A while back, I noted that the Greens were actively deceiving the public about the election result. Since that post, I’ve been startled at how widespread the spin and deception about the election result has been. If a party could find some way of misrepresenting the election figures in their favour, they did. The Coalition used extremely odd interpretations of the data to claim that they should have won the election. The ALP was equally quick to claim 2PP entailed their victory long before the 2PP outcome (as irrelevant as it is) was known.
But the Greens’ claim that they ought to have gained 17 seats remains the most outrageous of the lies. The sheer audacity of the claim is boggling, as is the fact that otherwise sane people believe it completely. His comments on the outing of Grog are interesting.
What the Greens refuse to acknowledge is that they, alone, were the only party to contest all 150 seats. Proportional representation of the whole only makes sense if there’s consistency across the whole.
But there isn’t. Even the major parties didn’t contest every single seat (further making the primary vote proportions irrelevant, btw).
Imagine two fishermen. One goes out every day of the month. The other goes out one day of the month. The former catches 30 fish, the latter catches 10. It would be laughable for the first fisherman to claim that they were the better fisher on the basis of the total number of fish. Yet that’s exactly what the Greens did (and continues to do). So consider the Australian Sex Party who only contested a few seats but got a strong number of primary votes in those seats. What’s curious is that they, in their inaugural election appearance, performed better on a per-candidate basis than the Greens did when it established itself as a party. The Greens, in comparison, fared rather poorly: their per-candidate outcome was less than they should have received if the votes were distributed at random. Therefore, far from being a legitimate third voice in the parliament, the two major parties still represent the vast majority of people.
Using a basic rule that a party with a per-candidate vote should recieve twice the number of seats in the lower house, the Greens only scrapes through with eight seats. ASP got two. How refreshing that the Australian Sex Party — not wishing to lower itself to the stunt political party that the Greens is — hasn’t lowered itself to whining that it was robbed due to the system not being entirely different.
Only The Sangfroid 