Samuel's Blog

The Sunday Share: A song to summarise the ACT election

October 20th, 2024 at 06:59pm

The ACT had an election yesterday. My thoughts on it actually date back to the 2020 election which saw some very strange swings towards the incumbent Labor government and their friends the Greens, especially in electorates where such a thing probably shouldn’t have happened (Brindabella in southern Canberra which is the only part of town which consistently leans towards the Liberal Party, and Murrumbidgee in the west which picked up a couple Liberal-friendly suburbs in a redistribution and yet had quite a swing against the Liberals). These swings could only really be attributed to the incumbency bounce which occurred in many elections in 2020 due to COVID.

This election has mostly seen those swings reverse. Labor and the Greens have fallen back a touch which due to the peculiarities of the Hare-Clark system means the Greens have lost about half their seats. The Liberals recovered largely in Brindabella and Murrumbidgee but fell overall due to various independents doing quite well and probably picking up two seats. The Liberal vote also suffered overall as leader Elizabeth Lee, battling with three other party leaders in Kurrajong, didn’t pick up a quota on her own which is unusual for a leader in an ACT election.

The upshot of it all though is that, for all of the excitement about some independents getting in, Labor and Greens combined still have a majority so it’s likely that their governing coalition will continue unabated. As usual, as I have observed in every ACT election since 2012, people have expressed a desire for change but not actually voted in a way which delivered any change. Even if there had been a real change from this election, I doubt it would be smooth sailing. So much change is required that I’m sure many things would slip through the cracks, create controversy and derail the new government eventually.

Ultimately, being a voter with a conservative viewpoint in the ACT is a wasted effort. Not just in territory elections but in federal ones too. My electorate in the middle of Canberra is such a safe Labor seat that it barely even attracts candidates outside the major parties, and when it does it’s usually someone further left than the Greens. Even the Senate seems to be a lost cause now.

I could worry about it, but I realised a while ago that even when I do get some politicians elected whom I happen to support, they usually do something to disappoint me or fail to live up to the ideals I thought they would represent. One, who is no longer in parliament, even cemented my decision to get out of party membership entirely by boldly lying to me about a very shabby internal party matter (which I happened to know quite a lot about, maybe more than this person thought I knew) while trying to get me to vote a certain way in an internal party election.

So ultimately I now just accept that government and party politics is broken, especially while we have electoral systems which claim to be democratic but put people in parliament that in almost every case were not the preferred candidate of the majority of their electorate. It’s a farce, and it’s fair to say I am thoroughly disillusioned with the whole thing. For the record I did cast a formal vote, but it’s beyond me why I bothered. If only ballot papers had a “none of the above” option and people who received fewer votes than it were ineligible for election.

Which leads me to the song. The line from the song which comes to mind is “I used to care but things have changed”. Ironically, this song was used for a Canberra tourism commercial at one stage.

Good song. As cynical as I have become.

By the way, I misspelled “independents” and “indepents” earlier today. Autocorrect wanted to change it to “ineptness”. Changing the party name Independents For Canberra to Ineptness For Canberra sounds like a perfect description of the ACT Government. Another four years of ineptness, hooray! I think I’ll just look away…

Samuel

Entry Filed under: Samuel's Editorials,The Sunday Share

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