Victorian State Parliamentary Election - 29 November 2014

[Platypus]

The early voting hours are ridiculous.

Not being able to vote between the Saturday and Thursday of election week is bloody stupid. I assume it's about being cost effective but once you open early voting, it really should be available every day until the election, especially every day of the week before it.

[Platypus]

Just a quick note on the East-West link. I think a lot of people like the idea of it, probably a significant majority. You lose some of that support when it's presented as an either/or with th metro rail project, with the understanding that only one of the two can be afforded, and you lose further still by the fact it will be a toll road and the tolls are not yet known.

Personally, I thik it should be built, but not as a toll road. One of the best competitive advantages Melbourne has over Sydney is the ease of movement around the city, largely without dividing us with toll roads. At present, the toll roads we do have are more convenience routes than primary routes, and while you can still go overland for free if the E/W link is built, just as you can go most of the citylink route without paying tolls if you're OK with traffic lights, the changes proposed for when the tunnel is built will make it harder than it already is - and driving across the top of Melbourne is already an absolutely nightmare most of the time. I really don't think that's wise.

That said, it is a nightmare through there, and something needs to be done. If the only way to afford it is tolls, then that's still better than nothing. But surely there has to be another way.

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As for my vote, now to be cast in the returning seat of Werribee (kind of disappointed not to be voting in Albert Park, much higher calibre of candidates), I've done my candidate checklist, and I have it all sorted. Lower house Labor/Greens 1/2 or vice versa, probably Labor 1st, then Liberal, Australian Christians, and 'Voice for the West'.

Upper house I first sent all those who live outside the Western Metro region down to the bottom of the list of 40-something. There is no excuse that with 11 seats to choose candidates from, the ALP is running a guy from Northcote in an unlikely but possible third position on their ticket.

Then there are the parties that I want nothing to do with - Rise Up Australia etc. - followed by people who I just really don't want to see in parliament. So the top two candidates for Labor, Cesar Melhem (possibly the most wretched knobhead in the state) and Khalil Eideh (better only by comparison) are turfed out, along with a few of the more bizarre minor candidates, and Bernie Finn, the first Liberal, who is kind of OKlahoma conservative in a region that is unerringly ALP at the lower level).

After that it's a bit of a cull of the rest of Labor, the Libs, and the Greens, cos it's pretty much locked in that we'll end up with 2 ALP, 2 Coalition, and 1 Green and none of the 5 who will get in are all that remarkable. The second Liberal gets highest on the list of the five current members, partly because he seems reasonably competent and benign, and partly because if any of the five seats do fall it's probably his, and to someone like the DLP, PUP or whatever, and also that having Bernie Finn as the only voice form the right for the whole of the West of Melbourne is an appalling prospect.

Then the seem-like-good-people-running-for-good-causes people, ending wit a number one for Vicki Nash from the Sex Party

Also the lead PUP candidate actually seems like a thoroughly good candidate and a potentially excellent member, but I just can't get on board that trainwreck of a vanity party.

[Platypus]

Electorate names are in the colour of the current party that holds the seat.

Albert Park - My former home turf. Martin Foley should never feel completely comfortable, but he will be re-elected here. Quick nod to the Libs for putting up a very high quality candidate for the second election in a row. This is the kind of seat that is no longer Labor heartland, but will never be Liberal heartland either. I'd say it and Prahran are almost brotherly seats, with Albert Park the more lefty of the pair. Still, it feels like in future it will be a more marginal seat, although once Fisherman's Bend is developed and this seat shifts to cover more Elwood-St Kilda-Sth Melbourne-Middle Park-Albert Park-as much as is required of Port Melbourne, it might actually be good news for the ALP. Elwood is Labor friendly, and while the western fringes of Port Melbourne are too, Southbank is not particularly and there's no reason to think that Port Melbourne's rapidly collapsing ALP vote will abate in the near future. Anyway, enough waffle. ALP[/]b 1-0-0

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Just as I was about to move on, I got a call to work the election. Past political posts are fine, but I can't comment anything as of now until it's all done and dusted. Im going to bend the rules and post the Albert Park writeup cos it was written beforehand

[Platypus]

Of th 713 votes cast, we had less than 40 as valid below the line

[Platypus]

I tend to think it'll be ALP and Liberal, based on nothing but my gut

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I'm feeling kind of mixed about the result. Labor did not deserve to win, but as is the case in most elections in Australia, and pretty much everywhere, the government had to prove it deserved to stay in and it failed utterly to do so.

So we've got Daniel (sorry, Dan) Andrews as Premier, and he doesn't deserve it. But the Libs had four years to build a case for re-election, and they failed to do so. I think there are three big reasons for the loss.

They weren't helped by the fact that people simply don't pay attention to state politics unless it's a scandal. The good things that were done were essentially invisible, and only the controversial things stood out. This happened to the Brumby government in 2010, too, and is generally counterbalanced by the unedifying use of taxpayer money for advertising by the government of the day, of either colour, to sell it's message.

They were absolutely not helped by the federal government. Yes, voters are able to distinguish between state and federal politics, but the federal Liberal party is so utterly detested by Victorians (especially moderates) that it certainly had a huge effect. Tony Abbott's very limited contributions to the debate down here hurt way more than they helped. This new brand of rah rah populist conservatism mike work in NSW and QLD, and in a few outer suburban seats of Victoria, but it doesn't play at all well in Prahran, or Albert Park, or even Carrum or Yan Yean.

Federally, I'm unequivocally on the left, but at the state level I think I'm more nuanced. A bad Labor candidate will get my vote ahead of a bad liberal, and the same for a combo of good ALP/Liberal, but a good Lib will go above a bad Labor.  If it was a gubernatorial election, for example, I'd've voted for Napthine. Which brings me to the third point. The Liberals knew that Napthine was an asset, and made their campaign all about him. All you ever saw was his face, 'the Napthine Liberals' etc etc., while in the meantime the ALP was running a huge ground game of face to face contact, with the footsoldiers working not on electing Daniel Andrews, but on electing Neil Pharoah, or Sonya Kilkenny, or Danielle Green. In those seats, the Liberals were actually reasonably good at having high candidate visibility, especially Clem Newton-Brown in Prahran (which is why he's still in the hunt), but basically the statewide narrative from the Liberals was very much Napthine vs Andrews, and from Labor it was very much Labor vs the government, and here have a flyer with the nice face of your local Labor candidate.

What makes that so appalling is the number of Labor candidates who don't live in the electorate they were running for, but hey, it worked.

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I also want to say I was really disappointed by the hand-out-the-vote people at my booth. We had a green, a liberal, and a labor representative.

The Green was skirting the rules pretty badly and had to be pulled up a couple of times. She would stand at the gate to the school, and shake people's hands as they were about to head in, demanding their attention lest they be incredibly rude and not shake an outstretched hand. I was not a fan.

The Liberals had two women, the first between 8-1 or so, who essentially coralled the other two like a mother hen, making sure they had sunscreen and water and weren't breaking any rules. She was clearly a bit of a character, but a positive one, and she was respectful of the voters. The afternoon one was a bit of a wallflower and left by three o clock, leaving the Lib HTV cards in a box on a chair, after asking if the other two would be OK with handing them out, To which the green said "I'm happy to tell people they're there, but I can't hand them out' - fair enough, I guess - and the ALP guy said 'no worries'. And then proceeded to absolutely not do, and didn't even tell people about them when asked. His line was 'Clearly the Liberals don't care about *insert booth name here*, but Labor has a plan for this area and Victoria', or variations on that theme. Anyway, second liberal really shouldn't have left, but we didn't have many voters after 3 anyway.

The Labor guy was also our only scrutineer for the count, and was fine in theory, although I was very disappointed that he wasn't prepared to do the right thing and hand out the Liberal cards along with the Labor ones. To be honest, that simple lack of an action would have changed my first preference vote away from Labor and on to the Green or Voice for the West candidate, cos I didn't think his party deserved my $2.13 after that But he was fine in the scrutineering, the only significant issue was a vote for Singh that had a clear 2-3-4-5, and a pretty clear intent on the 1, but basically there was a 5 in the box that was crossed out, then a 1 was written in the box too and part of the scrubbing out of the 5 overlapped a tiny bit of the 1. I can't say what ended up happening with the vote, but I thought it was a bit ridiculous to challenge it.

[Platypus]

Labor members are bound by an extremely strict policy of not ever crossing the floor, at the risk of expulsion from the party should they do so on anything other than one of the very rare conscience votes.

TBH I'd like a little bit more flexibility from both sides on member's rights to cross party lines. Not US levels, or even UK levels, but there should be more room to at least abstain based on personal convictions.