Unless Australians are comfortable with sending a much larger number of lower house members, that would make the electorates get much bigger than they currently are, and I would guess removing local representatives would not be a popular move.

I'm not entirely convinced that 1 liberal and 1 Labor would be locked in everywhere. I think the change in electoral system would produce governments much more representative of how people vote. It would change us to a system where forming a coalition is practically expected.

5 does seem like a reasonable working number of members to send as a combined "delegation" from an electorate, but that'd be the maximum desirable, in my view.

With 225 members and sending 5 from each electorate, that would reduce the number to only 45 electorates in the whole country.

Something, I'm totally fine with, I think federal electorates ought to be much larger than state or local electorates, but it would probably be a hard sell to many people.

Really appreciate you sharing your thoughts on this :)

The lower house single-member electorate voting system does still favour larger parties, it's just way, way, better than FPTP.

https://oercollective.caul.edu.au/aust-politics-policy/chapter/electoral-systems/

Relevant part starts at "Majoritarian (or ‘winner takes all’) systems" about a third of the way down.

This has been the case of a while in Victoria already. Makes sense to me, and hardly much of an imposition since you have to renew your driver's licence from any country eventually anyway.

And yeah, if you're just visiting or on a temporary visa, no probs

I reckon we ought to increase the number lower house seats to 225 seats by combining electorates in groups of 2, and sending 3 candidates from each.

That ought to fix the representation issues we currently have in the lower house, without entirely removing the local nature of lower house electorates.

Say what you will about any party, but when you see a party routinely get 10-13% of the vote, but only manage to get 0.66 to 1.33% of the seats, it's kinda hard to argue we couldn't improve the system any further.

Even taking preferences into account, I think our current system favours larger parties too much because of single-member electorates.

Though, I am very grateful for the system we already have. Thank Christ we are not the US or UK (or Canada).

Aluminium used for drink cans is dubious because, once again, plastic (liners to prevent the drink from corroding the cans)

The Juice Media are forever questionable to me for recommending the teals as a blanket "not shit candidates", despite some of them, not unsurprisingly, being against workers rights.

100%. I'm also really glad mandatory voting remains popular

This was my favourite part of tonight hahaha

Scotty from marketing, a whole lotta words, not much substance.

Thank you to our forebears for this at least, giving us preferential voting so that no matter what we think might happen, we can still vote by our heart!!

I don't know the context, but pretty hard to claim you didn't mean to kill someone when you shoot them.

(Self-defence no withstanding)

Edit: Actually read the article. Yeah, he's admitting to randomly shooting the gun it seems. Even if he "didn't intend to injure", you have to be a moron to just roll up and shoot.

This is murder, even if the intent wasn't specifically to kill. It's so negligent it's murder.

People are at the very least starting to vote 3rd parties more and more. And thank Christ we have the option. (Though, single-member lower house electorates are pretty shite and favour the larger parties).

People are still just a bit rusted on to the known larger parties, looking into other parties is actual effort.

How people can vote for these idiots beggars belief

I LOVE they had to add the authorisation at the end because of electoral laws haha

Icing on the cringe cake

I expect it's at the behest of the oil industry anyway, gotta keep consumption as high as possible.

Brought to you by my conspiracy theory, which seems very plausible given oil companies' history.

I've been rather turned off by Anzac Day growing up, since it's felt more and more the narrative has turned to "mateship" and how heroic the ANZACs were, instead of the reality which is that Australians were sent into the meat grinder by the British Empire (which in fairness, I was taught at school), and that war is hell, and we ought to do everything we possibly can to avoid it.

That all being said, excluding more modern veterans is total bullshit and anyone suggesting modern veterans are any less deserving are being dicks*. And I say this as someone very critical of Australia's involvement in America's imperialist invasions.

It's not our soldiers fault they were sent. They're the ones who actually had to endure the trauma of war, not Howard, who sent them.

Really hope all veterans in good standing can take part in any march they desire.

*Criticising the military in general, and specific soldiers/units who engaged in war crimes is fair game, in my opinion.

We're on the fast lane? Why yes, this is why we've seen emergency levels of funding into storage?

Oh wait, no we haven't. We're still approving new coal mines.

Shouldn't the headline be: "We could be on the fast track to 100% renewables"?

Next thing you're gonna be telling us is to bring back public servant building surveyors as the only building surveyors, to stop the conflict of interest that the builder paying the inspector directly causes.

Bloody madness, clearly the private market is more efficient /s

Our housing regs are a joke since they're not even well supervised

Thanks to Trump's far-right power grab, we may retain our centre-left government.

Dutton just has a face that makes you think of fascism (in my opinion). The harry potter films have cemented that image in many people's minds, I would guess.

Thanks Trump haha

The exception here being teal independents who vote with the Libs, as the colour name suggests, they're not for workers. The only difference is that they believe in climate change and are not as socially conservative.

Handy tool: https://theyvoteforyou.org.au/