that they weren't, will initiate a "special count" to fill their places.  In the weeks since then, however, many more MPs have come under the spotlight of the dual citizenship rule in Section 44 of the Constitution, and it's unlikely it has claimed its final victim yet.

The Constitution is very black and white about dual citizenships - section 44 says that if you are a citizen of another country, you are not eligible to be chosen or to sit in Parliament.  It doesn't seem to allow any ifs or buts about all that.  However, the High Court in Sykes v Cleary [1992] found that the Constitution was unrealistic and had to be "read down".  After all, if it were that straightforward then another nation could maliciously impose citizenship on Australian MPs and refuse to withdraw it.  Alternatively, for a given citizen of a given nation, procedures for getting rid of an unwanted citizenship might be unrealistically expensive, time-consuming, slow, dangerous, unreliable or unreasonable.

Senate Reform Performance Review Part 2

In this piece I continue the roundup of the performance of the new Senate voting system that I started in part 1.  Part 1 covered proportionality, half-Senate projections, winning vote shares, the impact of preferencing, just-vote-1 rates and exhaust.  This part covers  informal votes, the One Nation question, below the line rates, the two most unusual victories (Lisa Singh and Malcolm Roberts), the impact of the fixed quota, the question of verification and areas for improvement. (There's also a brief note about Inclusive Gregory that isn't relevant to reform, but that I thought I should mention anyway).  Anything else I think of may be tacked onto the end.  I have already discussed donkey-voting, proximity preferencing, the abject failure of most parties' how-to-vote cards, and preferencing patterns by state on the Button Press Week thread. Also, lots of Tasmanian-specific stats can be found on the Tasmanian button press thread.