Tag: elections

Covid Election Wins Could Be Catching

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Walking the covid election tightrope: Marc Hatot, www.pixabay.com Election days in New Zealand and the Australian Capital Territory (ACT) were carried out last weekend in the Pacific region’s usual civilised fashion. Voters had to run the gauntlet of volunteers handing out how to vote cards, but safe to say no-one carried assault rifles or acted in a menacing way. Both elections resulted in clear Labor victories, which ought to be a portent for Australia’s Government….

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Volunteering and election fatigue

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It’s National Volunteer Week, as good a time as any to encourage people to offer their skills and labour to community organisations and causes they believe in. For those who donated their time to support a political party or independent candidate, though, battle fatigue has set in. More than four million Australians voted during the three weeks leading up to last Saturday’s Federal election. This was more than double the pre-poll vote in 2016. Instead…

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Why political parties can spam without penalty

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I should feel miffed, being one of the 14.4 million Australian mobile phone owners who did not receive an unsolicited text message from the political party led by the aspiring Member for Herbert, Clive Palmer. Some of my Facebook friends, and even those not on Facebook, let the world know in no uncertain terms what they thought of receiving an unsolicited text from the United Australia Party (UAP), previously known as Palmer United Party (PUP)….

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The informal donkey voter

On Saturday, an estimated 2.724 million Australians will either not cast a vote or will vote incorrectly, either by choice or by accident. I say estimate, because it’s my estimate, drawn from official Australian Electoral Commission statistics plus sums based on donkey voter research. The AEC says there were 15.468 million people on the electoral roll as of March 31, 2016. That’s 94% of eligible voters, which means there are 978,933 people ‘missing’ from the…

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