Wednesday 4 May 2011

The Disinformation Campaign

London Fields # 91
First
published Inpress
(Issue # 1172), Melbourne on 4 May 2011, and Drum Media (Issue # 1058), Sydney on 3 May 2011
NB: Each column has a name, but these do not appear in print; printed versions may differ slightly to those displayed here


Were you aware than six out of ten Australians want to change their current electoral voting system to the one used in the UK? Neither was I, but this has been a key claim of the “No” campaign for the upcoming UK referendum. Saturation media coverage of a certain London event may have overshadowed it, but this has the potential to have far greater and longer-reaching effects on the future of the United Kingdom than the wedding of a possible future monarch. May 5th marks only the second national referendum in British history, on a potential change to the voting system. Currently British elections use First Past The Post (FPTP), a system where the candidate who receives the highest number of primary votes is elected, regardless of how few votes they receive. After the last indecisive UK election, the Tories and Liberal Democrats spent days trying to reach a compromise to form a coalition government, and voting reform was a key discussion. The LibDems wanted Proportional Representation (PR), but had to settle for a referendum to change from FPTP to AV (Alternative Vote). AV, also known as preferential voting, is very similar to what is used in Australia, except under AV you don’t have to rank all the candidates (single transferable vote).

It’s been a nasty campaign, full of disinformation. The “six out of ten Australians” figure came from a leading question put to 1202 people in a single survey conducted over three days last October. The “No” side points out only Papua New Guinea, Fiji and Australia use preferential voting and seem to imply that perhaps it is not quite democratic. They claim that AV will led to every government being a coalition, and that the change from FPTP would mean the end of “one person, one vote”. In truth AV allows you to vote for who you want to win the seat (rather than tactically vote against who you might want to keep out) so it’s closer to “one person, one meaningful vote“. The “No” campaign have also claimed AV would make it easier for the ultra right (and ultra white) BNP (British National Party) to gain seats, when the converse in actually true. The votes for any party other than the BNP would weigh more heavily under AV meaning they’d have to win 50% of the primary vote to get in. No wonder BNP supremo Nick Griffin has come out in favour of the “No” campaign, but they’re not trumpeting that.

There’s another Nick who’s not really wanted by either side - that’s Deputy Prime Minister and leader of the LibDems Nick Clegg. Clegg’s record of broken promises on issues such as tuition fees has seen him used as a reason against a “Yes” vote by the “No” side. The strangest thing in the campaign has been the weird cross-party partnerships it has set up - former Labour Home Secretary John Reid with the PM on one side, and the government’s Business Secretary Vince Cable with the leader of the opposition on the other. Yet as an Australian I find it galling to see aspersions cast on a democratic system that has only failed once (when the monarch’s representative interfered in 1975), as though it was a rigged system of a backward and corrupt banana republic. In the UK David Cameron has created an unprecedented 117 new peers for the House of Lords in his first year in office (Tony Blair averaged out at 37 a year, and Gordon Brown a mere 12), which amounts to gerrymandering on a grand scale. Instead of criticising the Australian system, they should instead be learning from it; a system where the upper house is elected by the people, and elections take place on weekends, rather than during the week, to make it easier for working people to vote.

David Cameron has variously described AV as undemocratic, obscure, unfair and crazy. We’re told that it’s too complicated and expensive, and a bit hard for us to understand. In one speech he quoted Winston Churchill who saw it as a system where “the most worthless votes go to the most worthless candidate”. Yet it’s how he became party leader! David Davis received the largest number of votes in the first round of the last Conservative Party leadership contest in 2005, so under FPTP he might be the PM now. What the “No” campaign has failed to tell us is that they want us to keep a system which the parties don’t want or use themselves. Sadly the largest vote next Thursday is likely to be apathy, and then the possibility of positive change will disappear for many years to come.


© James McGalliard 2011

Inpress: Published on page 44
Drum: Published on page 48