Canberra is full of well-educated, thoughtful people who do not care very much for ACT politics. However, come election time they scramble in the last few days to try to do the best to make the best of their vote.
Followers get the leaders they deserve. This is particularly true in the ACT. Our electoral system gives voters much greater power as to who is elected than in the federal system or in other states and territories bar Tasmania.
Federally, all that matters is whether you have put Labor before Liberal or Liberal before Labor and in the Senate which party box you have checked, and that is the end of the influence of your vote.
In the ACT multimember system, each voter not only influences whether a Labor candidate gets elected over a Liberal one or vice versa, but also which of the Labor candidates and which of the Liberal candidates might get elected in each electorate.
So even a dyed-in-the-wool Labor supporter can not only vote Labor, but also exercise his or her vote in a way which gives one Liberal candidate an advantage over another. For example, a feminist Labor Party voter might well give her one to five votes to Labor and then look at the Liberal Party list and choose which candidates in the Liberal Party favours her course.
After all, Labor is not going to get all the seats and at some stage the preferences of a Labor over-quota can influence which of the several Liberal party candidates gets elected.
Further, there is no requirement for a voter to put ministers, frontbenchers, or sitting members of their preferred party before other candidates of their preferred party. For example, a Labor voter in Molonglo might well decide that former rocket scientist Mike Hettinger would make a better fist of helping to run the territory than one or more of the existing ministers who are standing in Molonglo. Similarly, in Ginninderra a Labor voter who felt that Jon Stanhope deserved a wake-up call could still vote Labor but put him fifth of the five Labor candidates.
The important point is that ACT voters can do more than merely express a preference for one or other candidates shoved at them by a major party.
Let’s look at some possibilities. Liberal voters, for example, could easily come to the conclusion that all their sitting members are in one way or another responsible for four years of wasted opportunity by squabbling over leadership positions and fighting for inconsequential pet policy positions instead of getting on with the job of providing a coherent set of policies that would have put them in a position to take government.
They might well think that anything is better than what they have got. They might therefore think about giving their first three preferences to non-sitting Liberals.
A thinking Labor Party voter might well think that a strong opposition is important in a democracy and that many of the failings of the Stanhope Government could be put down to a failure by a coherent opposition. For those reasons, having given their first preferences to the Labor party candidates they should go to the Liberal party column and put all the non-sitting Liberals before the sitting ones. It is not a hollow gesture. Eventually over quota from Labor Party votes spill through. No one gets elected with an exact quota.
In a way, the ACT is a pre-selection as well as an election. For people who complain about branch stacking, number crunchers and power-brokers delivering hacks, now is your chance.
The thoughtful Green voter might well decide to give the Liberals their second preference rather than Labor which is the usual repository of their preferences. If the Green over-quota goes to the Liberals rather than Labor, Labor would be in a weaker position after the election and the Greens would be in a better position to force their will on them.
What does the thoughtful voter do about the various minor parties and independents? If you want a dragway, a V8 race and an expanded Summernats you would give the Motorists Party your first preference to send the Government a message. If you do not like those things you would leave the squares next to the Motorists Party candidates’ blank.
Some thoughtful voters would have followed the various candidates and parties position in The Canberra Times, but many have not. It is not too late. You can use the Internet to determine what the minor parties stand for (aside from The Canberra Times site): www.ldp.org.au; www.cap.org.au; www.richardmulcahy.com.au; www.pangallo.com.au. The thoughtful voter will see how much work and detail has gone into the presentation of their policies. Glib, populist statements are not worth voting for.
But even if a thoughtful voter saw, for example, the fairly extensive policy suite put out by the Community Alliance Party, he or she would have to be concerned about how effectively they could implement these policies with candidates who have no political experience. The lesson that there was learnt in 1989 when the Residents Rally had a comprehensive suite of policies but broke up in bitter acrimony because of the personalities of the people who were elected. But you could Google the individual candidates to see if there are some stand-outs.
In the next few days Canberra’s usually thoughtful and well-educated electorate could put a little time and effort into preparing for their vote.
It is often seen as unfashionable to take any interest in ACT politics. It seems as if some people think it is beneath them. However, the fate of the rates, garbage, footpaths, roads, schools, police and health system of even the most erudite or disdainful Canberra resident are determined by the people we elect on Saturday. That is worth some thought.